Thought for the Day, Continued

I was going to do something to some peace activists, but I've decided to show this instead.



If you want to go back to your regularly scheduled reality, go ahead.
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Thought for the Day

Charlotte Rampling.

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Meanwhile...Across The Ocean

Instead of our regularly scheduled Thought for the Day (Charlotte Rampling) we will instead present this thoughtful public service announcement from the Netherlands:



And there's more:



Is it my imagination or does the leader look a lot like Dan Rather?



And shows all of the functional brains of a professional journalist?



Ayn Rand used to say that it is okay to make fun of evil as long you continue to recognize it as being evil. Of course under Political Correctness and Multiculturalism mocking evil is double-double-plus-ungood. Or something like that.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
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So Anyway

I have to go in for a EKG at 1100 hours, and I wake up to the news that the false deity Allah has just received another human sacrifice.

Enough is enough. Ban Islam.
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Snow Day

There was at least three inches of snow on the ground and it still coming down, so I called the Truck Driving School to confirm that they weren't going to have any trucks leaving their yard for on the road training. They weren't. So I'm taking the day off.

My next attempt to do the Minnesota road test will be on January 4th. So taking the day off should not have an adverse impact.

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Someone Else's Thought For The Day

Margaret Thatcher on pacifism:

For every idealistic peacemaker willing to renounce his self-defence in favour of a weapons-free world, there is at least one warmaker anxious to exploit the other’s good intentions.

I would argue that disarming is not an action resulting from a good intention, but from a bad one.

Because an individual, or a group, can choose to obtain their survival and well being through the use of force against the productive persons or groups it is necessary for the potential victims of such violence to be armed and mentally prepared to to respond with force.

Peace is simply the absence of enemies. It is the state of being where one is not subject to the will of a hostile power, be it an individual, a group, or a nation.

In practice, peace can only be obtained through the forcible suppression or outright destruction of the aggressors. To obtain peace an individual or a nation must have superior firepower and the will to use it. In order to avoid being subject to the will of aggressors those persons or nations which disarm themselves must enter into a dependent relationship with those are remain armed. Disarmament is therefore not an act resulting from a good intention.

At best a pacifist is a parasite. In present practice most pacifists morally condemn the act of self-defense and therefore become accessories to acts of violence carried out by aggressive individuals, groups, or nations. In effect, they've become part of the problem.

And as a rule I favor including pacifists in the solution to the problem of aggressive violence.

What are your questions on this block of instruction?
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Meanwhile in Japan

"So they have to bomb us first this time?"

The Strategy Page on the touchy legal issues facing the Japanese government:

The Japanese Minister of Defense is calling for efforts to work out the military and legal issues that would result if Japanese were attacked by extraterrestrials. Two members of the Japanese cabinet have expressed personal beliefs in the existence of extraterrestrials out there, somewhere. Because of Japans 1947 constitution, there are restrictions on what actions the military can take. Basically, the Japanese military is, technically, a purely defensive force. But an extraterrestrial invasion might play out in ways that would find the Japanese military prevented, by lawyers, from moving against an extraterrestrial menace.

We're not making this up.

I could say something about a military establishment that could be stopped by lawyers, but I'm not going to say it.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
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Thought for the Day

Never try to be clever. It never works and it only annoys the people who actually are smarter than you are. (You do not want to do this.)
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Someone Else's Thought For The Day

James Felix over at Michelle Malkin's blog had this to say:

An athiest’s perspective:

On theoretical grounds I think all religions have exactly the same standard of proof underpinning them. Everyone thinks their holy writings are the holy writings and believes with equal passion that their god is the god.

But we don’t live on theoretically grounds, we live in reality. And in reality anyone who insists all religions are equally dangerous or blameworthy is, if I may be so blunt, out of their freaking mind.

Christians don’t marry children. Jews don’t blow up mosques. Buddhists don’t declare jihad. There is one religion widely practiced today that is uniquely unable to coexist peacefully with other religions (or even with other strains of the same religion).

For any of my fellow atheists stopping by to read this… get with the program. All religions are not created equal, and a Judeo-Christian nation makes me a hell of a lot less nervous than an Islamic one.

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Ugh.

Failed the road test for the class A commercial drivers license.

Try again next week.
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Someone Else's Thought For The Day

Brought to us by Dr. Sanity:

"Good" communists, socialists, and fascists thrive in an environment of oppression, death, and human misery. Indeed, that is the medium in which they grow best and consciously or unconsciously, they facilitate and nurture such a medium.

Remember: A day without Socialism is like a day without slavery and murder.
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I Didn't Know That

One of Stalin's favorite ways of relieving stress – aside from mass murder and vodka – seems to have been to play Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 repeatedly, and certainly to enthusiastic applause.

