It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know

I love this story
I miss the Cold War.  At least between us and the Russians, we kept the fringes tidied up.

I'm Available

The incomparable Geena Davis

Shamelessly stolen from Gerard

Perspective

Good advice from Og

Super Sunday

Good day at church.  Bears win in their own personal idiom.  Found this at Bayou Renaissance Man:

Life is good.

Advancing Into Chaos

I find this commercial disquieting.  We open with the Marines advancing toward....Stalingrad?  The whole city seems to be smoldering.  Women and children are screaming in the background.  We don't see any enemy activity as the Marines advance in the open, with perfectly aligned APCs and air cover.  The only thing missing is Nicolas Cage and the Windtalkers.

But wait!  The absence of an enemy is merely an opportunity to change the focus of the mission.  Hidden inside the APCs and helicopters are strangely uniform boxes containing Aid.  We know it's Aid, because each box is carefully labelled as such.  Lord knows the sharp end of the spear doesn't need ammunition, food or water in the first wave, unless that's what's in the boxes, in which case I'd like to order some Aid myself.

What bothers me the most is that whoever approved this commercial sees the Marines not as shock troops, which they are, but as some kind of generic relief force, equipped at all times for any situation.  This is remarkable.  The Marines are looking for a few good men to field what amounts to a U.N. peacekeeping force.  I find it astonishing that this is how the Marine Corps has decided to sell itself.

What I do not find astonishing is that this is what could be envisaged as the Marines' mission going forward under the current Administration.

Update:  This has been going on for some time.

And Now For Something Completely Different

A large percentage of the Yardbirds on stage here

If George Harrison is not your favorite Beatle, I don't know you

Morality speaking

I just got done watching "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" with Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp as drag queens.  It's worth watching for the costumes alone, but the boys make fantastic women.  Guy Pearce does not make a totally ugly woman, I have to say.  The characters were likable, the script was good, and the story wasn't completely ridiculous.

Hugo Weaving is going to the middle of Australia to perform his cabaret show.  We find out that this gig was courtesy of his wife, whose existence causes a great deal of consternation for his colleagues.  The fact that he is a father is even more distressing, especially to Hugo.  The film follows a road movie format, bringing our protagonists into contact with various people, some of whom are important.

His wife is quite tolerant and easy-going, as is his son.  In the movies, we often find that life has a niche for us where we can be valued for everything that we are.  Sometimes this happens for real.

It was a throwaway line that stuck in my mind.  Hugo is concerned that his son will be mortified by his lifestyle.  His wife is unconcerned, blithely stating that morals are relative, and that the boy will develop his own in time.

What a lovely conceit.  What a beautiful lie.

There's a bear in my boot

Did you know there are bears in West Virginia?  Well, duh, but when I was younger I assumed there were some tucked away in some mountain valley, but that there weren't very many, and you certainly wouldn't see them.

When my son was young, he was fascinated by and petrified of bears, due to a steady diet of awful killer bear movies he watched at Mamaw's house.  He was about eight years old or so when we went on our usual summer sojourn to Grandma's house in Ansted.  We took a pontoon boat tour of part of the New River Gorge a few miles from the house.  The guide was telling us about all the wildlife to be found in the gorge. Cougars were mentioned.  Awesome.  "There aren't any bears, are there?"  I asked somewhat confidently, because we had been telling him for weeks that there were no bears anywhere near Grandma's house.  "Oh yeah, there's bears".  Fantastic.  Now he won't want to go outside, and outside is pretty much all there is in West Virginia.

Later in the week, we were visiting some old family friends down in Gauley Bridge.  They casually told us a bear had gone through their garbage a couple of weeks ago.  Not only will he never want to leave the house, but his parents have been lying to him all along.

It turns out that Granddad was hunting up north with some buddies, as he was wont to do.  He was alone, probably gunning for birds, when he discovered that he and a bear were perusing the same shrubbery.  They looked at each other, and then they both high-tailed it.  I'm pretty sure that Granddad stopped running at some point, because he was always home for dinner.

The Idiot Abroad

There is an interesting thread over at Rachel Lucas' place about our the President's difficulties in ginning up support for a Syrian adventure.  Some are arguing that it is more dangerous to leave the President hanging than it is to back a horrible policy.  Whether you think that Obama's credibility could suffer any more indignities or not, there is some merit to the idea that the Executive is the face of the nation abroad.

Having said that, I think that physicsgeek has the right of it in the comments; fuck him.  There have to be penalties for incompetence, and this is one of them.  If Mr. Obama spends the next three years being ridiculed by the Congress and the rest of the world, that is on him.  Perhaps a message could be sent to our elites that we expect the barest level of competence in the highest office.  Maybe the electorate could learn the same lesson.

Hanging an idiot out to dry may not be as stimulating as tar and feathers, but it's probably less disruptive to the nation. 

Let's take a break from the Incredible Shrinking Presidency and celebrate the human spirit

h/t Borepatch

I'm reading "The True History of the American Revolution" by Sydney George Fraser.  It's available online for free, although I have a paper copy because I'm old-fashioned.  He is of the opinion that the British government was reasonable in its handling of its American colonies, and that the patriot party, as he calls them, were disingenuous in their professions of loyalty leading up to the Declaration of Independence.  While these things are true to a large extent, it is interesting how he fails to see, even in his own writing, that the Americans were already a distinct people.  The transplanted Englishmen who settled here were out of step with their fellows, and time had made the ties to the home country even more tenuous.

He lays a lot of the blame for failing to suppress the revolution on the Whigs and Wlliam Howe, who was a Whig himself.  Part of his overarching theme is that the Whigs, being generally tolerant of American independence in theory, and being out of power, were recalcitrant in prosecuting the war.  There is a lot of truth in that, because some of Howe's actions were certainly questionable.  He seems to be of the opinion that the Whigs were willing to let the colonies go their own way not only because they thought that inevitable, but also because it would grease their way back into power.  How little things have changed.

Incidentally, despite Fraser's obvious admiration for Henry Clinton and the repressive manner in which he waged the war, the backlash from such an approach is obvious even from this remove, which makes the Whig policy of poking at the rebellion in a conciliatory manner look more intelligent than at first glance.  The Tory use of Indians as a punitive weapon makes the later conflicts with them more understandable at least. 

It is also fascinating to identify the author's biases, which at least are original.

I need to water the one surviving plant.  The circle of life must continue.

I have a blogroll.  Surely that counts as content.

Don't call me Shirley.  I prefer Madge.

Illinois was surprisingly competent today.  Waiting for the Big Ten season to see how terrible they may actually be.  At least it wasn't our quarterback whose knee looked like Robin Ventura's ankle.  Horrible to see.

I may get off my big butt later.  Check back for updates.

Great.  Now I have a blog.  All I need is some content.