Where will you move if your candidate of choice loses?

SUSAN SARANDON, who appeared in three films last year and won kudos for her TV movie "Bernard and Doris," is still not a contented soul. She says if John McCain gets elected, she will move to Italy or Canada. She adds, "It's a critical time, but I have faith in the American people."

From The NY Post

I don't for the life of me get these sorts of pronouncements. I have a little more time for celebrity endorsements. If you want someone elected, and you have some social cache, then you might as well use it. But these brave celebrities feigning quasi-refugee status in the wake of an undesirable election outcome have got to be some of the most self-aggrandizing folks in history. What exactly is their point? I can only think of a few possibilities.

1. I am so important to the cultural soul of America, that you'd better not vote for Candidate X, because if you do, I am gone!

2. I am such a fascinating being that you must want to know how strongly I oppose Candidate X.

I can't think of any other reasons for sharing this sort of information. In any case, I am saddened that her possible relocation will make the release of "Mr. Woodcock 2" highly unlikely.

The tedious heavy lifting of cultural reinforcement

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men"

- George Orwell, in a review of Bertrand Russell's Power: A New Social Analysis.

Orwell was a hopeful socialist who believed that equality of result could coexist with freedom. It is likely that, due to his intellectual honesty, he would have dropped the socialism part for the freedom part had he lived longer. Still, the quote seems apt. I would add that it is also often the most difficult thing to continually restate the obvious. Proving first principles is high effort for low return sort of industry, especially in a distraction culture like our own.

Maladroit Public Servant of the Week

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (of Florida) is the Maladroit Public Servant of the Week with this gem, directed at one of the satan-juice infused oil executives currently involved in the horrific activity of making money:

“I can’t say that there is evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not.”

And the inimitable Mark Steyn's response:

“Hey, you first. I can’t say that there is evidence that you’re sleeping with barnyard animals, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not."

My own response would have been that pithy favorite, sometimes known as the one-fingered rejoinder.

Your tax dollars at work.

From National Review

Coleco Vision as commentary on the human condition

Ah, the Coleco Vision! I remember playing this often as a child at my grandmother's house. There was a game called "Nightstalker" which was basically a Pac-Man style maze-game in which you had to avoid these bad, parallelogram-type bad guys who chased you around the screen. The thing was, systems of this sort (2nd Generation) didn't have the power to actually end the game with a series of cinema screens and and lush music. So instead, the game became progressively more difficult until it was literally impossible to survive. The farthest I ever got was a level where the boxy bad guys outnumbered you something like 10 to 1, they could destroy your safe zone, and, oh yeah, they were invisible. At that point you just had to sit there and watch your guy die about 1.4 seconds after the level began. At the time I was ignorant of the bleak, existential despair that my little collection of pixels must have been feeling, along with the absurdity of an enemy who invisible and deadly, but the memory of the experience carries a certain poignancy now.

Of course, having nothing to look forward to past level 12 made the game pretty stupid in hindsight.

What if he throws poo at the judge?

As far as I know, the only persons we are aware of (in the natural order) are humans.

European Court agrees to hear chimp's plea for human rights

His name is Matthew, he is 26 years old, and his supporters hope to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

But he won't be able to give evidence on his own behalf - since he is a chimpanzee. Animal rights activists led by British teacher Paula Stibbe are fighting to have Matthew legally declared a 'person' so she can be appointed as his guardian if the bankrupt animal sanctuary where he lives in Vienna is forced to close.

An anonymous businessman has offered a substantial amount to cover his care, but under Austrian law only humans are entitled to have guardians.

Enlarge

Test case: Hiasl, a 26-year-old male chimpanzee looks through the glass at his enclosure at an animal sanctuary in Voesendorf, south of Vienna

The country's supreme court has upheld a lower court ruling which rejected the activists' request to have a trustee appointed for Matthew.

So now 36-year-old Miss Stibbe and the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories have filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

The insists that the chimp needs legal standing so a guardian can be appointed to look out for his interests - especially if the sanctuary shuts down.

Miss Stibbe, who is from Brighton but has lived in Vienna for several years, says she is not trying to get the chimp declared a human, just a person.

'Everybody who knows him personally will see him as a person,' she said.

From: This is London

Contains live cultures

From R.R. Reno:

"Culture cannot exist without orthodoxies, because freedom cannot give itself the obligations necessary for its own perfection: the ordered liberty of assent to that which is greater. Creative freedom we seem to have, but for what and toward what? The same question holds for intellectual, moral, and political freedom. It is one thing to be free from the false dogmas of the modern avant-garde; it is another to find the true dogmas that humanize."

From First Things

The more you know

Moral reasoning for college students:

Problem: I really want to have sex with this girl, but my lame-ass Catholic university won't provide condoms for the dorms. What do I do?

Answer: If one is unwilling to walk a block or two off campus to purchase a condom before engaging in sexual intercourse, then one lacks the basic maturity, stamina, and patience to be anything but a sub par lover at best. This is not to say that accomplishing said task makes you anything more than hopeful AND horny. Save yourself the embarrassment and say goodnight.

Problem: My professor keeps saying that ethical norms are an oppressive construct of the dominant class in a society and that it is my duty to subvert these dominant paradigms by asserting my own being-against-ness, thereby freeing myself of false consciousness and embracing the bitter truth that existence is a meaningless, absurd void? What do I do?

Answer: A truly meaningless existence will resist any attempts at understanding through reflection, thereby negating the need for dedicated study among other things. Subvert the illusory dominance of your professor by skipping class. Note: I am not responsible for the bad faith and moral dissonance of professors who will take vengeance for their thwarted sense of control and therefore flunk your lazy ass. Rock the boat at your own risk.

Mmmmm... mushy cocoons...

"UNIVERSITIES TODAY BUILD mushy cocoons around their students to insulate them from the consequences of their actions. They throw contraceptives at entering freshmen like latex confetti, and then subsidize abortion services if things don't work out. They police for political incorrectness, to defend students' sacred right not to be offended by opinions too far outside the campus political mainstream. Colleges regard their students both as fully enfranchised adults, encouraged to experiment with sex and (tacitly) drugs, and yet at the same time as children who need to be protected from those decisions. What exacerbates the problem is that this license is usually granted in a climate hostile not merely to traditional morality, but to the very concept of judgment and discrimination."

From American Spectator (wow, two in a row!)

We are the change we've been waiting for...

"Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3."

This little gem is from the new mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and yes, it is a joke. But what a wonderful one.

From the American Spectator