Police found 4 bombs including two made with propane. They're also gathering evidence from when gunman James Lee stormed into the building and took three of 1,900 workers hostage.
During the ordeal.... Lee ended up on the phone with an NBC producer. Lee talked to the producer for about 10 minutes.
But the standoff continued for another four hours until Lee was shot and killed by police.
The gunman was reportedly angry over the Discovery Channel's lack of programming on global warming.
Lee said he experienced an "awakening" when he watched former Vice President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
Too bad for Big Media....that it wasn't an abortion clinic and a guy who had just watched, say, The Passion of the Christ!
An anonymous toe-incarcerator has just forwarded me the following clip:
This is a time of global warming. Through our feet I think we can begin to feel it...through our feet I think we can begin to be one people...
Feeling global climate change through our feet?
THAT is what I call super-sensory perception!
His feet may in fact be connected to his *brain*...
But his brain clearly isn't connected to reality!
We can't let a particular tribe's co-option of something turn us off it. To my detriment, for years I let those yoga airheads define the practice in my head and keep it from due consideration. I regret that and have learned my lesson.
I don't wear shoes much; but I am trying to wear them and my flip-flops less. With my bad back, and my irremediable creaky knees....what do I have to lose?
It's not like anyone will mistake ME for an Earth-worshipper - I maybe a *yoga-dad* now, but it's not like I'm Slow Rion with a composter in my backyard!
For background, see my prior post - Is Your Brood Shod? - and its out-of-control comment thread.
If y'all remember, as DVR-ing folk we the Nut family can fall way behind on color TV serials. Point of fact, my wife didn't learn who won American Idol this year until a two full months after the live finale!
At the moment, she is still working her way through episodes of this winter's 24 - season 7.
I say 'she' because I stopped watching that ridiculous show a couple of years ago. It flat out stinks; I don't care what anyone else thinks on the matter - and I've heard plenty of people tell me that his past season was *very good*. Whatever. The second season, at the time, was excellent, after that it went straight downhill, IMNSHO.
Not only is the show horrible, it's peppered with nonsense like the following:
Never in my life has one of *my shows* crashed and burned as spectacularly this one.
I've been steadily net losing shows for some time now. If only I had the stones to banish the color TVs entirely from my house....
But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God -- having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.
They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth.
Selfish, money-worshipping Morons who are unable to *acknowledge the truth*???
I've never come across any!
Have you?
So we must have plenty of *days* left....
In all seriousness though, this is why the Bible is a must read. It's timeless - about the past, the present, and the future.
Reading it I discovered that *abortion* was far from a new issue. It has roots going back millennia to when pagans sacrificed children to Molech.
I also discovered that being *green* today isn't just about junk science, statism, wealth guilt, and being trendy; I found out that it's merely the modern day version of age-old earth worship.
And I found out a whole lot more than that from the Good Book- as anyone who approaches it with application and a discerning mind will.
BTW, I believe the *last days* refers NOT to the week before a Al Gore's apocalyptic tidal wave hits the moneychangers in Manhattan....I believe it refers to the period of time between Jesus Christ's resurrection and his imminent return.
It's a standard debunking of the eco-propaganda pawned off as *science*; and peddled in furtherance of Bigger Government.
Read it later, I want to discuss it from a wider angle.
Since I prefer my swallowed food to *stay down*, I don't read the Globe much - never did. But I can't remember ever noticing such anti-agitprop in it before. This egregious blasphemy had to be a *guest column*, right?
But could this development indicate a new, more liberal(!) policy at the Globe?
Not only was the article the *most emailed*, by the time I came across it, it had generated a whopping 500+ reader comments.
As stupid as Globies are, how long can they go on ignoring the fact that offering up a *diversity* of opinion is their only chance at business survival?
There has to be at least one person high up at the Globe who can put two and two together. The has to be one person who understands that stories that generate *feedback*, *emails*, and *hits* are like....THE MOST IMPORTANT BLEEPIN' THING in the new hyper-competitive world of digital media.
How messed up would that be if by simply becoming a tad *fairer*,....if that was all it took to save the Boston Globe from oblivion?
After all, the market for agitpop has been overly saturated for quite some time now.
Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of "climate change delusion."
Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.
Now c'mon. That really wasn't the FIRST KNOWN CASE of climate change delusion!
More accurately, it might have been the *billion and first* known case.