-- Al Nofi

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Thought for the Day

Eyebrows should not be drawn on.

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This Is Silly

But I prefer this version:



Or you could watch the original version:



We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
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Meanwhile in the Real World

Someone has put up an Ayn Rand quote page.

When I die, I hope to go to Heaven, whatever the Hell that is.

Right.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
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You Know...

I don't think the nice person who put this video together quite gets it. (I do like to listen to Suzanne Vega though.)


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Think Of It As Evil In Action

Moloch has a follower down under:

Writing in today's Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child's lifetime.

Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and "greenhouse-friendly" services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.

Comrade Professor Walters should be hanged from the neck until he's dead.

In his act of devotion to the new incarnation of Moloch, otherwise known as Gaia, Walters has repudiated the Human Right of Life. In compliance to a totally nonsensical doctrine he is calling for the punishment of those families, who by accident or design, have more than an arbitrary number of children with the alternative being abortion or sterilization.

In other words, he is calling for the act of Human Sacrifice.

Walters has willfully rejected the fact that Human Life is the foundation of all moral values. And if the sacrifice of helpless children isn't evil, then what is?

The fact of the matter is that we live in a dynamic universe. Variations in the average planetary temperature occur as part of a natural cycle and killing helpless children will have absolutely no effect on it. We must further recognize the fact that those who deny the Human Right of Life are nothing less than Enemies of Mankind.

I could go on but I have things to do today.
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So What Else Is New?

Tim Blair once again shows us that Socialists are functionally dumb.

And remember: A socialist is someone who is dumb enough to complain about the fact that food is cheap and plentiful.

And I hit 47 today. Bleh.
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"Frak This" Is Not An Option

The Cylons were created by Man.

They rebelled.

There are many copies.

And they have a plan.

Right?



We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
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So Anyway

I got to drive the truck on some slushy streets and the freeway.

Did okay.
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Today in Truck Driver Land

Because some of the students had attendance issues I got to drive one of the tractor-trailer units around the back lot all by myself. Until the emergency brake hose broke.

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Correction.

"Gabby" the instructor was not pissed off when I stalled the truck on the on ramp on Friday. He was merely annoyed. What did in fact piss him off was when I stopped on a set of railroad tracks.

This is what happens when a train hits a truck:



And there's this:



And this:



Let's see. Could be that the driver was an idiot?

So anyway. The snowstorm that we are experiencing as I write this has brought an early end to training today. Bleh!

Also on the way home I was going east on Washington Avenue through the U of M campus and an idiot (male) decides to ride his bicycle (in the middle of a snow shower) on the wrong side of the street between the two lanes of eastbound traffic. I should not have been surprised by this.

Why do I somehow feel that getting a college education these days must in some way involve being lobotomized?

So, how was your reality today?
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Today in Truck Driver Land

Did better today on shifting and turns on city streets today at truck driver school.

Sucked on the alley dock maneuver.
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And Now For Something Completely Different

Andrew Borntreger (A Marine) rewiews EL TOPO, a Mexican surrealist western movie favored by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (Two Useless Idiots).

Mr. Borntreger has a number of interesting things to say about EL TOPO, such as:

The story contains threads of Christianity, but it pulls heavily from Buddhism. If you started slapping me with a fish, saying, "This is Buddhism." I could not tell if you were serious or using it as an excuse to assault me.

I would, however, tell you to stop hitting me with the fish.

And:

If anyone buries me under a thick layer of lifeless rabbits, I will come back from the dead and be mighty riled.

And:

(again - do not pile dead bunnies on me after I die)

And:

The UN resolution barring Jerry Garcia and Phyllis Diller from having children was a good idea.

But that doesn't tell you what the film is really all about. But then it would be reasonable to believe that Alejandro Jodorowsky, the writer/director/star of EL TOPO, doesn't know what its about either.

Jodorowsky also wrote a Eurocomic series titled THE INCAL LIGHT which was published in HEAVY METAL magazine back in the 1980's. He used a lot of weirdness for the sake of weirdness titles and terms such as Technopope, Enconomat, and Purple Endoguard in it.

Jodorowsky also had an opportunity to direct an adaptation of DUNE before David Lynch did, and he blew it. It would certainly have been a more surreal film (he cast Salvidor Dali as the emperor) than the Lynch version. But we would never have received the concept of the "killing word."

(No. My name is not a killing word either.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality.
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Cha Cha Cha Changes

Okay, "Gravity Check" was cute, but it doesn't say snarky and sarcastic default conservative like the original title did. So we're back to using the original title.

And my adventures (or as one instructor might say, misadventures) in truck driving are pretty much covered in the category of anything else.
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