“Far better than we at home, our soldiers grasped that fighting fascists for consensual government is a noble cause and should have been the source of great pride among the American people.”

That’s from a fine tribute to our men and women fighting in Iraq from Victor Davis Hanson. I strongly hope the last line in the essay is borne out, for the people doing the hard work deserve it.

Sagittarius Style:

In vino vertias — and for Sagittarius, in booze
blurtiness:

when battered, they’ll spill all your secrets and
many of their own. Tactlessness aside,
Sagittarius is just plain fun to get drunk or
drink with. This is the sign of serious
partying (what else would you expect from the
sign of Sinatra,Keith Richards, the Bush twins
and Anna Nicole Smith?.) they’re the people who
caht up everyone in the room, then persuade the
entire crowed to travel some place else — like
a night club, or a playgroung, or Cancun. Good
natured hijinks are sure to ensue (including a
high possibility of loopy groping; spontanious
Sag is a brilliant booty call)

Alcohoroscopes MRK 2- the stars and your drinking style
brought to you by Quizilla

Here that? I’m a brilliant booty call, something I’ve been saying for years.

John Kerry:

“I’m tired of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and a bunch of people who went out of their way to avoid their chance to serve when they had the chance,” the Massachusetts senator said. “I’m not going to listen to them talk to me about patriotism.”

That’s a pretty interesting thing to say in front of a left-wing university crowd, considering this is our “chance to serve,” with “our” being Americans who are 18-30. I suppose I’m going out of my way to avoid my chance to serve too, by his reasoning. John Kerry makes me feel so bad about being a lowly chickenhawk. At least I’m capable of noticing the irony in his complaint, because I feel guilty about passing up my opportunity to serve. I think they’re doing a great job without me, though. Probably don’t even notice I’m not around.

I don’t really have the time or energy to comment on this right now, but some anti-Chief Illiniwek protesters occupied an administrative building on the U of I Thursday. OK, one comment… what a pathetic bunch of wannabes!

Wow, a half-decent report from AP??? Check it out. It’s about the Marines waiting at the current front in Falluja and what they’re going through.

Hat tip to Rantburg

What a jackass! Unbelievable. This lady went to Baghdad as one of the human shields (in violation of the Geneva Conventions, not that “International Law” matters much to our enemies, or to left-wingers when it doesn’t suit them). Now she went back there to cause more trouble and got herself captured by the terrorists and Ba’athist losers in Falluja. Now that she’s been freed from captivity, Australian Prime Minister John Howard says, “What a jackass!“

Super Nice!

I’ll never understand what drives people to hate other people just for being a jew. Doesn’t make any sense to me, totally alien to my way of thinking. I remember in college, a friend of mine once told me that he was raised to distrust Catholics, and basically to hate ‘em. Or us, rather. He denies it now, and I have a tendency to remember things crooked from college, seeing as I was downing a twelver of Natural Light daily, so I tend to take his word for it. And he’s getting married in a Catholic wedding. It came up recently, because I was talking to this ironworker who I see at the local watering hole occasionally. We were having a pleasant enough conversation about how windy it was up on the roof of the church he was working on, and out of no where, he tells me that he “hates the damned Catholics.” It was pretty funny when I told him I was a Catholic. Threatened to report him to the bishop. He’s since learned to keep his cool ’round us papists. So what’s the point of all this nonsense I’m writing? This. Glad to be of some minor service today.

Just last night, I was talking about what a ghoulish skank Courtney Love is, and today Chris writes about a similar topic, although he doesn’t actually call her ghoulish or skanky. A drug addict loser, and a really, really lousy parent (to paraphrase), but not a ghoulish skank. Check out my last post in the recovered archives, in which I referred to CL as ghoulish, almost three years ago. I like that word, and dislike her. She looks kind of like how I’d imagine a ghoul would look. Pale and starving.

Go read about The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations, as it pertains to Condoleeza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 witch trials.

The last update to that post (as of time of posting) is from John Rosenburg who considers the article cited to contain bigotry in its first paragraph:

Odd was Alessandra Stanley’s article, “Testimony Provides Breath of Racial Reality for TV.”

According to Ms. Stanley, Rice’s “measured performance brought a breath of reality to a television universe too often clotted with distorted images of black women, ” but for an example of distortion one need look no further than her own lede:

There was absolutely nothing in Condoleezza Rice’s neutral-toned suit, primly folded hands or calm demeanor to draw attention to her sex or race. Her answers, guarded, prosaic and a bit pedantic, were typical of any high-level Washington official.