It's a good thing I didn't attend my wife's holiday work party with the senior executives. She got seated next to the BIG BOSS's wife who proceeded to lecture everyone about the perils of "global warming". When I say "lecture" I mean it. She interrogated everyone on how they commuted to work. My wife won momentary plaudits for taking the commuter train into town. Yet uncomfortable with those laurels Mrs. C-Nut proudly declared that she owned a Chevy Suburban. I guess it was analogous to when Cubs fans throw opposing teams' homerun balls back onto the field.
Well anyway, all I wanted to point out was that this high level executive and his flaky wife also had a school-age child who apparently couldn't sleep at night - for fear of *global warming*.
Forbes' Peter Huber on so-called *global warming*:
Outsider faith in global warming has to be grounded on trust in higher authority, disconnected from any critical scientific reflection at all.
Promoting that kind of faith is the exact opposite of what science teachers should be doing. The Royal Society, in the words of its executive secretary, was formed "to replace unsound thinking about the world with knowledge based on observation and experimentation."
For many scientists of the Enlightenment, science reinforced religious faith. They discerned "God in the machine," God the watchmaker, God in the wondrously functional complexity of life and the cosmos. The mental models of their day couldn't track these wonders back to any other cause, so the cause must have been God. Their arguments remain accessible to people of ordinary intelligence and curiosity. And they have since led to accessible (and to my mind, compelling) counterarguments that can be discussed in simple yet still scientific terms with middle-school kids. By contrasting watchmaker and blind-watchmaker views, side by side, a good teacher can convey something profound about the method, power and limits of science itself. Grown-up climate modelers might learn something from these classes, too.
Here's Ted Turner on not taking action against "global warming" - the apocalypse of his pagan creed:
"Not doing it will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals."
Cannibals, huh?
Well, if there are no fruits and veggies, I say we eat the vegetarians first.
As I type this, shares of Washington Mutual are down 1.97 to a measly $10.77 apiece. The stock was in the forties just this past summer. Look at a five year chart:
It's cratering because it got drunk writing mortgages at the peak of the real estate bubble.
One example is all you need to see how stupid this institution is.
I know a guy who owns four properties. He's got $4 million worth of mortgage debt on homes that I reckon are already down to $2.5 million in current market value. He is what they call "upside-down", but to the fourth power.
Get this, two weeks ago, he got ANOTHER home equity loan on one of his underwater buildings for a few hundred thousand bucks from Washington Mutual - a bank that can't claim ignorance because it holds some of his extant mortgage debt.
Who the bleep would ever lend a completely insolvent guy more money? WaMu may just as well flush the money down the drain.
The most incredible aspect of this blunder is the timing. WaMu has just taken billions in writedowns, slashed thousands of jobs, cut their dividend, and seen their stock crater. The handwriting is on the wall - in largeboldtype font and they are STILL making ridiculous loans.
Look at this chart below (click to enlarge if need be):
Countrywide is on the cusp of bankruptcy. Greenpoint shut down in August. And WaMu is obviously tracking in the same direction.
GMAC will be the next to go belly up - I've heard as soon as this upcoming May. I actually know an executive at GMAC's mortgage division. He was my wife's boss for a couple years until he bolted for GMAC. Here's a guy who was making probably around 700k per year for his capacity as a chief financial officer. (I am sure GMAC bumped his pay above that.) Anyway, to give you a window into his brain, I will relate what he told me and my wife 2.5 years ago when we moved to Boston.
HighlyCompensatedSavvyFinancialGuy - You guys are renting? You're CRAZY. You just have to buy a house. The market only goes up and you can't stay outside...you'll be shut out forever.
Now mind you that was in June of 2005, the euphoric apogee of the real estate bubble. Remember, I had a landlord who told me he sold a building in less than a hour, sight unseen, over the internet at that time. Websites like condoflip.com were proliferating; it was absolutely crazy.
Since the Boston real estate market has been in free fall from the very day we got here, I reckon that I am actually the savvy financial guy! (albeit "underpaid")
My wife was itching to remind her erstwhile boss of this "advice" he patronizingly lavished on us when we moved but since the guy pulled the strings on her bonus she refrained.
Quite frankly, I think the guy is insane to leave my wife's stable, highly profitable firm to go run GMAC for a slight pay raise. As I mentioned above, GMAC is a ticking bankruptcy bomb. Rule number one is to always work for thriving, flush companies in healthy industries. For example, don't think anybody at the New York Times is getting a raise this year with their dwindling readership and ad revenues.
Obviously, this CFO guy didn't and doesn't have any armageddon-type opinions on the future of real estate - otherwise he may have passed on the GMAC promotion.
