• Hey! We're on Twitter!

  • Buy The Book!

  •  

     

    Click to Buy The Mug

    Buy The Book

Archive for May, 2008

Post Friday-Subcontracted-Beast Blogging

Posted by Maryc on May 31st, 2008

The Engineer’s Guide to Cats

WPvideo 1.10

(h/t to Slywy )

Video Village, Wild Things | 9 Comments »

Breaking Berke Breathed’s Record Of Self-Breakage

Posted by scott on May 27th, 2008

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I’ve got two posts sitting in the Drafts folder, rapidly decaying into yesteryear’s news, but I can’t seem to sit here long enough to finish either one, thanks to a sudden and rather show-stopping reprise of an old back injury (a reminder that taking up karate for the first time at age 30 wasn’t the smartest way to inaugurate my declining years). Ordinarily I can get through one of these bouts with a combination of Hal Jordan-like will power and the judicious abuse of opiates, but the Vicodin isn’t touching it, my doctor is reluctant to prescribe anything stronger, and Rush Limbaugh’s maid isn’t returning my phone calls.
Hope to be back shortly. In the meantime, s.z. may be dropping by to water the plants.

Now a word from our sponsor | 37 Comments »

Melanin Dawn

Posted by scott on May 19th, 2008

From Whiskey Fire we see that “MGM is thinking about remaking Red Dawn.” Naturally, this arouses the denizens at Libertas, and causes heavily armed high school boys to pitch a pup tent in Dirty Harry’s shorts:

As with any remake we could spend days talking about how they will screw this up (and they will), but think about how great it could be – it won’t be great because that might help Bush — but having an army of Iranian backed Islamo-Nazis occupy a part of the United States would not only be a rip-roaring action yarn but also an important reminder of the evil ideology we’re fighting.

The whole movie should be an allegory about the hell Obama has promised to unleash on the Iraqi people should he win the election. Great stories ask and answer what if…? What if we abandoned millions of innocents to Iranian backed jihadists? What if we abandoned them because it was just too hard to liberate them? What if, thanks to weak-kneed liberal politicians, those millions of innocents fed into a meat grinder were Americans?

In my hands it would be set in Manhattan because an island’s easier for the terrorists to defend and chock-full of appeasers in desperate need of a wake-up call. The scene with a herd of Greenwich Village liberals being shoved into burqas writes itself.

Is war the answer now, punk? Oh, it is? Good. Then why isn’t it when the people are brown-skinned foreigners?

Which is why the Iraq war, while a strategic military disaster, has been a masterpiece of social conditioning. We immunize ourselves against charges of racism and imperialism by defending brown-skinned foreigners while accustoming our young men and women to the task of killing brown-skinned foreigners. It’s like softening our hands while we do the dishes! “Blood? You’re soaking in it! HA ha ha ha ha!”

Anyway. This will all come in handy when we make our final stand against the endless brown waves of the Reconquista (as one Libertas commenter points out.)

If you’ve read , you know that Red Dawn occupies a special place in our hearts, since it’s the only film to which we devoted an entire chapter. And I share its fans’ anxiety that this classic film, so beautifully evocative of its time and place, may be spoiled by efforts to crudely “update” the picture and make it more “relevant” for today’s audience by tossing in anachronisms such as MP3 players, visible bra straps, and Negroes. And really, what would be the point of even trying, since as Libertas reader Troy observes, modern kids are too stupid to appreciate the subtlety of a John Milius movie:

It’s not going to be too difficult to “re-educate” a youth populace that is constantly under the drone of iPod headphones, thinks MySpace is the OED, has a 9th grade reading level (a tad below our Founding documents, Federalist, Gettysburg Address, I Have a Dream, all the greats of Western lit. — not to mention a little book called the Bible), types with its thumbs deep thoughts like “BFF”; “K”; and “LOL”. Of course — they have been playing Call of Duty 4; Grand Theft Auto, et al. so they may have some skilz.

DH — Manhattan is the exact wrong place to set it. Not even Snake Plissken wants to die to save Manhattan. We would just cordon it off and turn it into Gitmo North.

Red Dawn is a redneck shining moment. Folks between the Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada (on balance) do the fighting and dying for this country. I love The Wolverines, but maybe they could change the high school mascot to The Crusaders.

What are the odds that this Red Dawn will be a high school version of V for Vendetta? Remember Remember the 11th of September… as the day GW Bush took over.

Or perhaps the Mexican invasion and the war for Aztlan?

