Prediction

One – the "Day Without Immigrants" will not produce even a fraction of the economic impact the agitators say it will.

Two – The " Day Without Immigrants" will produce a mammoth backlash.

Let's see how I do on those.

UPDATE: New York Times story.

UPDATE: I Think maybe Wizbang has this analyized properly. Lowered expectations indeed.

Da Winnah!

Cyprus, home of gigantic lemons, huge bonfires, many moons and oddly well fertilized wheat, now has yet another thing to throw it's collective chest out about!

It is now the proud holder of the new world record on stringing brassieres together! As we here at Blue Crab Boulevard reported earlier, the organizers had twin goals. We certainly hope they reached them!

Their success will shove Singapore, which had held the record since 2003 with 79,000 bras, off the top spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Women from as far afield as Alaska, Brazil, Martinique and Iran contributed bras to the record attempt, aimed at raising awareness of breast cancer.

Even the British solders based in Cyprus took part helping organisers move the bags of bras and lay the chain.

We suspect the assistance was quite enthusiastic. We're familiar with American soldiers. We are quite certain British soldiers are much the same.

The new record beats the old one held by Singapore. However, beware! They are catching up.

Now THAT’S A Paperweight

A Chinese businessman has bought an interesting and unusual paperweight for his office. Purchased on eBay, the new addition to the decor around the old office is awaiting Chinese Government approval before it can be brought into the country. Why, you ask?

Because it's a MiG-21f fighter jet.

"I like to collect valuable items. I have the buying power and my company has an empty space where I can display the plane," the newspaper quoted Zhang as saying.

The eBay Web site for the transaction shows the plane is currently located in Lewiston, Idaho.

It said the fighter jet, last flown in 1995, has been inspected by a museum and found to be in excellent condition.

The seller was only identified by the username "inkgirle."

The story doesn't say whether the new paperweight comes with missiles.

Here's a picture of the new paperweight:

Hockey Puck

I never really liked Don Rickles. While he could be funny at times, especially in very short, small doses, in the end he always seemed somehow just plain mean. A small, nasty man using insults to get laughs. His act seemed to boil down to one thing, "Hockey puck!". He'd use the term over and over, insulting whoever was the target of his spiel. Funny once, maybe, but used repeatedly it became stale and very old, very quickly. One thing I noticed when I saw him on television shows where he did his act in front of a live audience, the laughter was different for him. Not as hearty as it was for other comedians, it had a strained, almost embarrassed quality to it.

I see today that the blogosphere is pretty much all Colbert, all the time. The left, of course, praising him and cursing the press. The right slamming him and his act. I wouldn't know Colbert if I tripped over him. I'm just not a television kind of guy most of the time. But I did watch the video of the act he put on at the Press Club dinner last night. And you know what? He did not get many laughs. At all. Aside from a few jokes that drew genuine laughter from the crowd, most of the other times, if he did not get complete silence (quite often, really) he got that same strained, embarrassed laughter I remember from Rickles appearances.

Because in the end, his appearance boiled down to one thing.

Hockey puck.

UPDATE: Brainster has a great take on this.

UPDATE: New Republic's The Plank has a straight up take on the Colbert performance. From someone who is not a Bush fan or a war supporter. The judgment: Colbert wasn't funny. No internet conspiracies, nor press corp cover-up. Colbert just sucked. He wasn't edgy or brave, he was boring, banal and not funny.

UPDATE: I think the Washington Post gets it, too. Of course, consensus among most of the left is the same old "we're being silenced" meme. Which they talk about endlessly. Go figure.

Dissent Through Fraud

You know it's an awesome day in the blogosphere when Steyn hits two home runs. In the Sun Times, Steyn nails the use of a quote falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson. It's one that is being used repeatedly and, as Steyn points out, is absurd as well.

What does it mean when so many senior Democrats take refuge in an obvious bit of hooey? Thomas Jefferson would never have said anything half so witless. There is no virtue in dissent per se. When John F. Kennedy said, "We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty" — and, believe it or not, that's a real quote, though it's hard to imagine any Massachusetts Democrat saying such a thing today — I could have yelled out, "Hey, screw you, loser." It would have been "dissent," but it wouldn't have been patriotic, and it's certainly not a useful contribution to the debate, any more than that of the University of North Carolina students at Chapel Hill who recently scrawled on the doors of the ROTC armory "F— OFF!" and "WE WON'T FIGHT YOUR WARS!"

Of course, he's absolutely right. Dissent for the sake of dissent is not patriotic, it is not constructive. Taken together with my earlier post about the envy on the left, this piece practically defines the entire problem we're having right now.

Dissent for its own sake is like the Democrats' energy policy: We're opposed to any kind of energy; we prefer to be mired in enervated passivity. If the right is full of armchair generals, the left is full of armchair generalities: Nothing can be done, any course is futile, everything's a quagmire. All we can say for certain is that saying so for certain is the highest form of patriotism.