However, he is smitten by one end-of-the-world narrative, that of "global warming". He and his Oprah-educated wife were always lecturing his staff on environmental nonsense. Even I would bite my tongue and endure these sermons. After all, 30% of his staff's pay came in the form of discretionary bonuses.
For sure, workaholic corporate types haven't time enough to contemplate larger trends or phenomena outside their field. But as WaMu and this rockstar exec demonstrate, they are not even guaranteed to understand their own businesses. It's not just day traders who "momentum trade"; corporate executives also do their share of wave chasing - their share of "buying high" and "selling low". Their own business successes generate operational momentum. When a bank like WaMu has made all its money by writing subprime, adjustable loans, then it's just not one day going to change course. Like Countrywide, the entire company became oriented towards aggressive lending. If a salesman wasn't pushing these fanciful loans hard, he was eliminated. There are testimonials from former employees confirming this on the web.
Likewise, if a guy has only been buying homes for the past 15 years, we might forgive his ignorant conclusion that "real estate only goes up". It's very hard for untutored men not to get swept up by the momentum of their own personal experience.
It's also pretty hard for busy successful executives to realize that they might not know a single thing about the age-old politicization of weather patterns - after all, if they were dumb, they wouldn't have so much money, right?
The domestic economy is crumbling and blame will be allocated by the high priests of socialism.
Already, pundits have noticed that Big Media has forgotten about "Iraq". Whether that is because the "surge is working" or not is wholly unquantifiable and, also, quite beside the point.
Iraq has been brushed aside by better competition. A poor economy is THE socialist dream. High gas prices, foreclosures, inflation are all upon us...all they need now is a healthy dose of unemployment.
It hasn't taken hold yet (mostly because of their profound economic illiteracy) but it won't be long before the New York Times is painting the Bush Administration as "economic liars". They will deride the "Bush boom". All the increased tax revenues of the past few years will be chopped up to a "bubble", "predatory and fraudulent mortgages", and "lying government statistics" on inflation and GDP growth.
This post I did last month on the Lying CPI would, if his foes weren't so ignorant, be Bush-bashing gold. In that post, I detail how the government's underreporting of inflation is used to exaggerate headline GDP numbers. It won't really matter that the CPI is now computed by Bill Clinton's fungible formula. What matters are soundbites for the lumpen masses.
The prescribed solutions will, of course, be higher taxes and more regulation.
It will be interesting to see how the next cycle of agitprop plays out both politically and in the public dialogue. Though I believe it will have the fertile context of a recession and I consider the public profoundly econo-illiterate, I do think that Americans can at least sense a huckster. Again, these socialists are so stupid, and so inept, that they don't even propound their own best arguments.
Heck, they are so dumb, they turn the potent, combustible issue of high oil prices into calls for fighting "global warming".
I submit that while Joe Blow may not have a degree from Harvard, he's quite cynical about how politicizing the weather will lower pump prices.
I was out at friend's house last weekend in Paxton, Massachusetts whereupon he and his wife told me about one of their crazy neighbors. They said he was an "environmentalist" who actually gave my buddy sh*t for mowing his lawn with a gas-powered mower. Putting aside the countless inanities implicit in such thinking, how much gas does a lawn mower actually burn? I think I used six gallons of gas in the past year and a half at my old place - which had a similarly sized lawn.
Apparently the lunatic cuts his lawn with a hand-mower.
I told my buddy that I should have parked my globe-heating Chevy Suburban in front of the environmentalist's lawn and idled it for four or five hours just to rile the Moron up. And that would on top of the least 15 gallons of war blood I burned on the 160 mile round trip to the cookout.
What would be even better, would be to preach Jesus to him every time you saw him. I sincerely doubt he would like YOU throwing your personal religion up in his face...
This tactic has the added benefit that almost all extreme environmentalists are religious-phobic pagans. "Jesus" will likely strike the same nerve that SUV's, non-recycled plastics, and inorganic food agitate.
Here's the globe-heating, Mother Nature-raping mower that I make my kids cut the lawn with.
"Noah's Ark", built on Mount Ararat to attract world leaders' attention to global warming, will be inaugurated for public visits.
As a part of the project prepared by Greenpeace, a ship similar to Noah's Ark has been constructed on the mountain - thought to be the location where Noah's Ark finally touched dry land.
The wooden ship will be ten meters long, four meters wide and four meters in height.
