Category Archives: Life
Questions With No Answers
Some stuff I’ve been pondering….
Can someone point me to an explanation of Neoreaction? One that is geared toward the layman and not 30 pages long? I’m not very inclined to buy into it, but I would at least like to know what it is I’m not buying into so I can explain why I’m not buying into it.
__________________________________
I recently asked two questions regarding the Hobby Lobby case. Since no one answered, I’m asking again. First, how much does birth control cost out-of-pocket? Is it really that expensive? It would seem to be rather affordable given how many women use it, and that mass production lowers costs. But I’ve never bought it, so I can’t say for sure. Second, I’ve seen comments claiming women often need birth control for medical reasons other than actual contraception. Do abortifacients provide any kind of medical benefit the way, say, birth control pills do?
__________________________________
Proponents of population control are saying most people are nothing more than consumers, and will deplete the world’s resources. So why do they push for a welfare state, which is primarily a population of consumers who don’t produce?
__________________________________
Have any of the very rich politicians or entertainers who complain loudly about income inequality ever just issued some poorer people a check?
__________________________________
Will the Falco Tribute Band destroy civilization… or save it?
Title is from here. Mickey explains it’s historical significance. Although you should watch the original first or this one won’t make much sense to you.
Leftist Turn At Albuquerque
It started with this post, and led to an argument on CNN about white gay males stealing the culture of black women.
It’s amusing to me how gender is a social construct, and can be changed and transformed at will from one to another (or to made-up ones) but culture and political orientation are hardwired by biology. This neatly sidesteps the issue of whether cultural behaviors can have bad effects, since one can only act according to the culture defined by their color. Anyone imitating a culture outside their race is inauthentic at best and mocking at worst.
I don’t seem to remember Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, or Gloria Gaynor(!) being too upset about gay males buying their albums. Diana Ross even did a song, “I’m Coming Out,” written for her gay fanbase.
Makes ya wonder if Notorious B.I.G., P. Diddy, and Ma$e knew they were sampling a “gay song” when they released “”Mo Money Mo Problems,” or just wanted a catchy beat. Speaking of which, Diddy and Ma$e sure looked like they were borrowing from white culture in the opening of that song’s video. Were they mocking white culture? Or does Diddy just like playing golf?
Ma$e appropriated white culture in his video for “Welcome Back,” borrowing from “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” and using a sample of the theme song from “Welcome Back Kotter.” Ma$e and Diddy also sampled Latin music culture with “Feel So Good” which used the chorus from Miami Sound Machine’s “Bad Boy.” The song also brags of taking “hits from the 80s.” I think the 80s should sue.
This rabbit hole has no bottom. Where does the line get drawn? Is Eminem a cultural criminal for his plan – in his own words – “To do black music so selfishly / And use it to get myself wealthy”? Dr. Dre didn’t seem to mind too much. What about black rappers who sampled white music? Peter Gunz and Lord Tariq sampled the white boys of Steely Dan (badly) for their song “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby).” But Steely Dan was influenced by black jazz musicians. Are the black session players who tour with The Dan race traitors? Tariq and Gunz crossed the Latin border when they sampled, in the same song listed above, Latin performer Jerry Rivera’s song “Amores Como El Nuestro” And isn’t “Peter Gunz” a riff on the old TV show with a legendary theme written by a white dude?
I told my wife about the dustup that led off this post. Her response was “Oh, minority victim war.” There are far worse problems facing the black female community than whether Miley Cyrus or gay males are twerking. But that doesn’t get you on CNN.
H/T to Andrew Klavan
Two-Edged Sword
Via Ed Driscoll – E.J. Dionne says it’s time for Progressives to reclaim the Constitution
It’s odd to see Dionne calling for this, since self-styled “Progressives” have been the ones railing against the Constitution for decades, pushing for a “Living Constitution” that can be molded like Jello into whatever shape they want, or for ignoring it completely. Even his plea for “reclamation” comes across more like stuffing it in a vault so no one can see it and challenge whatever they say it means this week. The entire article sounds like a feint to continue doing what they’ve been doing – whatever they want, Constitutional or not.
