Category Archives: Social Commentary

Bailout Questions

Here are some good ones. I suspect that the socialists will have a response to this one, though:

President-elect Obama claims that spending approximately $800 billion will create 3.675 million new jobs. That comes to $217,000 per job. This doesn’t sound like a very good value, especially with the national average salary around $40,000. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just mail each of these workers a $40,000 check?

The response will be that the jobs will last more than a year. But of course, they’d have to last at least five years to be equivalent.

Father Of The Year Award

…doesn’t go to Nizar Rayyan:

Surviving family members spoke to local Arab media and said that in the days before his death, Rayyan had repeatedly asked his children, “Who wants to die with me as a martyr?” The children would respond, “Yes, daddy, we all want to be with you alive or dead.”

Rayyan’s adult daughter, Wala, said even the younger children wished to die with their father. “If
In the days before his death, Rayyan has repeatedly asked his children, “Who wants to die with me as a martyr?”

One of Rayyan’s daughter-in-laws said she was offered the chance to die with the family. She stopped by the family’s large home in Jabaliya and was asked by Rayyan if she wished to die with him, his wives and their children. She agreed to die, but later left the building, shortly before the IAF strike.

She probably just had to go out and pick up some milk, or something.

Given their hostility to Christianity, it’s funny that you rarely hear the left criticize this kind of violent religious nutbaggery.

Shut Up And Sing

Jay Norlinger has an ugly and depressing compendium of artists imposing their politics on their audiences.

I have to confess that I, too, have thusly sinned (though I think in a much milder manner). At the Space Access Conference last March, prefatory to giving a brief talk on propellant depots (with a hundred-and-one-degree fever, though I’m not sure that’s an excuse or that I wouldn’t have done it at normal temp) I made a brief (and oblique — probably only a few got it) joke about Hillary “dodging sniper fire” in Bosnia, which had been in the news recently. It wasn’t at all in the same class as Nordlinger’s examples, but it was probably inappropriate. It was in no way germane to the topic of discussion, and I can see in retrospect how some Hillary! supporters in the audience could have been offended, if they got it. For that I apologize here.

I’m glad to live in a country in which these artists can engage in such boorish behavior, but I’m glad also that we live in one in which we can use our own free-speech rights to point it out (even in real time), with admonishments, boos, or even voting with our feet. If more did so, perhaps the phenomenon would at least be tamped down. It’s probably hopeless, though, when you live in New York, or Ann Arbor, in which these cretins feel safe in their cocoon to behave in this manner.

Update a few minutes later]

This seems related somehow — fighting back against the new Hollywood Blacklist. Andrew Breitbart explains what he’s trying to accomplish. Roger Simon has further thoughts.

On Shaving

Meditations from Lileks:

I’m just tired of making the sink look like a scene from Hellraiser.

I know it’s my fault; I should prep the beard, swaddle my puss with scalding towels, use better cream, better razors. I was perfectly happy with the multi-blade razor that vibrated like it was full of bees; either on or off it did the trick, more or less, but I began to balk at laying out a double sawbuck for four refills, and slunk back to disposables. Didn’t get the store brands, because those things are like shaving with a garden rake. I wasn’t going to go for the two-blades; no man likes to think his beard can be tamed with a mere two blades, not when science is working as we speak on a razor with more blades than a Chinese acrobat pyramid has levels. Three blades seemed right, with a “lubricating strip” that deposited a stratum of imaginary soothing-agents on your face. The first shave was always good, unless you cut yourself making a turn on the jaw, in which case you had to have the razor put down immediately. Once they go rogue, taste blood, they’re useless. I usually managed to cut myself once a week, though – the side of the lip, or one of those absolutely unstanchable disasters on the top of the philtrum, or around the chin-dimple hillocks. Once you’ve opened a new account, so to speak, you’ve no choice but to scrape it open the next day, unless you shave around it and cultivate a small plot of beard to go with the conspicuous blot of clotted blood. If you have two going at once, well, you look like you shaved by dragging an angry parakeet over your face.

One of the reasons I have a mustache is to avoid the philtrum.

As an added bonus, Jack The Ripper.