"We are in front of a second universal flood. But it is not yet too late. If all the nations of the World make a turn in favor of environment one will be able to avoid the catastrophe," indicated Andree Behling, Greenpeace expert in energy." "The politicians must assume their responsibilities and cannot continue to look at a world threatened to be submerged by the tides, the storms and floods, while hundreds of thousands people lose their houses, while plants and animals disappear by the diseases and dryness," he said. (link)
The quartet of irony, hypocrisy, ignorance, and stupidity, even if each raised to the n-th degree, could not adequately describe Climate Change Morons.
When did modern scientists start touting biblical tales of creationism? What happened to the Big Bang Theory and Darwinism?
Is "climate change" alarmism a science or a religion? If it's a science, when do they need to invoke the religious metaphor of Noah?
(Answer: it's really all about deception!)
The fact remains, every civilization throughout history has had doomsayers warning of cataclysmic flooding. Furthermore, they have always blamed it on human iniquity. So despite millennia of scientific discovery and innovation, today's experts have nothing more than an age-old popular myth.
These days I am partial to historically-based arguments and wisdom. Read what Will Durant wrote over 70 years ago to put today's fears of "climate change" into proper focus:
"Even more universal was the story of the Flood; hardly an ancient people went without it, and hardly a mountain in Asia but had given perch to some water-wearied Noah or Shamash-napishtim. Usually these legends were the popular vehicle or allegory of a philosophical judgment or a moral attitude summarizing long racial experience – that sex and knowledge bring more grief than joy, and that human life is periodically threatened by floods, - i.e., ruinous inundations of the great rivers whose waters made possible the earliest known civilizations. To ask whether these stories were true or false, whether they “really happened,” would be to put a trivial and superficial question; their substance, of course, is not the tales they tell but the judgments they convey."
That last line really is the crux of the pathology, "...but the judgments they convey."
Noah's Ark is a self-discrediting argument - most especially coming from today's scientists. Greenpeace is trying to invoke history to buttress their alarmism when in fact, history exposes "climate change" as just another in a long line of scaremongering hoaxes.
This would be like saying that O.J. Simpson's acquittal PROVES that murderers are often falsely accused.
It's just a little too "socialist" for me to wish everyone a Happy New Year.
Alright I am back from a blogging vacation. Worry not, my mind has been working overtime and it's ready to dispense morsels of wisdom to my starving flock.
I strongly considered making a break from Marginalizing by dedicating January exclusively to positivity - perhaps titling a blog series - "January Geniuses", rife with bull financial arguments, chi management techniques, hagiographies of great minds, and a strict avoidance of all things negative.
But has Greg Mankiw and Co. really earned a month off?
I think not. Instead I will just resolve to be slightly more positive throughout 2007.
A few comments on the end of the "inclusive" holiday season.
Did you know that Hanukkah is only a notable Jewish holiday in the United States?
Do you even know anyone that celebrates Kwanzaa? It's a completely fabricated holiday not unlike Festivus - both of which were conceived in the narcotically imbued sixties.
Kwanzaa was dreamt up by a NutJob named Ron Karenga in 1966. How exactly can a Californian create a "Pan-African" holiday? The guy talks out of both sides of his mouth - or should I more eloquently state that he flatulates at both ends. From that Wikipedia link above,
He later stated, "...it was chosen to give a Black alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society."
In 1967, a year after Karenga proposed this new holiday, he publicly espoused the view that "Jesus was psychotic" and that Christianity was a white religion that blacks should shun.[5] However, as Kwanzaa gained mainstream adherents, Karenga altered his position so as not to alienate practicing Christians, then stating in the 1997 Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community, and Culture, "Kwanzaa was not created to give people an alternative to their own religion or religious holiday."
Nine years after Kwanzaa was invented, Dr. Karenga further moderated his views and became a Marxist.
Haha. California and Cambridge...the only two places where "moderates" are called Marxists.
Maybe I'll invent a holiday for the goyim to rival Yom Kippur - I feel particularly left out when that celebration comes around. Or maybe I'll start an all-white pro-basketball league. If you don't think there's a market for that then you don't know too many old white men!
I have already articulated my disgust for sharing. Remember multiculturalism is an ugly step child of socialism. Every person, every lifestyle, and every culture has to be equal in order to unite the proletariat. The children's shows on television are littered this time of year with seasonally flavored propaganda for the docile brats. The term "Christmas" is only uttered on the classic shows like "A Charlie Brown Christmas"; otherwise they use fashionable euphemisms like "holiday sharing party". I must have heard it fifty times on the Sprout Channel last month.
