“Well-written, meticulously researched and thought-out, Sea Changes, Derek Turner’s first novel, succeeds mightily in bringing to life the prototypical players in the Western tragedy that is mass migration. The reader becomes intimately au fait with the many, oft-unwitting actors in this doomed stand-off: small-town conservative folks vs. progressive city slickers; salt-of-the-earth countrymen against smug, self-satisfied left-liberals. Ever present are the ruthless traffickers in human misery: both media and smugglers. Like it or not, the dice are loaded. In this epic battle, the scrappy scofflaws and their stakeholders triumph; the locals lose.”—ILANA MERCER, Author, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, Columnist, WND & RT
I don’t read novels, other than Anita Brookner’s achingly beautiful studies in solitude. Brookner is brilliant. (And no, there is not a feminist bone in her body; she writes about the impact of a vanishing Britain on the already lonely individual.) When Vladimir Nabokov, Patrick White and Isaac Bashevis Singer stopped writing—on account of shuffling off this mortal coil—I stopped reading novels. Almost everything written by today’s writers is stream-of-consciousness nonsense. (A careful guardian of the English language Tom Wolfe is not.)
If time allows, I may explore V.S. Naipaul; I like the way his mind works. But so long as Toynbee’s A Study of History (abridged) and Murray’s Human Accomplishment lie on my bed unfinished (and so many others languish in my library unread), Naipaul will have to wait.
It is “almost an impeachable offense for Obama to make specific spending cuts to hurt us,” contended Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox And Friends.
“The key word is PAIN. If the president is deciding how to spend money in order to hurt us,” said Judge Napolitano, “rather than in order to provide us with the services for which we have paid, and for which we have hired him—he is doing the opposite of what he has taken an oath to do.”
He has taken an oath faithfully to uphold the laws. In other words, to make the government work; don’t make it painful. Find a way to make it work on 2 percent less. He has, absolute, leeway as the chief executive. Leeway is integral to his office. As the head of the Executive Branch, the president can prioritize money and cuts. … Instead, he wants to cut in away that’ll make us stand inline five hours at the airport, and teach the Republicans a lesson. That’s the way the Constitution [should] work.
(VIA Myron Pauli.) The president’s first priority in causing you pain, just so you know who’s boss—he and family, after all, have a security detail for life—is to spring criminal aliens from jail.
Not only is this president an ass with ears, but he is also pain in the ass.
When it comes to Barack Hussein Obama, media abdicated all responsibility to do journalistic due diligence. It wasn’t only that all stories about the 44th POTUS were spun favorably; but entire issues were submerged entirely. Now two such invertebrates blame their intellectual and ethical deficiencies, spanning years, on the power of the president to mesmerize and misinform.
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Politico are contemptible. They attest that, “Many reporters find Obama himself strangely fearful of talking with them and often aloof and cocky when he does. They find his staff needlessly stingy with information and thin-skinned about any tough coverage. [Where? Tell me where?] He gets more-favorable-than-not coverage because many staffers are fearful of talking to reporters, even anonymously, and some reporters inevitably worry access or the chance of a presidential interview will decrease if they get in the face of this White House.”
VandeHei and Allen spill pages of pixels in claiming that the Obama administration bamboozled them, with the use of digital technology, aided by some really, really “authentically new techniques”; and with “government creation of content,” blah, blah, blah. (Their prose is diarrheic.) Next they’ll claim to have been subjected to subliminal messages during White House briefings.
The media are a Cult. Cults always blame The Leader for inducing a cult following.
When I saw what Bush was all about, nothing could stop me from exposing his machinations (and likening W’s “Bring ’em on grin” to the grimace “on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis”). Nothing stopped libertarians outside the Beltway from exposing Bush’s illegal and immoral war on Iraq. For doing so throughout the Bush years, I became persona non grata in Republican circles on September 19, 2002.
VandeHei and Allen are whinging castrates. They should make you sick.
UPDATED: “These guys are acting like they’re just innocent dupes,” rages Rush Limbaugh.
I’m in Seth MacFarlane’s corner, despite his smarminess. The master of ceremonies at the 85th Academy Awards managed to annoy the right people.
In “Oscars’ Hostile, Ugly, Sexist Night,” Amy Davidson, an affirmative fem at the New Yorker, kvetched over the “hostility shown to women in the workplace.” The meandering Davidson was moaning about MacFarlane’s “We Saw Your Boobs” routine (I didn’t see it), and its implication:
We saw your boobs, but that’s not even what we find attractive, so you exerted no power in doing so—all you did was humiliate yourself?
Behold the sacred boob! So now if a woman strips and a man laughs he risks accusation of impropriety. Besides, women rule the work place, toots. I know men who don’t dare greet a female for fear of an harassment suit.
Another anemic New Yorker writer whined that MacFarlane insulted those Who’re Always Ready to Receive Offense.
Snivels She Who Took Offense:
MacFarlane came off as kind of a pig, as he made fun of women for being too thin, too old, too naked. How sophisticated is it to call the pretty, popular girls sluts? I had to stand up and move away when he turned his sights on the lovely black nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, nominated for Best Actress. I felt sick imagining where MacFarlane might go. So when he simply made a joke about George Clooney sleeping with her down the road, I felt my body relax.
I’ve now watched “We Saw Your Boobs.” If this is indeed MacFarlane singing, he has a better voice and is more musical than all the other warblers who “sang” last night, except for Dame Shirley Bassey, of course, who can do no wrong.
Here’s her stunning, sexy, original performance of Gold Finger
As I predicted in Annual Oscar Offal, Adel did deliver a monotone. She has no range. Barbra Streisand was appalling. And I owe you an apology. I promised no Jennifer Hudson. But someone did go primal on stage. I suspect it was Hudson.
I recall that Foxman had more to say about Mel Gibson than he had about a Seattle based Jihadist, Naveed Afzal Haq. Haq murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building in 2006.
The ADL’s website issued only the tersest of statements. It made no mention of the dead, the injured, and the Muslim. A glance at the League’s site and a visitor from Deep Space might get the impression Seth MacFarlane and other marauding Christian Cossacks like him posed the greatest danger to Jewish continuity.
As I said, I caught but a glimpse of Seth MacFarlane presenting the Oscars. He was not terribly funny, but then they never are. Don’t tell me you found any of the multiple appearances of Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg the least bit amusing.
“Family Guy” is quite cute, but this MacFarlane creation has nothing on Mike Judge’s stuff. “Idiocracy” and Beavis & Butthead are sublimely smart.
MacFarlane is certainly not inJoan Rivers’ league when it comes to impropriety. If only she were unleashed on the Oscar crowd. Now that she’s old, she gets away with speaking her nimble mind.
I laughed so loud and hard at a comment she made on her reality show with Mellisa, the insipid but loving daughter, that I missed at least two more jokes. (I would not recommend watching “Joan Knows Best?”. Like all reality voyeurism, it’s junk—and a schlep, as Rivers would say.)
Ms. Rivers walked in on a football party Mellisa was throwing for her young son and his rowdy small friends. Looking on with disdain at the grubby little boys, Rivers blurted out:
