Ole!

Love it!

I don't want to talk about that right now!

I want to talk about this!

Y'know, Britain is all fouled up. Like we are, only worse.

Now they've decided that their grown women —their middle-aged women— are so naive and delicate that they can't defend themselves when their base, animal VANITY is pandered to in the most transparent, trivial ways.

And Heaven Forbid that one of these women should spend and extra farthing on a jar of face cream.

(British women should probably be saving that money for the dentist.)

I mean, next, they'll be telling middle-aged men not to buy outlandish sports cars... Because a new Ferrari WON'T make the high-titted twenty-year-old girl go on skiing trip with them.

When actually, we know that it will.

It works every time. Italian coupe = firm young tail. Always. It works every time.

...Not done. No.

I'm a 52-year-old man, OK? Boomer. Late boomer, anyway. And I am officially ashamed of my generation.

Feminism was supposed to mop up all this "body image" shit. Instead, the ceaseless, infantile whining from my now-menopausal sisters about their white-people vulnerabilities and typical interpersonal detachments has given government —impoverished government— political cover to go out and fuck with advertisers in ways that would have been unthinkable just few decades ago. (Go look at old magazines in the library: You'll see no mention of "cellulite" before the 1960's. It didn't exist, because nobody cared. My cohort has literally given women a new way to be uncomfortable in their own skin.)

There is no end to this lunacy.

Vanity is a monster.

(Hmmm? Me? Oh, I took my earring out about six years ago. The hole's almost healed up now...)

This is just ridiculous. Thanks for that link to the Brit nonsense. I have to leave where I am now to drive somewhere, but I'll come back to this later and maybe blog on it tomorrow. PS Feminists, far and wide, practically strung me up for this:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201010/the-truth-about-beauty

You'll never guess what happened to the Catholics in Florida.

Crid,

If you believe the churches, especially the Roman Catholic church, are only about spreading gospel of Jesus, you are myopic and tunnel visioned.

I wish there were some way to do a true audit against the vaults in/under Vatican City and the other vaults they have around the world. The Roman Catholic church controls hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars around the world.

Well, I've always said the Roman Catholics were mostly about spreading the Gospel of Jesus. Myopic, tunnel-visioned. So the Catholics also stashed that money? Wake up, Sheeple!!!!!

Crid buddy, i suspect other than newsclips, you don't know shit about the catholic church. Having spent my high school years in an all boys catholic school (as 1 of 2 protestants out of 600), I can tell you that the vast majority of the clergy were dedicated to turning out excellent well rounded, well educated citizens. You find bad apples in any population sample, including morons with nothing better to do than call themselves buttholes and blog posters

> you don't know shit about
> the catholic church.

I'm wounded by your hurtful remarks. In my defense, the "Shit about Catholics" file has been getting really fat lately. Only so many hours in a day, y'know?

Ireland: Bad apples. Boston: Bad apples. Los Angeles: Bad apples. And now, Miami: Bad apples.

It's a media problem, you say? Dang.

______


If one must be cruelly battered, it's fun to take a left hook for credulity in one comment and right cross for cynicism in the next.

I rest my case

And not being catholic I have no horse in the race. I was relaying my personal experience from within, please relay yours or stfu

But "buddy"…!

Crid,

You take the levels of facetiousness to new lows.

ronc,

Look up Indulgences and then get back to us.

Thanks.

All in good fun. A hero of mine once said "Facetiousness hardly ever translates onto print." But in blogdom, the stakes are so low while the atmosphere is so rich that one can't help but give it a go.

Pardon me while I over-indulge in my fantasy for ravaging Crid while he sips champagne from my boot.

Thank you.

(Put the earring back in, you stud, you.)

o.O

Haha, Flynne, I'll leave you to the ravaging, but I have to agree.. I'm glad he's back!

"Feminists, far and wide, practically strung me up for this:"

Emotions are so easy to arouse. I'm not surprised that this "money shot"

"By being honest about it, we help women make informed decisions about how much effort to put into their appearance—or accept the opportunity costs of going ungroomed"

was blocked by that complex emotional structure summarized by "It's not fair!"

Honesty just isn't popular, because it never tells you "You're the best!"

"I'm a 52-year-old man, OK? Boomer. Late boomer, anyway. And I am officially ashamed of my generation."

I'm right there with you, but I don't claim that status. I consider myself an X'er. We may be slackers, but at least we're not a bunch of sanctimonious pricks. Come join the party. I won't tell anyone.

Hey, Crid said, "feminism"!

But not nearly as well as he did in October '07, slamming someone claiming the burkha was an icon of religious freedom:

"But liberalism shames you. In embracing the Western resistance to nature's horrors --whether in the formerly uninhabitable sands of Dubai; in the life-extending, Ohio-educated surgical theaters of your hospitals; and perhaps most obviously in your pitiless maneuvers through modern energy markets-- you've cast your lot with modernity. The Middle East wasn't exactly forced to accept all these blessings into its cultures, but you did. I think you've made the right choice, and want to tell you something about what your future holds.

No single word describes a bigger piece of the richness of my life than "feminism." Aside from the warmth its brought to all my intimacy within family and without, feminism has brought half of humanity's brilliance into play in all our fields of endeavor.

Every western laboratory, church, factory and gymnasium has a whole class of competitive players demanding just as much fulfillment as their brothers enjoyed. But not only are they eager; their minds work differently in fundamental ways, so their tactics seem endlessly novel.

Their genius is now part of the refinement of every American enterprise. Every bolt on a car, every tube of toothpaste, every x-ray plate, every note of music, everything we make is a little better nowadays because women were contenders in the competition for market share. The the markets are improved, the vendors are improved, and everybody got richer by having to be better.