What does "sharing" have to do with Christmas? There may be a mutual exchange of gifts but that's not really "sharing". The next thing you know, these little kids will grow up thinking there's nothing wrong with compulsory sharing, i.e. confiscating the hard earned property of others...
Last night I turned on the television and the Sprout hostess was teaching kids to say "holiday" in sign language - what an absolute joke.
Now I am 32 years old and have never needed to use sign language beyond the universal middle digit expression, but nowadays, it's quite in vogue within certain circles to teach your toddler signing. Supposedly it aids "communication frustration". I recently met a young lady who actually taught at a school for the deaf. I asked her about these fruity parents that hire people to teach their kids sign language (ones that have no hearing problems whatsoever) and she turned red-faced with ire and declared the parents "total f*cking *ssholes".
Who could possibly complain about "global warming"?
I could see if a warm climate was getting unbearably hot, perhaps local denizens might get miffed by "human induced climate change". But in cold climes like Massachusetts, only Über-Morons could logically be upset at this year's heretofore mild winter.
It's a good thing I didn't attend my wife's holiday work party with the senior executives. She got seated next to the BIG BOSS's wife who proceeded to lecture everyone about the perils of "global warming". When I say "lecture" I mean it. She interrogated everyone on how they commuted to work. My wife won momentary plaudits for taking the commuter train into town. Yet uncomfortable with those laurels Mrs. C-Nut proudly declared that she owned a Chevy Suburban. I guess it was analogous to when Cubs fans throw opposing teams' homerun balls back onto the field.
Devil's Advocate - Well, what would you have said if you were there?
I would first raise my hand and loudly ask if anyone wanted to change seats with me.
Seriously, I hope I would have said nothing. My wife's boss controls too much of her income to risk offending him or his flaky wife. Self-interest trumps all.
Below is another timeless lesson on spousal dinner party etiquette. (Attention Morons and Luddites, you need to click, perhaps twice, on these images to make the videos play. They are not just weird pictures with a mysterious play button plastered on them.)
From personal experience I can assure you that husbands can be just as, if not more, embarrassing to their wives. Please, find my male chauvinism on other subjects.
Unencumbered, I would have told the clueless woman that "global warming" is nothing but a trendy climate theory and that she was both tragically uninformed and mortally brainwashed.
Lemma - It's a waste of time to reason with at least 90% of Morons.
Sadly, that is the conclusion I have come to over the last few years. Whether Moronic by nature or by conditioning, I have discovered that most dummies are incorrigible. My favorite tack to take with Morons is one of hectoring mockery. For whatever reason, popular learning curves flatten very early in life (age 25?) and enter a slow descent there on in. Bad ideas find easy burrowing in most adult minds, providing Captious bloggers with a target-rich environment.
How often do you hear someone say, "Well, I am not qualified to comment on that" or "I am not very fluent in that subject"???
Never, right?
While Michelangelo famously declared, I Am Still Learning, the apropos description of our times is Stuck On Stupid.
I am fully immersed in Michelangelo's mantra. Sure my learning curve was range-bound throughout my single years whilst I chased dollars, wine, women, and song; a fact that deeply pains me to think about. I certainly could have done all that but read a book or two along the way. But less than two years ago my brain was reborn, and I owe it all to this blog. I have said it before, and I'll say it again and again - I have learned more in the last two years of my life from the research, auto-didacticism, and composition of Marginalizing Morons than I have in the preceding three decades of my life.
Now back to that rich executive's Idiotic wife. Of course she lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts - the tony bastion of "conservatism and capitalism". Remember, the town doesn't even sell liquor and has "Transgendered Awareness" Day at its high school. Its reputation laughably proves the maxim that everything is relative. Anyway, this dummy has an 8 year old child in the Wellesley government school system who is "petrified of global warming". Can you say brainwashing? Or child abuse?
I remember being in the third grade (1982-83) and my teacher informed the class that Russia had a nuclear missile aimed at our city (Worcester). That was kind of scary and probably not something a teacher should be frightening kids with so glibly. But that was most likely true, in contradistinction to "global warming" mythology.
It's always risky getting pulled into "global warming" debates - you know, never argue with a fool because others may not know the difference.
