This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "Freedom of Choice: Why Liberals Should Exercise Their Freedom to Pay Higher Taxes" by The Razor, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Walter Russell Mead's post "America, Israel, Gaza, the World" over at The American Interest. Congrats!
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Skyfail?
The guys at Red Letter Media have a review of Skyfall, the latest James Bond movie... it sounds like they both liked it quite a bit, but you have to get through about ten minutes of them goofing around before you get to the real review:
Quantum of Solace was a bit weak, but Daniel Craig is definitely one of the better Bonds... I hope his version of Bond will be around for a while. His IMDB page already credits him with roles in two more yet-to-be-named Bond movies, so hopefully we can expect at least two more with Craig as Bond before they try to pull a switcheroo on us.
Quantum of Solace was a bit weak, but Daniel Craig is definitely one of the better Bonds... I hope his version of Bond will be around for a while. His IMDB page already credits him with roles in two more yet-to-be-named Bond movies, so hopefully we can expect at least two more with Craig as Bond before they try to pull a switcheroo on us.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
The Council Has Spoken!
This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "Taking DC By Strategy – A Battle Plan" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Victor Davis Hanson's post "Anatomies of Electoral Madness" over at VDH's Private Papers. Congrats!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Traditions at my house are a bit different:
It's far better to eat Thanksgiving dinner than it is to be Thanksgiving dinner, I always say. Here's to hoping that your Thanksgiving turned out better than this poor guy's did.
It's far better to eat Thanksgiving dinner than it is to be Thanksgiving dinner, I always say. Here's to hoping that your Thanksgiving turned out better than this poor guy's did.
Monday, November 12, 2012
The Council Has Spoken!
This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "A foreign policy/war powers law establishes that the unnecessary deaths in Benghazi were Obama’s responsibility" by Bookworm Room, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Michelle Malkin's post "Obama gets his “revenge,” but conservatives must stand tall" over at her eponymous blog. Congrats!
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Our long national nightmare is NOT over
So... Obama somehow managed to win a second term, despite having a record that should have gotten him tossed out on his ear. What happened here? I mostly agree with Ace's list of things that hurt Romney, but what's going on beneath all that? The root problem, as I see it, is that we have far too many voters in this country who simply can't be reasoned with.
Many people on the left are Kool-Aid drinkers. They are firmly decided yet decidedly misinformed, the type of people who refuse to even speak to anyone that watches Fox News. They tend to think of themselves as highly-informed voters, but they deliberately seek out only the most rabidly left-wing media outlets and completely shun all dissenting opinions. If they even acknowledge that there is another side, it is only to present a cartoonish caricature of their political opponents... they don't have any interest in knowing what anyone on the right really thinks about anything.
For some voters, their problem is not so much willful ignorance as it is an overreliance on emotional thinking. They like to think of themselves as having an open mind, but their minds are so open that their brains have fallen out. They don't necessarily shun opposing views, but it can still be very difficult to reach such people... they don't process information in the same way that logical people do. You can hit them over the head with cold hard facts all day long and not even make a dent, because they base their votes more on how they feel than anything else... if the facts hurt their feelings, you aren't going to get very far with them. The only chance you have to win over people like this is with appeals to emotion... and the very next day the Democrats would probably just win them right back again by appealing to class envy, hurling false charges of racism or homophobia, stoking hatred of Christians or Jews, playing on imaginary fears of wars on lady parts, or arranging a well-timed photo op.
And then there are those who can't really be bothered to think at all. They are the product of a failed school system that doesn't teach kids how to think critically. They know all sorts of things, but they don't know how they know them. They might not seek out overtly political stuff, but most "straight" media coverage they get from our corrupt media is just a watered-down version of the delusional crap they would get from MSNBC... and even when they try their best to avoid that sort of stuff, it still finds them anyway in dribs and drabs thanks to all the left-wing talking points that permeate pop culture. They might call themselves apolitical, but they are Democrats by default. Some of these people can be converted, but they have to be mugged by reality first. That being said, if seeing both 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2012, and suffering through the worst economic recovery in our nation's history aren't enough to wake them up, then I don't know what will.
These are all long-term cultural problems we face here, they didn't just suddenly crop up on us overnight. And it seems to get a little bit worse every single year. I still remember my first run-in with this sort of thing... it was something that happened to me way back in grade school, but it stuck with me.
Ronald Reagan was running against Walter Mondale, and my fifth-grade teacher polled the class on who we would vote for... she gave us some ballots to fill out, but first she gave us a twenty minute lecture on the awfulness of Reagan and the wonderfulness of Mondale. I didn't know very much about politics at the time, but I was vaguely aware that my father was a Reagan voter, and I knew what my teacher was doing was very wrong. This was a push poll... I didn't know the proper term for it at the time, but I could see it for what it was and it made me very angry. As it turned out, I was the only kid in the whole class who didn't vote for Mondale. You'd think the teacher would be satisfied with how successful her push poll was, but no... she spent the rest of our time in class trying to track down and expose the identity of the sole Reagan voter. I stayed quiet, hoping she would just give up and get back to doing her job, but she didn't stop until she got every kid in class but me to fess up to who they voted for... she finally found me by the process of elimination. Then she got in my face and demanded to know why I voted for Reagan... so I got in her her face instead and called her every name I could think of, chasing her right out of her own classroom. I hated her guts from that day forward, and I never blindly took the word of any teacher again... any respect they got from me they had to earn.
That was 1984. I can only imagine how insufferable the teachers in that school are today, now that we're living in the Age of Obama. We can argue about Romney's strategery all we want, but what are we going to do about all these other problems? This isn't just about the next election. I fear this will take generations to fix, assuming we haven't already reached some sort of tipping point.
Update: Of course, folks on the right can be just as hard to reason with sometimes. Apparently some people were so butthurt about how the primaries turned out that they stopped identifying themselves as Republicans, which was part of where all the confusion about the polls came from. Also, by the sounds of it, Project ORCA turned out to be nothing short of a GOTV fiasco. Oh well. Maybe next time we'll somehow manage to get our act together, if the country lasts that long.
Update: Ugh... I'm really amazed that I'm still arguing with brainwashed Dems who are 100% certain that Mitt Romney's position on abortion is identical to Todd Akin's, while also having to take crap from people on the right who see no difference between Romney and Obama. It's almost enough to make me want to just say screw it and start picketing somewhere with some "Obama=Akin" signs.
Many people on the left are Kool-Aid drinkers. They are firmly decided yet decidedly misinformed, the type of people who refuse to even speak to anyone that watches Fox News. They tend to think of themselves as highly-informed voters, but they deliberately seek out only the most rabidly left-wing media outlets and completely shun all dissenting opinions. If they even acknowledge that there is another side, it is only to present a cartoonish caricature of their political opponents... they don't have any interest in knowing what anyone on the right really thinks about anything.
For some voters, their problem is not so much willful ignorance as it is an overreliance on emotional thinking. They like to think of themselves as having an open mind, but their minds are so open that their brains have fallen out. They don't necessarily shun opposing views, but it can still be very difficult to reach such people... they don't process information in the same way that logical people do. You can hit them over the head with cold hard facts all day long and not even make a dent, because they base their votes more on how they feel than anything else... if the facts hurt their feelings, you aren't going to get very far with them. The only chance you have to win over people like this is with appeals to emotion... and the very next day the Democrats would probably just win them right back again by appealing to class envy, hurling false charges of racism or homophobia, stoking hatred of Christians or Jews, playing on imaginary fears of wars on lady parts, or arranging a well-timed photo op.
And then there are those who can't really be bothered to think at all. They are the product of a failed school system that doesn't teach kids how to think critically. They know all sorts of things, but they don't know how they know them. They might not seek out overtly political stuff, but most "straight" media coverage they get from our corrupt media is just a watered-down version of the delusional crap they would get from MSNBC... and even when they try their best to avoid that sort of stuff, it still finds them anyway in dribs and drabs thanks to all the left-wing talking points that permeate pop culture. They might call themselves apolitical, but they are Democrats by default. Some of these people can be converted, but they have to be mugged by reality first. That being said, if seeing both 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2012, and suffering through the worst economic recovery in our nation's history aren't enough to wake them up, then I don't know what will.
These are all long-term cultural problems we face here, they didn't just suddenly crop up on us overnight. And it seems to get a little bit worse every single year. I still remember my first run-in with this sort of thing... it was something that happened to me way back in grade school, but it stuck with me.
Ronald Reagan was running against Walter Mondale, and my fifth-grade teacher polled the class on who we would vote for... she gave us some ballots to fill out, but first she gave us a twenty minute lecture on the awfulness of Reagan and the wonderfulness of Mondale. I didn't know very much about politics at the time, but I was vaguely aware that my father was a Reagan voter, and I knew what my teacher was doing was very wrong. This was a push poll... I didn't know the proper term for it at the time, but I could see it for what it was and it made me very angry. As it turned out, I was the only kid in the whole class who didn't vote for Mondale. You'd think the teacher would be satisfied with how successful her push poll was, but no... she spent the rest of our time in class trying to track down and expose the identity of the sole Reagan voter. I stayed quiet, hoping she would just give up and get back to doing her job, but she didn't stop until she got every kid in class but me to fess up to who they voted for... she finally found me by the process of elimination. Then she got in my face and demanded to know why I voted for Reagan... so I got in her her face instead and called her every name I could think of, chasing her right out of her own classroom. I hated her guts from that day forward, and I never blindly took the word of any teacher again... any respect they got from me they had to earn.