It's truer to say that these days patriotism is the highest form of dissent — against a culture where the media award each other Pulitzers for damaging national security, and the only way a soldier's mom can become a household name is if she's a Bush-is-the-real-terrorist kook like Cindy Sheehan, and our grade schools' claims to teach our children about America, "warts and all," has dwindled down into teaching them all the warts and nothing else. Or as the Capital Times of Madison, Wis., concluded its ringing editorial on the subject:

"Thomas Jefferson got it right: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' And teaching children how to be thoughtful and effective dissenters is the highest form of education."

Teaching them authentic Jefferson quotes would be a better approach.

Damn, that man can write.

Burqa King

I'm in awe of Mark Steyn's ability. He comes out with some of the most penetrating commentary I have ever read. Today he has a piece out reviewing Oriana Fallaci on the fall of Europe. It's well worth the read, if only to get to the passage that the title to this post is taken from.

The Politics Of Envy

Gagdad Bob over at One Cosmos has an absolutely brilliant analysis of what drives the left: envy. Riffing off the left's attacks on Flight 93, he really gets to the heart of it.

According to Webster's, envy is defined as "malice," and a "painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another, joined with a desire to possess the same advantage." The psychoanalytic understanding of envy is that it is an unconscious fantasy aimed at attacking, damaging, or destroying what is good, because of the intolerable feeling that one does not possess and control the object of goodness. As such, it is an aspect of what Freud called the death instinct, since it ultimately involves a destructive attack on the sources of life and goodness. Particularly envious individuals cannot tolerate the pain of not possessing and controlling the "good object," so they preemptively spoil it so that they don't have to bear the pain.

Which effectively explains the way they left is constantly tearing into what they disagree with. The frontal attacks on things that are really either objectively good or actually neutral but which the left dislikes are subjected to spoiling:

If you have an “ear” for envy, you will detect it everywhere in the liberal world. In psychoanalytic parlance, it is also called “spoiling,” or devaluing. Again, because the envious person cannot tolerate the good, he attacks the good and makes it bad. So even in my crappy little paper, The Los Angeles Daily News, they can’t help themselves (I long ago canceled the L.A. Times because of its unhinged leftist envy… I do miss the much higher quality, er, "intimate apparel" ads, though). For example, the headline regarding yesterday’s upbeat economic news was “Fed Chief Warns of Stagflation.” This is typical. One could be cynical and say that this is just “spin,” but I don’t think it’s generally conscious. Rather, I think it’s unconscious envy and spoiling.

It's a long piece, but it is truly devastating and well worth the read.

What Forest?

I always liked George Schultz when he served as Ronald Reagan's Chief of Staff Secretary of State. He always came across as level headed and honest. The Opinion Journal has a nice piece about him. In it he discusses the leaky CIA and the revolting generals with a proper degree of revulsion.

"I always had a good experience dealing with the career people in government," Mr. Shultz said. "But I have to say it's almost as if there is an insurrection taking place. Particularly what is going on in the military is astonishing and fundamentally intolerable. There has to be a sense of discipline. This is something new, and for everybody's good it has to be dealt with."

Which is pretty well exactly what my take on this whole thing has been, right from the start. Somewhere along the line parts of our government lost sight of who they serve. They are not supposed to serve political parties, they are supposed to serve the US regardless of politics.

I asked about the place of dissent in government. "Look," the former secretary said, "in our system some people get elected and what you get out of that is the right to call the shots, and the full-time career people are entitled to have their views listened to. But it is very important to see that what is going on now is a problem that goes beyond whether someone likes Don Rumsfeld or not."

If we go down this path that the left seems bound to follow, we are leading to a system where the politicians can govern not with the consent of the people, but with the consent of the bureaucrats. That is a path to ruin. Having generals dictating who can control them is downright horrifying. At a time when we need to stay focused as a nation on what is happening in the world, we are letting partisan politics paralyze us.

Was a no-brainer. President Bush's approval rating is in the dumpster, and much of the public is discomfited by the violent reports out of Iraq, which ironically are the product of the same mentality that killed the Marines in 1983. The Iraq war may or may not turn out well, but clearly now it is in a dark moment. When I put this to the former secretary of state, his response, characteristically, is optimism: "I think this is the most promising moment, almost, in the history of the world–a time when the information age has made it clear to people what it takes for them to get ahead in their lives and succeed, to have prosperity, to have growth, and it's a critical matter not to have that great opportunity aborted by a wave of radically inspired terrorists. So we have to confront this, and we have to do it on a sustainable basis because it's going to take a long time."

I suspect that much of Bush's low poll numbers come directly from his stance on immigration. That's the point he's really lost ground on with the base. The media continues to try to paint Iraq as a failure despite the many good things that are happening there. We, as a nation, have become distracted by the trees and cannot see the forest any longer.

"I'm in favor of vision," he replies. "Ronald Reagan had vision. But gardening is something you have to do if you're going to be effective in foreign affairs . . . come around reasonably frequently and get rid of the weeds before they get too big." In any event, Mr. Shultz reminds me, the most useful lessons for dealing with a hostile world didn't emerge from his long years in diplomacy, but in labor, in the experience of collective bargaining: "You show me a union that will never strike, and I'll show you a union that isn't going to get anywhere. You show me a management that will never take a strike, and I'll show you a management that's going to get pushed around." Or nations: "Our basic problem is that the Iranians are convinced that they can do anything and there are no consequences."

Mr. Shultz returns to his core preoccupation, the reality of global terror: "The law-enforcement mentality is not going to do the job for us. You have to have a war mentality. You have to have an offense and defense; you have to be active about it." This diplomatic gardener is no shrinking violet.

I think the press and the left have completely lost the big picture now. It is one bit of manufactured outrage after another, after another. The distraction from what is happening in the world will hurt us all in the long run.

UPDATE: Fixed Shultz's title, thank you Bradley. I have no idea why I got that wrong, I obvously knew what position he held. Thought outracing typing ability most likely….

Fran O’Brien’s

Fuzzilicious Thinking has a long post up about the Hilton and what it has done. I continue to believe Hilton has, and will continue, to suffer a PR problem because of this. Worst of all, the wounded have lost what had become a fantastic coming out party for them. Where they could begin to reenter the world. A place where they were understood and where camaraderie helped them begin to cope with their world.

I think there is a lesson here for corporations. You can hunker down in a bunker and hope a bad decision will fade away, or you can confront the issue and turn it into a PR coup. Guess which one Hilton chose?

Dumb move, Hilton. Really dumb.

Vote For McCain! And Shut Up!

Anyone who's read this blog for even short while knows that one thing I am an absolutist on is the first amendment. It is the cornerstone of what America is. It is the one part of the constitution that is the cornerstone of the entire American system of government. As Captain Ed puts it:

Senator McCain apparently has no love for the First Amendment, nor any understanding of why it occupies the primary position in the Bill of Rights. The right to free speech recognizes the inherent and natural right to speak one's mind and to argue for one's political beliefs. Free speech costs nothing and it requires nothing other than a lack of government interference. The right to speak out informs all of the other natural rights recognized in the Constitution; without it, none of the others make sense, including the right to religious expression, property rights, the right to bear arms. None of these make sense if the government can control your political speech and determine about what its citizens can protest and when they can do it.

To hear John McCain cheerfully announce that he would choose clean government over free speech is a complete and utter deal-breaker for me. I could not, in good conscience, vote for anyone who stands for ending free speech. Let's face it, government is corrupted by big money. Both parties are equally to blame. But the answer isn't killing the first amendment.

Senator John McCain has many fine qualities, but an understanding of free speech is not among them. He would trade our primary birthright for a mess of bureaucracy and trust it to operate in our interests while limiting our ability to criticize it. That path leads to autocracy, corruption, and ruin.

This man frightens me.

UPDATE: Protiein Wisdom on the subject.

Well, This Is Depressing

Donald Sensing has a couple of post up, both at his One hand Clapping site and at Winds of Change that discuss his views on blogging and where it is heading. Frankly, the post paint a depressing picture, especially to a new blogger. Essentially, Sensing says we're doomed.

– Single-author blogs of national-interest topics such as the GWOT, politics, religion, etc., will find it increasingly difficult to gain and maintain significant readership numbers. Team blogs, such as WOC, will come to predominate simply because of the labor intensity high-readership blogging requires. A solo writer trying to keep a site refreshed and original enough to keep two thousand or more reader interested every day faces a terrific burden. I know, I did it for a few years. Team blogs spread the labor and therefore can offer more content of higher quality.

Which tends to make a new blogger trying to gain some readership a bit nervous. Obviously, I've put a lot of time into this blog and I hate to hear it's DOA.

On the other hand, the way I approach blogging and the way Sensing approaches it are fundamentally different. I read One Hand Clapping quite a lot when I was first made aware of blogs. Sensing is a good writer and his posts were always informative, well reasoned and fairly long. In other words, he's a writer. I tend to approach this as more of a linker and a finder of interesting things. I also write, but not anywhere nearly as extensively as Sensing.

So, the question is, is his type of blogging, with long, carefully written pieces headed toward the group blog model? Maybe yes, I don't know. Is the faster paced, less writing intensive blogging still viable? I rather hope so,

Of course, there's also a middle ground where like minded individuals form a sort of consortium. That way the individual bloggers maintain their single voice while being part of a bigger whole. I suspect that may be closer to the future than Sensing's vision.

