"Come now, Sweet Cream, don't forget to flash"

I've been listening to the Basement Tapes a lot lately. Haunting. I like most of it, bump over a few Robertson tunes, but I can't remember which ones at the moment. Million Dollar Bash is my 7-year-old's favorite song off the collection. I think he likes the "ooooh-ee!" parts the best.

Last year I was in Alberta three times during the winter, and the only music that made sense to me up there was Dylan's. Miles and miles of desolate frozen farmland equals subterranean homesick blues plus don't think twice it's alright. It's winter music in my brain. I tried listening to my funk compilation on the way to the airport once just to get psyched up. Didn't work. Oh, well. The man is from Minnesota.

Muslim kids hate Christians, Jews--want to be "martyrs"

The sort of stuff described in this article happened in Lakewood, OH shortly after 9/22/2001. Muslim students cheered while watching a news clip of the towers falling. Excerpt:

The predominantly Muslim youngsters openly praised Islamic extremists in class and described the September 11 terrorists as 'heroes and martyrs'.

One pupil said: 'Don't touch me, you're a Christian' when he brushed against him.

Others said: 'We want to be Islamic bombers when we grow up', and 'The Christians and Jews are our enemies - you too because you're a Christian'.

Mr. Kafouris, a Greek Cypriot, taught for 12 years at Bigland Green Primary School in Tower Hamlets, East London.

According to Ofsted 'almost all' its 465 pupils are from ethnic minorities and a vast proportion do not speak English as a first language.

The teacher claims racial discrimination by the school, its headmistress and her assistant head after they failed to take action about the comments made by pupils to him.

He said there was a change in attitude of the pupils after the atrocities of September 11, 2001. They told him: 'We hate the Christians' and 'We hate the Jews', despite his attempts to stop them.

He said he filled out a Racist Incident Reporting Sheet but claimed headmistress Jill Hankey dismissed his concerns.

In a statement submitted to the Central London Employment Tribunal he said: 'Miss Hankey proceeded to excuse and justify the pupil's behaviour, conduct and remarks to me as if I had no right to be offended by the child's remarks and conduct.

'Amongst Miss Hankey's justifications for the child's remarks, she said, "If the child was older, say 15, I might take it more seriously. He's only nine - he's only
doing it to wind you up".'

We're wound up all right. Profiling of these radical Muslims is starting to make more sense every day; they are the problem regardless of what the politically correct say and think.

Steyn on Obama's Incentivizing of Bureaucracy

Now that I've provided a lame excuse for being behind, here's a very funny yet scary Steyn piece which you probably already read reflecting on Obama's SOTU. Excerpt:

In the past 60 years, the size of America's state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it's still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine.

Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured or marketed any product other than himself. So, quite reasonably, he sees government dependency as the natural order of things.

And in his college-loan plan he's explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you're a schmuck and a loser. In the America he's building, you'll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama's proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It's the audacity of hopelessness.

This is borne out by all the anecdotes I'm hearing. A friend who is a controller for a medical devices firm was helping me paint trim at the new house. He said "We have a complete hiring freeze on. We have no idea what is going to happen with the health care bill which will effect our sales strategy and outlook and our benefits package. Obama doesn't have any understanding of economics. All my siblings who voted for him are having regrets now." Another friend I have in management said about the same thing, except he has had to take a 5% pay cut. The uncertainty is keeping everything stagnant.


Well, there is one certainty: tax rates will go up at some point.

Hello

I think it's great that the blogosphere exists. It's a hobby that you can inflict on other people–I mean that you can share with other people. It's sort of like writing something and then publishing it on the web. Wait–that's exactly what it is... what was I thinkiing?

We bought a new house. Then we moved into it. I thought the buying process was sort of difficult, but it wasn't nearly a hard as moving all our stuff. Hindsight is 20/20, and now I wish that we had just put all the furniture on Craigslist and then bought other stuff from Craig as needed. That's where most of it came from to begin with, or so my wife tells me. We could have given most of the kids' clothes away and by the next week people would have donated everything back. I can't help it that we look like poor people. Well, no, that's not true–I just like getting free clothes from people who only planned to have one or two kids. It's always stuff from places that I've heard are really nice, like Baby Gap, etc.

Back to buying the house. Getting final approval was kind of a bitch. I thought they were going to want urine and stool samples by the time it was over! But they didn't, so the mortgage broker had them mailed back to my old address. I emailed a thank you note to him and added "It's a good thing the weather has been so cold, huh." He merely replied with a link.

The dust is settling here finally. We're happy to be closer to the school where our oldest two go ever since we "gave up" on home-schooling last year, and closer to our parish and of course, SBUX. And moving refreshes your memory with regards to important hierarchies in life, e.g., dryers weigh less than washers, washers weigh less than the piano that your mom who is still alive gave you, etc.

"You look like a banker who drives a car."

I was talking to a reader the other day and this video came up in conversation. She hadn't seen it, so I'm posting it. I think Jonah G. remarked on it in his Liberal Fascism blog.



Hey--was that a sieg heil at the beginning? Nahhh...

Yeah, give a man a schnoz.

This video gives me hope; I can imagine someday junior high and high school kids watching old Obama propaganda and just laughing their asses off. "Who was that guy? How did he get elected? Were people really that stupid?"

Best commentary I've found on Obama's SOTU speech

Troy Senik is a speech writer who formerly wrote for G. W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Newt Gingrich. And his dissection of Obama's State of the Union Speech is so choice that I'm not going to excerpt any of it here, you have to read the whole thing. But I will say I especially loved the part about "the President’s attempt to transfer the totemic appeal of some working-class hero to himself by placing him or her in the House gallery."

No words wasted

One of the things I love about William Donohue from the Catholic League is that he is a master of using the fewest words possible to sum up his arguments. Take this concluding paragraph from his latest press release regarding the ridiculous Prop 8 trial:

Plato condemned sodomy. Jefferson thought it should be a felony. Neither was Catholic. And neither they, nor the Catholic Church, ever thought it was okay for gay bashers to act out their hatred. That this even needs to be said doesn’t speak well for where [attorney David] Boies wants to go.

I haven't been able to locate any transcript of Boies's full remarks online or I'd provide a link to them. I'm sure they contain enough insulating circumlocution to avoid setting off the bigotry meters of the thickheaded, but Donohue's is much sharper as is ours.

More Russian-themed Girlie Spam

Got this email:

Subject: Sweet Lord, call me on my cell!

Hey, why do not you write? You forgot about me?

"I am very unhappy without you, remember me?"

It's me, Olga from Russia, Moscow, remember? I'm waiting for you on his page on the Internet, and miss you terribly!

[click here]

Absurd.

Hey, doesn't the Arab President's ex-wife on 24 look like Natasha from Bullwinkle?