That was 1984. I can only imagine how insufferable the teachers in that school are today, now that we're living in the Age of Obama. We can argue about Romney's strategery all we want, but what are we going to do about all these other problems? This isn't just about the next election. I fear this will take generations to fix, assuming we haven't already reached some sort of tipping point.
Update: Of course, folks on the right can be just as hard to reason with sometimes. Apparently some people were so butthurt about how the primaries turned out that they stopped identifying themselves as Republicans, which was part of where all the confusion about the polls came from. Also, by the sounds of it, Project ORCA turned out to be nothing short of a GOTV fiasco. Oh well. Maybe next time we'll somehow manage to get our act together, if the country lasts that long.
Update: Ugh... I'm really amazed that I'm still arguing with brainwashed Dems who are 100% certain that Mitt Romney's position on abortion is identical to Todd Akin's, while also having to take crap from people on the right who see no difference between Romney and Obama. It's almost enough to make me want to just say screw it and start picketing somewhere with some "Obama=Akin" signs.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
The Council Has Spoken!
This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "Obama Agonistes: The Fiction Cracks On Benghazi" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Andrew McCarthy's post "The Real Foreign Policy Failure" over at National Review Online. Congrats!
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
666 Park Avenue
I'm a big fan of Terry O'Quinn, so I thought maybe 666 Park Avenue would be worth checking out... I've seen the first 5 episodes so far, and I'm not too impressed. Terry O'Quinn is great, but his character seems poorly written to me... he's an all-powerful Devil one minute, then he's just as scared and confused as everyone else is the next. And several other characters seem to have a serious case of the stupids, which can be really annoying.
The whole show is a bit all over the place, really.... so many different things are going on at once, but hardly anything ever gets resolved in any meaningful or satisfying way in any single episode. It's a bit like watching a fantasy version of the X-Files, but one that's way too heavy on the "mytharc" stuff and way too light on the standalone monster episodes. And there's a lot of random weird shit happening that doesn't seem very connected to anything, such as the evil suitcase that contains the smoke monster from Lost, or something. This makes the pace of the show feel very, very slow... it takes about three episodes to give you one episode worth of meaningful stuff actually happening.
Also, a recurring theme of the show seems to be that money is the root of all evil... I think that would really start to grate on my nerves after a while, but your miles may vary.
Update: Well, the powers that be over at ABC have decided to pull the plug on the show, so I guess I can stop whining about it now. I just hope Terry O'Quinn ends up in something better next time... his talents seemed a bit wasted on this, in my opinion.
The whole show is a bit all over the place, really.... so many different things are going on at once, but hardly anything ever gets resolved in any meaningful or satisfying way in any single episode. It's a bit like watching a fantasy version of the X-Files, but one that's way too heavy on the "mytharc" stuff and way too light on the standalone monster episodes. And there's a lot of random weird shit happening that doesn't seem very connected to anything, such as the evil suitcase that contains the smoke monster from Lost, or something. This makes the pace of the show feel very, very slow... it takes about three episodes to give you one episode worth of meaningful stuff actually happening.
Also, a recurring theme of the show seems to be that money is the root of all evil... I think that would really start to grate on my nerves after a while, but your miles may vary.
Update: Well, the powers that be over at ABC have decided to pull the plug on the show, so I guess I can stop whining about it now. I just hope Terry O'Quinn ends up in something better next time... his talents seemed a bit wasted on this, in my opinion.
Monday, November 5, 2012
A few predictions for election night
I predict Romney will win with at least 53% of the popular vote. What that will mean in terms of electoral votes, I have no idea... but I will say that I think he'll win at least one state Bush failed to win in the 2004 election. And I predict meltdowns galore on MSNBC, culminating in at least one of their hosts openly accusing Romney of stealing the election somehow.
Update: Well, I guess zero out of three ain't too bad, huh?
Update: Well, I guess zero out of three ain't too bad, huh?
Thursday, November 1, 2012
The Council Has Spoken!
This week's results for the Watcher's Council vote are in, they've been posted over at Watcher of Weasels. The winning council entry for the week was "Heart Of Darkness – The Real Benghazi Coverup" by Joshuapundit, and the winning non-council entry for the week was Bing West's post "First, Aid the Living" over at National Review Online. Congrats!
Only five days left until Election Day...
Pay no attention to worthless polls based on 2008 turnout levels. Don't let Obama distract you with his stupid, petty nonsense. We can do this. Get your game faces on:
(Found via Moe Lane.)
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