I remember when I first tried to rent Red Dawn at Blockbuster, the clerk warned me that in order to really understand the movie I’d require a thorough grounding in the Western canon, with a particular emphasis on the major works of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Federalist Papers, 16 through 31.

Plus, as another commenter reflects, today’s polluted cultural environment would only serve to exacerbate the film’s few tiny flaws:

There was a scene in Red Dawn – I can barely remember the movie because I was like 7 or 8 when I saw it on VHS – where a Russian soldier gets the drop on one of the wolverine kids. He has his gun trained on them and is about to kill them when he realizes that they’re just kids and his *humanity* boils over and spares the kid. (Do you guys recall that scene? Am I mistaken?)

Well, if Red Dawn does get remade, trust me, you; the movie will have that scene as the heart of its message.

“One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter” will be the sickening theme. Count me out.

Now that’s some white hot irony, fresh from the smelter. Or as Thers observes of Dirty (and this apparently goes for his readers as well):

Mr. Harry seems more than a little confused as to just who’s shouting “Wolverines!” or the local equivalent over there in Iraq nowadays.

But even though America clearly needs a lesson in the vital importance of defending while killing brown-skinned foreigners, the liberals in Hollywood won’t let it happen:

I think Troy’s on to something. Since “Red” now means exactly the opposite of what it used to, the evil Reds in the remake will be “Red Staters” striking out against freedom loving True Patriots whose dissent, devotion to “choice” and incontinent onanism are proof of their true claim to the title “American.”

I’m not sure this pitch is quite high concept enough, since an army of Midwesterners invading Manhattan, armed with tickets to “Xanadu” and reservations at the Times Square ESPN Zone — while horrifying — is something New Yorkers have come to face with the same fatalism that you see in Kansans following a tornado or a locust attack.

My Country Right, Wrong or Decline to State | 39 Comments »

I’ve Looked At Bill From Both Sides, Now…

Posted by Maryc on May 16th, 2008

By now, I’m sure we’ve all seen Bill O’Reilly’s meltdown on the Inside Edition set, but have you seen it from the producer’s side?

Thanks to BarelyPolitical, now we can!

Enjoy Bill O’Reilly’s Producer won’t you? Thank you!

WPvideo 1.10

Video Village | 5 Comments »

Friday Beast Blogging: That Camera Phone Will Be The Death Of You Edition

Posted by scott on May 16th, 2008

Moondoggie: I see dead people…They’re — everywhere! And they’re not — brushing me!

moonandriley.jpg

And Riley: I find that with the simple use of natural back-lighting, I can increase my aura of Evil by 18%, with no concomitant rise in energy costs.

Wild Things | 2 Comments »

Spare the Rod

Posted by scott on May 15th, 2008

I don’t mean to poach on Roy’s estate, but one of his commenters announced that Rod Dreher, the Con Who Stays Crunchy Even In Blood Of The Lamb, was talking about balls. So naturally I had to click over to Beliefnet, because I’ve long been fascinated by the rituals of Orthodox Teabagging — the incense, the chanting, the liturgical tapdancing — and figured that Rod, being a pious acetic who survives on a diet of locusts, wild honey, and schadenfreude, would have the inside scuttlebuttplug.

First, a little background. A Catholic priest named Arthur Mallison resigned from his parish in McKinney, Texas after it was revealed that he had posted on Saint Sebastian’s Angels, a website for gay clergy.

“There was a faction in the parish that had started a nationwide campaign to put pressure on Father,” said Annette Gonzales-Taylor, a Diocese of Dallas spokesperson.Mallison was assigned to St. Michael’s in McKinney just weeks ago. Some members discovered the website and started writing about it on blogs in Illinois and Georgia

The diocese said the pressure on the priest was too much.

“He was trying to spare all of the parties pain, disappointment or embarrassment,” Gonzales-Taylor said.

The Vatican issued an edict in November of 2005 clarifying the church’s position on gay clergy. The Pope said priests should be celibate regardless of their orientation.

“They don’t want sexually active homosexual priests,” Gonazales-Taylor said. “All of our priests are expected to remain celibate and live a celibate lifestyle.”

The diocese said even though Mallison didn’t violate church policy, he resigned because he didn’t want misinformation and perception to hurt the parish nor the diocese.

Mallison was a priest at St. Francis of Assisi in Lancaster for 10 years before moving to McKinney. The diocese said he could be assigned to another Dallas area parish.

Some people might feel this was persecution, since the diocese has been careful to say that Fr. Mallison “has done nothing that violates church policy,” but Rod has gotten his hands on a private email from the priest which proves that he likes coffee!

Stephen Brady at Roman Catholic Faithful provided me this undated e-mail from the St. Sebastian’s site, written by Fr. Art Mallinson, who resigned his new pastorate in north Texas yesterday after his participation in the online site a few years back became an issue.

Roman Catholic Faithful is a website whose mission statement reads, in part:

we are Catholics who are faithful to the teachings of the Holy Father and the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. Some of our members are priests, others are religious, but most are ordinary laity. Our diverse membership has a common goal — to fight actively and spiritually to restore Holy Mother Church.

Why was RCF founded? In 1994, Stephen Brady of Petersburg, IL began protesting the fact some Eucharistic ministers and others in his local parish were responsible, either as teachers in the public school or as members of the school board, for instructing his children in the use of condoms.

But back to Rod’s efforts to actively and spiritually restore Holy Mother Church by steaming open other peoples’ mail…

Fr. Mallinson’s e-mail to the secret society reads:

I have been stalked once — due to a chat conversation. I was planning on meeting this guy for coffee sometime in the future. In the course of a chat I mentioned a place that I often visited and when I would go. I thought nothing of it. But then one day this total stranger tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I was K___, my on line nick [sic] — I freaked! He came to watch me and check me out!I never thought I would feel this way — and I wasn’t doing anything untoward. He didn’t even know I was gay — but I knew that he was. And he knew I was a priest … even though he didn’t know my real name. But the idea that someone had come to look at me while I was unaware … very strange.

We strike a ballance [sic] on this list — we confided feelings and secrets that we couldn’t utter anywhere else — and feel liberated in doing so, while at the same time — keeping a level of distance or anonimity [sic] for security. It’s a bit strange and scarry [sic] at times — but what options do we have?

Well, you could try living out your vow of celibacy, for one. Or joining a support group of priests struggling to deal with their sexuality in healthy ways, and not dealing with it by arranging anonymous encounters on the Internet.

As one of Rod soft-hearted commenters bleated, “priests lead lonely lives,” but that’s no excuse for planning to have coffee with someone in the future, because personally I’ve never had a cup of java that didn’t lead directly to intercourse. Let’s be honest…barista’s just another word for pimp.

There’s a lot of pathos in this, actually. The skulking, the clandestine meeting arranged on the Internet, the loneliness, the burden of his secret and his desires. No one can deny the frail humanity of a man in this priest’s position.

I have to admit, Rod is showing more Christian charity, more simple human empathy than I would have given him credit for, even if it does come with two scoops of creepy voyeurism.

But…

Spoke too soon.

I deeply doubt that anyone so conflicted about the tension between his nature and his calling as a celibate priest has any business in active ministry. Surely Father Mallinson’s superiors at the chancery when this was discovered must have been able to see that here was a priest in crisis. And yet?

And yet the diocese hints that Fr. Mallison could be foisted onto some other, unsuspecting parish without him even  molesting someone first, which I understand from Church tradition is a prerequisite for this sort of favoritism.

How has he resolved this crisis? It cannot be a matter of indifference to his parishioners, or those who may yet be under his spiritual authority. It shouldn’t be to his bishop either.

Unless his bishop is also part of the worldwide homosexual cabal that has penetrated the Catholic Church, according to the Seattle Catholic:

If those responsible for discipline of bishops are unable or unwilling to take decisive action against an openly homosexual dissident with perverse fantasies, what action can be expected from bishops much more discreet? Worse yet, combining this unlikely prospect of ecclesial discipline with the “openness” of American seminaries to homosexuals for at least the past thirty-five years and the unofficial estimate of a 30%-50% “gay” clergy, how many of the 300+ bishops or thousands of individuals in positions of Church authority are homosexual themselves?

And who’s to say the College of Cardinals hasn’t been entirely subverted by homosexuals? Perhaps that white puff of smoke that emerges from their Conclave doesn’t signal the selection of a new pope, but is simply evidence that they’ve got a steam room going in there. Why, this conspiracy could reach all the way to the red Prada Shoes of the Fisherman himself!

But where, I hear you cry, does the teabagging come in? Well, some of Rod’s raders felt his post (and some of the resulting comments) had the quality of a witch hunt, since the priest in question hadn’t been accused of doing anything more than belonging to a website where men who could not be candid about their sexuality in public sought understanding and sympathy. But to which Rod righteously thundered:

“Witch hunt”? Oh, please. The last refuge of someone who cannot defend the accused on the merits. Five minutes spent looking at the SSA website reveals that to be a complete canard.

John: While St. Sebastian’s Angels might be shocking, the little bit that I looked at made clear to me that these men are desperate for community.

Was it the tape loop of the ejaculating penis that led you to this conclusion, John? Was it the bare bottoms of the men at the beach? Was it the priest who posted that he’d had his balls sucked through the tip of his penis?

Say what you want about Rod’s conclusions, you can’t deny that the man does his homework.

Teh GAYZ! | 9 Comments »

Old Friends

Posted by s.z. on May 6th, 2008

I was planning on writing an entertaining yet profoundly wise post that would solve one of society’s most pressing problems (perhaps “Is Wearing White Before Labor Day Responsible for the Moral Decline of Our Nation?” or “Which Candidate Will Tap Suri Cruise for VP?”).  However, after 2 trips to the vet, three visits to Pet Smart, and caring for the latest foster cat (a 4-week old kitten who apparently ran away from home to show his mother that she wasn’t the boss of him), I’m really, really tired.

So, let me just share one exciting discovery with you: after havinng exchanged the sordid world of NRO for the more womanly sphere of church, kitchen and children, Meghan Cox Gurdon has once again left the kids to fend for themselves and is writing weekly opinion columns for the SF Examiner. 

Her most recent columns are about how liberals are really not our sort of people, and how Obama and Hillary Clinton are big poopie heads.  Thus, we have to go back a few weeks to find out what we REALLY want to know: what happened to the kids?  Let us now peruse Moving on schedule to minivan martyrdom to see what we can learn about what the adorable tikes have been up to since we saw them last.

Jump in, or we’ll be late!” Three girls fling in their school backpacks and we zoom off to another school. Two girls leap out, calling for their brother.

From this we can conclude that middle girls Jujube and Rhythm Method are still alive, attend some sort of school, and are searching for their sainted brother Apotheosis, who presumably doesn’t ride with the rest of the family, as he takes the Popemobile to school.  The third girl is probably the eldest child, Mimosa, who wisely claims to be adopted.

The toddler, strapped in her car seat, keeps repeating “Whacka Bamba,” which is the hard-to-pronounce name of some fellow she keeps hearing about on the car radio.

Aw, little Turnip has learned to talk!  And she has developed such a delightful lisp!  (Wait for the copyright infringement suit by Gnat Lileks.)  And note that Turnip’s childish prattle, like that of the other Gurdon children before her, is not just endearing, but also reveals deep truths about how the liberals are just not our sort of people, and how the Democrats are all poopie heads.

The rest of us return home, where a neighborhood girl is waiting to play.

That would be Jonah Goldberg, who is always hanging around the youngest Gurdon kids, trying to steal material for his next column.  (It’s an open secret in conservative circles that 6-year-old Creme Brulee Gurdon is the uncredited ghost writer of Liberal Fascists.)

At hyper-speed, I saute vegetables, load a rice cooker, sear chicken and pop into the oven two unbaked loaves that I assembled in the morning,

Uh oh!  Is Meghan trying to tell us that in the midst of preparing the children’s nutritious and wholesome gruel, she conceived twins???

conscious all the time of a dozen approaching deadlines.

Yeah, it’s tough being a conservative columnist mother these days with only one full-time foreign nanny to your name.

Anyway, as the piece continues, Meghan has to chauffeur little Paisley to her ballet class, so that the girl can learn such cherished conservative virtues as tutu fluffing, chain smoking, and masochism.  Her older sister Grenada signs up for art class, heroin addiction, and a trendy form of bisexuality.  Meghan then has to take Brother Apotheosis and sister Reagana to martial arts class, where the kids learn tai kwando, self discipline, and how to get assassination gigs via blind ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine. But by the time Meghan gets everyone home, she’s frazzled, the kids are in violation of child welfare laws, and Meghan’s loaves of bread are hard and stale (which presumably means that her newly conceived twins are going to be Fox News weather bimbos when they grow up).

So, having learning a valuable lesson about how busy Meghan is, how much she does for her children, and how her kids are way better than yours, let us bid a fond farewell to the Gurdons.  Pleasant dreams, everyone!

Uncategorized | 25 Comments »

Yeah. You Need To See It

Posted by Maryc on May 3rd, 2008
WPvideo 1.10

No. Really. You Need To See It.

WPvideo 1.10

What?! You’re still here?!! Go. Just go see it, for the love of Stan Lee go see it!! And for the Love of All That is Good and GEEKY–STAY THROUGH THE END OF THE CREDITS.

Movies, Tinsel Town Talk, Video Village | 8 Comments »