Regarding such… Driscoll also quotes my close personal friend and breakfast lifestyle director Thomas Friedman, who infamously wrote –
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
Let’s take Friedman’s assertion at face value, and assume China’s leaders are all Pretty Nice Guys, which for all I know, they very well might well be. But what happens when these people are inevitably – if for no other reason that aging – gone? Will the next group of leaders be so charitable? What the tinplate El Jefe groupies like Friedman don’t seem to grasp is that the Constitution wasn’t written for reasonably enlightened leaders. It was written for the lowest common denominator, designed to function even when the worst people are in charge. Warren Meyer explained it over at Coyote Blog –
Over the past fifty years, a powerful driving force for statism in this country has come from technocrats, mainly on the left, who felt that the country would be better off if a few smart people (ie them) made the important decisions and imposed them on the public at large, who were too dumb to make quality decision for themselves. People aren’t smart enough,they felt, to make medication risk trade-off decision for themselves, so the FDA was created to tell them what procedures and compounds they could and could not have access to. People couldn’t be trusted to teach their kids the right things, so technocrats in the left defended government-run schools and fought school choice at every juncture…I am reminded of all this because the technocrats that built our regulatory state are starting to see the danger of what they created. A public school system was great as long as it was teaching the right things and its indoctrinational excesses were in a leftish direction. Now, however, we can see the panic. The left is freaked that some red state school districts may start teaching creationism or intelligent design. And you can hear the lament – how did we let Bush and these conservative idiots take control of the beautiful machine we built? My answer is that you shouldn’t have built the machine in the first place – it always falls into the wrong hands.
Read the rest here.
Happy 4th Of July
Your government wishes you a happy Dependence Day.
He knows where to find you, citizen
Okay, I can’t be completely cynical. Have another one.
Superman by Fred Ray, 1942
Hope you’re all having a happy 4th.
Bonus pic, click to embiggen –
Superman in WWII, by Jerry Ordway, 1990
Wednesday Golf Outing
Some more in the style of Hal Gurnee’s Network Time Killers…
– A woman gave birth to twins… six months apart. Doctor blames it on an “incompetent cervix.”
That’s the best turn of phrase I’ve heard all day. All week, even. It definitely deserves to attain idiom status somehow. I’m thinking – to take the easy route – that it would be a great name for a progressive-acoustic feminist wannabe-ironic hipster band.
__________________________________
A raging AngerSad has erupted over the Hobby Lobby court decision on the Byrne Robotics board. I have a couple question about the decision myself. First, how much does birth control cost out-of-pocket? Is it really that expensive? Considering how prevalent birth control seems to be, it would seem to be rather affordable, given how many women use it, and that mass production lowers costs . But I’ve never bought it, so I can’t say for sure. Second, I’ve seen comments claiming women often need birth control for medical reasons other than actual contraception (which HL still provides). Hobby Lobby only refuses to provide 4 out of 20 birth control methods. The 4 types they won’t cover are abortifacients. Do abortifacients provide any kind of medical benefit the way, say, birth control pills do?
I’m not even going to get into all the issues about the government telling a privately-owned company what it can and can’t pay for, or how HL employees are free to work where the employers will pay for all forms of birth control, etc.
Getting back to the B.R. thread…. a commenter wrote “A single-payer system would have many problems, but it seems to work pretty well for Congress and our veterans.” Hasn’t said system and said veterans been much in the news of late? The commenter does link to a poll claiming most veterans are satisfied with the care they get, but I’m not inclined to trust the Veterans Affairs site’s reporting. As for Congress… drawing on the combined taxes of the entire country to support the health care of 535 people should work spectacularly well. It’s scaling it up to paying for 318 million people that’s the problem.
__________________________________
Digging down into the internet vaults…. The Comics Curmudgeon examines(!) Rex Morgan M.D. (guest-starring LBJ. Or a lookalike from the same place Hal Gurnee found the Kenny Rogers clone) –
FORE!