Specifically, our wealth is not dependent on a happenstance of geology which our own culture wouldn't have had the science to detect and exploit.

The mechanics of capitalist democracy churn so steadily that their grinding sometimes isn't perceptible, even to us. I'm certain that these workings are particularly mysterious to you. But you can trust me on this, because we have the shiny new border fence to prove it: No corner of humanity better represents the aspiration of the human heart the United States. In the contest between our culture and yours, we can't lose, and we won't lose.

But in the centuries ahead, you must never regard the ruthless destruction of your culture as dispassionate. I hate you, so this is going to be fun.

Though I think we have the apathy born of success... bravo!

Yeah... and it was pretty pathetic the next day when we figured about that the Arabian-named commenter wasn't some bitter, Jihad-minded Saudi prince or commoner, but rather a pathetically-grasping single mother from Saint Louis, presumably an inner-city figure reaching to religion (as so many do) for relief from the indignities of poverty.

And that was me, getting all macho-Republican on her ass... Hammering her with feminism's enriching bounty.

In my defense, I was still feeling twitchy about that whole "9/11" thing.

And the more I think about it, the more I think the embrace of Islam by a woman like that, however shallow and rhetorical, has much to do with the sunny (rather than sunni) idiocies of feminism.

Much of popular culture tells women that single motherhood can work out just fine. But if I remember correctly (and I don't have the heart to look her up again), this woman was trying to raise a young son in the inner city. She'd probably seen with her own eyes that the sisters-can-do-it-all platitudes were hollow, at least with respect to raising a decent young man with no father. Say what you want about it, Islam tells us how mothers, and fathers and children are expected to cohere in families. Those strictures aren't to our taste, for obvious reasons. But Islam doesn't pretend that family identities can flex broadly for everyone's fulfillment. And no thoughtful worldview ever will.

It may well be that the sarcastically anemic "feminism" described in the link above is what compels her to argue for chador as an expression of freedom. Could there be a sillier white-people-problem than middle-aged actresses who look too young when selling face cream?

One last point about the Brits, especially as considered by Dalrymple in the first link of the comments here.

I'm a very manly man... I like to watch sports on TV. Specifically, I like to watch the Formula One auto racing league. For people who don't know anything about it, F1 is like America's Nascar except:

• There are right hand turns

• There are hills

• There's a lot more money involved

• These expensive car designs allow each driver to fight his own war instead of dancing through a series of aerodynamically homosexual dyads, which the good-ol'-boys in stock cars seem to enjoy very dearly

• They race in front of topless women in the South of France instead of toothless women in Alabama

F1 is an international league. Last year they added a race in Korea and this year they're adding one in India. It's big. It has the largest scheduled-television audiences of anything in the world except the quadrennials, the Olympics and the World Cup.

The history of the sport is European. Much of the league is based in England, as is Bernie Ecclestone, the man who's supervised and attended the tremendous growth of the sport in recent decades. He produces the live feed from the sites of the races, and individual broadcasters send their own announcers to dress the coverage. The BBC's British team is phenomenally good, and has hundreds of millions of english-speaking viewers around the planet.

So, yesterday...

So, yesterday it was announced that starting next year the BBC would no longer carry all the F1 races... Half of them would be offered only by "pay-TV" broadcaster Sky TV. (It's helpful to note that Rupert Murdoch owns a piece of Sky, and has been wanting to buy more: Think about the phone-hacking scandal over there last week.)

Well, English-speaking fans are outraged that they'll have to shell out money for the Sky coverage. And you can read hundreds of complaints posted about this in the last few hours, and you'll notice something strange: The BBC is always referred to as "free TV".

But it isn't. If you want to WATCH the BBC, you have to pay for a license. And they check... They drive past peoples' homes with detection equipment, and if you're watching without a license, you get fined.

Got it? A huge state enterprise is committed to entertaining the populace in trivial ways. And when things go wrong, people forget that they have no choice.

That's how servility works.

I wish Amy's old commenter Tressider would come back and say goofy stuff some more. She was probably no more loony than BOTU when it came to things like airport searches: But it seemed like a part of her European heritage of submission, rather than BOTU's Kentucky hillbilly foolishness.

One of the weirdest and most telling comments I ever faced on this blog came as she attempted to challenge me:

> You're the one who sounds like an insufferable
> peon of the state employment agency here.

She was completely, black-of-night blind to the inversion of her insult. I tried to clear it up for her:

> the "peon" is the one with state power (and
> employment). The royal Euroweenie is
> mocking the state functionary to whom
> he's come running for help.

That's how servility works... For Brits, at least, contemporary government means you can't even remember who's signing the checks.

Will things be different for Americans? Consider again Radwaste's thoughtful advice in a nearby comment about health insurance... Offered even as he forgets to thank the taxpayers for providing his own secure care.

The Tea Partiers are making this a frightening weekend for those of us who create the wealth that makes it all go.

But that doesn't mean they're wrong.

The Hungarian Grand Prix starts in 11 hrs (5am PST), warmup materials here. Let's cheer for Ferrari just for the Hell of it

"Consider again Radwaste's thoughtful advice in a nearby comment about health insurance... Offered even as he forgets to thank the taxpayers for providing his own secure care."

Make some more things up, Crid. It's entertaining to measure how certain you are about things you don't know.

But your comment's not informative. It's fallacious.

Back atcha: why should anyone listen to you, when you're not a {insert something you're not - it's a long, long list}?

The first entry on the list is where the credibility comes from: Not sucking on the public teat.

(Pssssssst. Crid. Those Ferrari drivers have earrings.)

o.O

When you've got a neck like Fernando's, the weight of an earring is not a burden. (He was on the podium this morning.)

'S matter, crid, you can't do that?? Hehehehee!

o.O