Ms. Stanley thus is saying that Rice didn’t seem like a black woman because she was not flashy, loud, and dumb.

But she was saying that “flashy, loud, and dumb” is how black women are typically depicted on television. (Damn you, Oprah!) Her contrast was between this television depiction and other television depictions, not with this television depiction and real-life. That much should be obvious from the title.

Via Peoria Pundit, at his new digs.

Update: On closer inspection (actually first thorough inspection since I wrote this having only read the excerpts, that article is odd. What’s up with the following sentence? She got her groove back after a bracing exchange with Mr. Kerrey.

Please.

The imaginary girlfriends category on E*Bay was shut down, since E*Bay doesn’t allow explicit materials to be distributed on its boards. But thankfully, thankfully they’ve found a new home. Doesn’t get much funnier than that.

A Contractor Tells About His Mission

Read the whole thing.

Read this interview with Oliver Stone on his fawning movie about Fidel Castro. Absolutely hilarious. Lots of nasty pitching: curveballs and sliders abound. You’d expect someone with his ego to walk out of an interview like that, and not try to pretend to be cute, like in this exchange:

ALB: Did you ask him about his relationship with Juanita in Miami?

OS: God, I don’t remember. There were so many women.

ALB: Juanita is his sister.

Or flat-out vapid, as in this one:

OS: Totally. I think it would be a mistake to see him as a Ceausescu. I would compare him more to Reagan and Clinton. … They were both tall and had great shoulders, and so does Fidel.

This man is not a serious thinker. Don’t even try to convince me that Michael Moore is to be taken any more seriously.

If you didn’t think that priapism stuff was scary, check out this story about a dude whose wang blew up.

Dr Angela Domocos, head of the accident and emergency department at Cluj General Hospital, said: “It is very rare for this to happen. We call it an exploded penis because it happens when the blood cavities in the penis burst.

“I don’t know what this couple were playing at, but there must have been tremendous pressure inside the penis to make this happen.”

I don’t know what they were playing at either. I can’t even imagine, and I think about this sort of thing far more than I should admit. I’m assuming the pressure built up was blood-related and not something involving the million-dollar spot, since the latter would cause an ruptured prostate, not a blown hangdown. Or maybe there’s something about Romanian women I don’t know about. It did happen in a Transylvanian town… ever hear of a movie called Once Bitten? If I recall correctly, and something so horrifying from my childhood could not be forgotten, it was a movie about a female vampire who had to annually bite, and drink blood from, a teenage virgin’s wiener. It’s also Jim Carrey’s first movie, to my knowledge.

I’ll play along…

This is what the UNIX ^grep command does.

That’s from Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin’s Speech and Language Processing, which was sitting on my desk.

Here are your instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 23.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

The weather is great today. We’re supposed to hit the 80s this weekend. Speaking of weather, check this out.

The Russian newspaper, Pravda, is not a very good source of news. But it’s great for laughs, just like al-Jazeera, the Weekly World News and other such organizations. Here are two pravda articles, one that claims there’s a time warp over the south pole that you can fly kites into and back thirty years; and another about soviet artillery trying to shoot down alien spacecraft. Found both articles at One Hand Clapping, where there is plenty of good content, especially this essay about Andy Rooney’s most recent plea for attention and this one about Tony Blair’s speech on the war.

Very funny. The punchline wasn’t quite what I’d expected, but that’s the nature of humor, eh? The unexpected. It’s funny cuz it’s true, and so forth. I have a hard time grasping the Europeans’ willingness to embrace a supernational government that started as a coal and steel industry organization. I mean, really, a government is supposed to be born of an idea and then spend the rest of its life fighting off beaurocratic cancer. The EU is a bureaucracy so massive that it might as well become a government, a self-realized tumor. And it’s spent the past decade and a half trying to come up with a decent idea, or an excuse to be.

American Realpolitik found a fine article defending David Crockett from his portrayal in the Alamo movie that is coming out.

I’m a big fan of Miss USA. “A Republican, she told Reuters she would use her position to help explain America’s involvement in Iraq. ‘What needed to be done had to be done,’ she said.” In the same article, she “described her social life as ‘totally single and looking.’” I’m a good guy! Pick me! Pick me!