I don’t know if they went golfing, but it sounds like someone scored a hole-in-one…
I don’t want to know if there were penalty strokes.
__________________________________
Somehow I’ve ended up featuring Kenny Rogers twice in relatively rapid succession. I’ve got nothing against Kenny – “Coward of the County” and “The Gambler” are good tunes – but let’s spin another track from that same era and see how many people run screaming.
The guys look like they’re going to, uh, play golf when the ladies suddenly show up.
Baby Maybe
[Or: “Alternative Birthstyle”]
Ryan:(drunk) Sorry…. no no, go go go. Songs of the Chiropractor go back many a many years.
Colin:Do they?
Ryan:Yes they were. And I know as a young black child growing up in the Bronx, none was more popular to me than that boogie-woogie hit, “Is That A Bulging Disc Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?”
Wasn’t it just yesterday that I was saying something about progressives having a “pseudo-intellectual worldview and love of scientific sounding formulas over empirical reality?”
I should have said “terms” instead of “formulas.” With formulas, there’s at least one or two numbers involved, which can be held to some sort of empirical, double-checking standard. Terms sound authoritative and don’t leave the little cracks where factualism can seep in.
Today’s fake-authoritative terminology is “infant gender assignment” –
Obstetricians, doctors, and midwives commit this procedure on infants every single day, in every single country. In reality, this treatment is performed almost universally without even asking for the parents’ consent, making this practice all the more insidious. It’s called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It’s a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring’s genitals.
Because, as everybody knows, doctors have secret special words that magically make their opinions into concrete reality.
It’s getting harder and harder out there for a pseudointellectual pimp. The race to set oneself apart as “enlightened” by discovering deeper and deeper levels of fauxlosophy is barreling toward the horizon at full speed and shows no signs of a finish line.
Hat tip to Bookworm
Happy Paws
…as Steve Martin never said.
Clap your paws if you have
A tennis ball between your teeth
Clap your paws if you like
Running up and down the beach
Cheerfully and shamelessly swiped from Vodkapundit.
One Day My Plane Leaves
Crying rhymes for the dying times
If it’s time to die there’s nothing you can do
– Second Coming with Layne Staley, “It’s Coming After”
Kurt Cobain wasn’t the only musician from the early 90’s “Seattle Scene” to die at a young age.
In 2002, eight years after Cobain’s death, Layne Staley of Alice In Chains died, after years and
years of drug abuse.
Like Kurt, no one knows the exact date of his death for certain, and like Kurt, his death was
ruled to have happened on April 5. I’ve always wondered if the coroner or whoever chose that date
for some kind of symbolic reason.
Very much unlike Kurt, however, Layne didn’t suddenly and shockingly die at the height of his fame. Rather, everyone knew he was heading for a pine box for a number of years before it finally happened. A good number of his lyrics even seemed to evidence that Layne himself knew this. But while he was here, his voice coupled with Jerry Cantrell’s nuclear-blast music brought a heavy, sludgy, dark sound not like anything up to that point.
Layne had a couple of side projects, one of which was occasionally guest-singing with the band Second Coming. Another better known one was collaborating with members of Pearl Jam and Screaming Trees in the supergroup-of-sorts Mad Season. Anyone who knew Layne (aka “The Voice Of Doom”) only from AIC and thought his sole talent was screaming was thoroughly disabused of that notion.
From 1995, a full seven years before his death, but it sounded like he knew it was already over, didn’t he?
Layne could also play drums and was (I’m speculating here) a bit of “Benny Hill” fan.
According to Wikipedia, “At Alice in Chains’ last concert with Staley on July 3, 1996, they
closed with ‘Man in the Box.'” How disturbingly appropriate.
Title is from this song, lyrics and music entirely by Layne as well as playing rhythm guitar… loudness warning, but it’s awesome –
Buy Our Album! We’re Nirvana!
Our little group has always been
And always will until the end
It’s 20 years today since Kurt Cobain died. There’s still argument over whether it was a suicide or not.
I didn’t get into Nirvana’s music right off the bat, but I did like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and once I dived into alternative music, they were right up there. They were one of those bands where I hated some of there songs and loved others … not a lot of middle ground. At first, I thought they were going to be the next fad, maybe be a big name band. Like everyone else, I had NO idea just how big they were gonna be. I don’t think I’ve seen anything else quite like it in my lifetime.
People just could not get enough of that song. It was everywhere. I think it inspired more people to pick up guitars than anyone since the Beatles, or maybe even since Elvis.
I wasn’t one of them. I had wanted to play music since before that, and didnt pick up guitar until well after Kurt was dead. But Nirvana was definitely a strong influence. Some of the first songs I learned to play on guitar were Nirvana tunes. Let’s face it – solos aside, a lot of them aren’t that difficult once you master power and barre chords. They are, however, teriffically arranged power and barre chords.
Reportedly, Kurt claimed that he knew he had “made it” when Weird Al Yankovic parodied one of his songs. To hear Al himself tell it –
For whatever reason, my manager tried and tried and said he couldn’t get through [to Nirvana]. He contacted them again and again and they never got back to him. So he said, “If you want to do this parody, it’s on you. You’ve gotta talk to the band.” A friend of mine was in the cast of Saturday Night Live [UHF co-star Victoria Jackson]. I told her, if you ever get Kurt Cobain alone in a room, put him on the phone, because I’d love to talk to him — and she did! Directly! He was sweet and he got it in like five seconds and said, “Of course you can do a parody.” The famous quote from him was, “Is it going to be a song about food?” because at that point that’s primarily what I was known for. And I said, “Well, no, it’s going to be a song about how nobody can understand your lyrics.” And he said, “Oh, sure, of course, that’s funny.”
Yankovic also stated –
It was exceptionally hard shortly after Kurt passed. It was still my biggest hit at the time, and I couldn’t not do it because the fans would want to hear it, but at the same time, it was uncomfortable for me, especially. So for a long time after Kurt passed, I would always preface my performance of the song by doing a somber dedication to Kurt in his memory. The hardest one was doing Seattle, because I didn’t know if I should be doing that song in Seattle at the time. I didn’t know how people would take it. I asked a lot of journalists there, “Should I do this? Should I not do this?” And almost unanimously they said, “You should do this. It would be cathartic.” And it actually went over extremely well.
I don’t remember where I was when I found out Kurt had died or anything like that. I’m not a hardcore fan keeping vigils or whatever. But I have always been a bit fascinated by him and the band, and sometimes pick up the odd and random bit or piece of history I trip across.
It Sure Sounds Funny When You Say His Name Like That
Send me off to the morgue I’m ready to be buried away down in my bed
And I’m alone without the sun
Please just take oneAnd by the grace of god go I into the great unknown
Thing are gonna change in our favor
– For Squirrels, “Mighty K.C.”“ KC stands for Kurt Cobain. He’s dead. The song is by a band called For Squirrels. They’re dead, too.” – From here
I remember when I first heard the song “Mighty K.C.” It was September or October 1995 on the local alternative rock station. I didn’t know it was about Cobain’s death when I first heard it, but the lyrics did stand out, both morbid and hopeful at the same time.
The other thing I didn’t know was that two members of the band died in a traffic accident before the song was even released. They were traveling in a van that flipped over, killing founding members Jack Vigliatura and Bill White and tour manager Tim Bender. I heard a DJ explain this not long after the song hit the airwaves, casting an entirely different light on the verses.
The video sort of merged the original theme of the song with the death of the band members, showing home videos of the band projected onto the body of a Kurt Cobain lookalike. Rather clever, I suppose, as a tribute to both.
The band menbers were big R.E.M. fans, and you can hear it in this song. It almost resembles R.E.M.’s “Fall On Me” in places.
nightskyradio 