To the Enviro-Evangelicals, owning a Honda Accord is always more virtuous than owning an Earth-scorching SUV. It simply doesn't matter if the Accord is driven 100,000 miles per year and the SUV sits idly in a garage. When small-brained folk scoff at my SUVs I fire back that I work from home and hardly drive at all (less than 10k miles per year). I demand to know how many miles they drive each year. Logical probing is feckless, they'll invariably exclaim, "So what, you COULD buy a minivan!"
Well, they COULD ride a bicycle to work. They COULD telecommute. They COULD turn their heat off completely and bundle up.
IF and COULD, two bywords of childish Morons, comically divorced from the reality-based world.
The woman in Wellesley...Despite her fear of the impending apocalypse, she has a couple of SUVs and feels extremely guilty about it. Perhaps in addition to shaming others into energy conservation she also offsets her carbon emissions?
Devil's Advocate - At least she cares...
Here we go again, drunk and stumbling down the steps of Conjecture Tavern. The next talking point will likely be, "Global Warming may not be happening, but we just can't take the risk...." - believe me, I have heard these arguments so often, I can predict not only the incoming talking points to a T, but also the order they get regurgitated. When did "smart" devolve into "robotically predictable"?
We can't take the risk of being wrong? Yep, the Enviro-Fanatics have co-opted Pascal's Wager.
Certainly, catastrophic risk is the most disastrous kind!!! What type of irresponsible person wouldn't be concerned about the end of Earth? Note at this nadir of the debate, the sly substitute of fear for logic, real science, and evidence. Mingled with the legerdemain is the fascist demand to avow your love of humanity and Mother Nature. This is why some of my favorite curveballs to throw "global warming" NutJobs are:
1) I bleepin' hate the environment! 2) Earth is my least favorite planet! 3) Mother Nature is a wench!!!
The fools just don't know how to respond. Guilt is puddy in their hands; so blunt the weapon.
As much as I'd like to get away from this subject I simply can not. It's the nexus of the Moron universe. As a propaganda buff, I ceaselessly marvel at the radius of "global warming" alarmism.
I just googled "george bush" and got 8.2 million search results.
While googling "global warming" currently yields 24.7 million search results.
So the most powerful man on the planet has merely a third as many search results...
Every time I come across a ridiculous "global warming" news story I dump it into a special folder for future reference. At my current rate of accumulation, I may soon have to buy an external hard drive to warehouse all of the inanity.
It takes more than just constitutional fortitude for normal people to stand up to such pervasive and sophisticated propaganda. Not only do they have to study the talking points and research the counter-arguments, they have to indulge inanity and defend the size of their cars, profess love for the Earth, proclaim themselves fearless of catastrophe, and bear the stigma inherent in tackling groupthink. If adults aren't up to this task, it's near impossible for eight-year-olds to resist the brainwashing - especially those kids of Moronic parents. Eric Hoffer has the pertinent quote,
We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.
"Global Warming" isn't just the shibboleth of a harmless evangelical cult; there are real casualties beyond frazzled 8 year-old boys and neutered "holiday" parties. But that's a subject for a later date.
Moving on.
First Night is the 30 year-old New Year's Eve celebration in Boston. Read its ridiculous Mission Statement:
Mission Statement: To reveal and celebrate diversity through the First Night celebration and the First Night Neighborhood Network, using art as a catalyst to unify the community through creativity, imagination and participation.
Even more asinine than that is that First Night is a complete misnomer. Since it's celebrated on December 31st, First Night should really be called "Last Night".
Devil's Advocate - Well it does turn to January 1st at midnight...
Well then it should be called "First Morning"!
I met a woman in Brooklyn last week who is a Boston émigré and an interesting entrepreneur in her own right. She organizes closets for evil rich people in Manhattan. She isn't designing them; she goes in and sorts sweaters and shoes, by season and color; she alphabetizes outfits by brand and whatnot and charges an insane hourly wage. Anyway, in talking to her, the subject of Boston came up. She shook her head and gave the most succinct and accurate description I have heard yet.
She said, "Those people up there are BACKWARD".
Yes, indeed they are.
Forget Seinfeld and Superman, Massachusetts is the Bizarro World. While Bostonians fancy themselves the smartest people on the OverheatedEarth, they are in fact among the dumbest. Bet your bottom dollar that one hundred years from now, Boston will still have Puritanical liquor laws and still be celebrating First Night on the last one of the year. Just recently I have endured countless "global warming" lectures, but never once in my life has someone told me I was going to hell for my sins. And remember I went to a Catholic high school (albeit a Jesuit one).
If you want to find a backwards, in-your-face evangelical, then blindfold yourself and throw a dart in Massachusetts.