Moral Courage

And the lack thereof. Reader IAm at Done with Mirrors has a post up about the neighbors in Hirsi Ali's apartment building using Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights to sue to have her evicted. The neighbors have won the suit.

Hirsi Ali has been a staunch supporter of human rights and the rights of women oppressed under extremist Islamic governments. She has been under protection because of her stand. But the neighbors, fearing Muslim violence, want her out.

So it comes down to this: Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s history of moral courage in defending and demanding the rights of women, free speech and more is rewarded by the cowardice of her neighbors, validated and encouraged by an EU court. I can understand that not everyone—-indeed most of us—-are not and cannot be a Hirsi Ali. Greatness is reserved for the few, after all. But at a bare minimum, each and every one of us has some sort of ethical responsibility to support the Hirsi Ali’s of the world, and fear—-while understandable—-is no justification for falling down on that job.

How far has Western civilization fallen when we can not stand together with someone with this much courage? Reader IAm thinks it is a failure of moral courage. So do I.

Meanwhile, there is Hirsi Ali, who's definitively further along the path to enlightened moral courage than most of us, a subset of whom reject her very physical presence among them, out of fear and because of their narrow imaginations about the bigger picture. On May 4, she is slated to receive the AJC Moral Courage Award, which I was interested to discover is on the 'net largely in press release form. I'm not seeing where this was covered in major media outlets, but perhaps I'm missing something. Nor does it appear to have been picked up widely in the blogosphere, though I see that Booker Rising caught it.

Giving in to the thugs, giving up one who stands against them out of fear, surrendering to the extremists is the path to destruction. Done with all the best intentions, this attempt to cast out a person this brave leads only to one place.

Where the road paved with good intentions always leads.

Cannibals

Well, the effort to unseat Joe Lieberman continues. Not by a person from the other party. People in Lieberman's own party are trying to replace him. Led by Screamin' Howie Dean's own brother, no less.

Here's a great idea. Take a senior Senator who is ultra reliable on every, single position of the Democratic party except one the far left does not like. And bump him off. That is some kind of strategic thinking. Even more telling, it's not people in Connecticut that are driving this whole effort:

But in the space of six weeks, the newcomer has come on strong. Lamont raised $344,111 from 4,337 online donors and added $371,500 of his own money. He hired a staff of seasoned professionals and signed up several thousand volunteers. The 52-year-old cable television entrepreneur is blitzing the state, hitting as many as three events per evening. (emphasis added)

So welcome, citizens of Connecticut to the brave new world where people from outside your state dictate who you can have representing you in the Congress. Because you can bet the bulk of those online donors aren't from your state. So vote for Lamont, lose a three term Senator over one issue the left can't swallow.

While I doubt Lieberman and I would see eye to eye on a lot of subjects (and would agree on others), he's a staunch supporter of the troops. He's also able to see beyond partisanship and look to the good of the country. That makes him a better person than the people trying to unseat him right now.

A Scary, Scary Picture

Michael Totten is a really talented writer, he can make you see the pictures his words convey. Which is one reason this story about his trip to the Lebanese border, from both sides is so frightening.

“Do you think they’re watching us?” Lisa said.

“They are watching you right at this second,” the lieutenant said. “You are definitely being photographed. It’s possible you’re being watched through a sniper rifle.”

To say I felt naked and exposed at that moment would be a real understatement. I felt like my skin was invisible, that psychopaths were boring holes with their eyes straight to the core of my being. At the same time, I knew they did not see me as a person. They saw me as a potential massacre target.

I know Hezbollah wouldn’t hurt me in Lebanon, even though they did call me on my cell phone and threaten me with physical violence. All bets are off while standing next to IDF soldiers in Israel, though. Whoever was watching me surely dehumanized me as a Jew (even though I'm a non-religious "Christian") who belonged to the little Satanic fit-for-destruction Zionist Entity.

I wouldn’t say I felt scared. But I certainly didn’t feel comfortable. The earth seemed slightly tilted. Lebanon feels unhinged and psychotic from the Israeli side of the line. At least it did on that day. I kept having to remind myself that the country I love and lived in is not at all represented by the nutcases with guns in the hills who like to pick off Jews on the border.

The title of the piece comes from this quote:

“I say this to my guys every morning: Everything could explode at any moment. Just after I said it this morning a bus load of pensioners showed up on a field trip. An old woman brought us some food. It’s crazy. They shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here.”

Read the whole thing.

Stealing From The Dead

This story will make you furious. A Colorado mayor/funeral home director who received money accidentally after the death of a Marine has refused to return the money. Even after a court ruled he had no right to the money and ordered it paid back.

Flopping Aces has the story.