Archive for August, 2010
"Cairo Time" is actually worth your time
Yesterday, we ran a piece about the Julie Roberts’ turkey “Eat, Sleep, Fart”, or whatever it’s called, which is one of the worst movies we’ve seen in a while. Claire McCaskill’s super-8 vacation home movies from the early 80s would be more enjoyable to sit through (though, they’d probably involve more farts, knowing ClaireBear…or, as she calls them, “uh-ohs”).
Our friend Zara here in Chicago read our take on the flick and asked us if we wanted to see “Cairo Time” with her at Landmark Century just south of Boystown, and we jumped at the chance because (1) Zara is beyond awesome, (2) it involved meeting her up in Andersonville at her apartment first and having dinner at Reza’s, which we love, and (3) determining if all Hollywood travel movies are by default styled squarely in the “spaghetti harvesting unicorn riding” meme.
Frankly, we didn’t expect much from “Cairo Time”, despite having both Patricia Clarkson and Dr. Bashir from Deep Space Nine in it. We enjoy both of these people in almost everything they do. Clarkson plays such earthy, interesting characters and that man, whatever his name is, was very good pretending to be in outer space (some times he turns up as a terrorist in various things, and he was the sorta-president of kind-of Iran in the last season of 24, we think).
We thought the movie would be like “Eat, Sleep, Fart”, and prattle on about how terrible America is, and how wonderful filthy places far away are, crammed full of people begging, stealing, and murdering, with terrible plutocratic governments bleeding their people dry. Surprisingly, this was not the case for “Cairo Time”.
We’re not going to talk AT ALL about the plot, though there would have to be something wrong with you if you couldn’t figure out it’s about romance in the capital of Egypt. Because it’s not a mainstream Hollywood movie, the pacing was slow, and was really a character study of the woman Clarkson played, as she was separated from her husband by various circumstances and left on her own in Cairo to explore.
“Exploration” was an overindulged, narcissistic theme of “Eat, Sleep, Fart”, but this was not “explore” in the sense of “finding yourself”. It was “exploring” in the sense of being a stranger in a strange land and taking in the overwhelmingly alien culture around you.
That’s what we love most about travel, though we tend to focus on exploring the greatness that is the United States. We love dropping into a new part of the country, like we did in 27 states during the 2008 campaign, and finding all the local differences, learning how people do things, and seeing what novel treats and surprises they had to offer. In going to all these places, we learned a lot about our fellow Americans, but even more so about ourselves. The same was true for Clarkson in this movie, as she found herself confronted by the bluntness of Egypt.
Long gone are the charms and wonders of the pharaohs, and the film didn’t shy away from the oppressiveness, misogyny, and general craziness of Islam. In one of the first moments in the film, Clarkson is sweltering in a car zooming through the city, and she’s wearing a light button-down shirt and shorts, with her long blond hair blowing in the breeze out the window. The car passes countless women wrapped up in sheets and towels like mummies, wearing the Muslim burquas and hajibs and other instruments of textile torture. They’re all sweating profusely, looking like they are going to pass out from heatstroke, while the men around them galavant around in shorts, tank tops, and whatever they want to wear. Clarkson asks why the women have to be wrapped up like that, and her Muslim driver just shrugs and says, “They’re used to it. They like it”.
We’ve always wondered what it’s like to be a young Muslim girl, which are allowed to run around wearing normal, sensible things in the heat, who reaches the age of maturity and thus needs to be mummified according to these barbarians. Is it horrifying for these girls to have to walk around under the baking sun wrapped up in black wool? How badly does everyone smell after sweating all day like this? What sadistic man dreamed up this nonsense?
Later in the film, the reason for the mummy wrappings is made clear as Clarkson goes out for a stroll in Cairo, looking in shop windows, as a group of Muslim men gathers behind her, intent on raping her. The men are in their early 20s and behave like a pack of dogs. They rush her, try biting and licking her, and ultimately force her into a shop where a kindly old man chases them away and lets Clarkson regroup and collect herself before heading back to her hotel. The excuse for their behavior, like with everything related to Islam, is that these animals can’t control themselves so it is a woman’s fault for being beautiful and having blond hair that makes them all go crazy.
When Clarkson is told this, in a cafe where men sit around all day, not working, “doing nothing” (as so idolized in the Julia Roberts snoozefest), she corrects the man speaking by saying she’s too old to be beautiful, and that she’s not had young men come after her like that in a very long time. “But you are a woman, this is natural,” is the response given, with the sick implication that it doesn’t matter if a woman is 15 or 85, if she’s walking around Cairo there’s a very good chance a mob of young men will rape her, because anything bipedal with a vagina and a pulse is fair game for sexual violation whenever the urge arises in a mob of unemployed, Muslim thugs.
“They just can’t control themselves and aren’t expected to” is the order of the day.
As people with penises we have to just note, this is not the case. A penis can be a magical and talented thing, but it never, ever has the anatomic ability to take control of a body. The heart may want what it wants, but the penis gets what it gets, and only when the brain tells it to go somewhere or do something. So all of this Lefty hooey about Muslims not having the ability to control their sexual urges or having any accountability for what they do to women is just ridiculous.
This misogynistic attitude towards women is carried out through the rest of the film, with Muslims treating women more or less as things, lower than favored pets but a little higher than wheelbarrows or ice cream machines because at least women can be used for rape, which appears to be something of an intramural sport on the streets of Cairo.
Clarkson is enchanted by the city, and how exotic it is, though, so she doesn’t spend too much time worried about the near-sexual assault. She goes on a boat ride, sees the pyramids, has a picnic with British elitists that could have been served in 1890, takes a train ride, and witnesses a traditional Egyptian wedding (where, oddly, the bride and bride’s mother are dressed as prostitutes and forced to belly dance for all the men in attendance).
But, through it all Clarkson never has that “America’s bad, foreign places are good” attitude that Julia Roberts and so many on the Left have. She explores Cairo, tries to find a way to negotiate its dangers, and lets her imagination run wild with the exoticism of the place…but she never knocks America, and consistently reaffirms that things are different back in the States, and that difference is not a bad thing.
Her daughter in the film just graduated college, lives alone, and is traveling by herself on a break while looking for a job. The Muslims are horrified by this, because they believe that daughter should be wrapped up in sheets somewhere, maybe in the laundry room, locked up in chains until a man can decide what he wants to do with her. Similar control is demanded of Clarkson’s son, who eloped, and the Muslims say he should be disowned and punished, but Clarkson says he needs to be who he is and he’s not under her control anymore. That’s a concept Islam doesn’t seem to understand, that human beings have inherent freedom hard-wired into them, and that at the age of maturity ALL people, regardless of their gender, have the ability to set their own courses and live their own lives.
Fat, gross, dirty men hanging out in coffee shops plotting their next rape shouldn’t be able to keep daughters and wives wrapped up in walking ovens waiting outside in the hot sun, or slaving at home to cook, clean, and prepare for the triumphant return home of these Muslim men.
That’s just ridiculous, and it’s heart-breaking these women allow themselves to be treated this way, in any country. It’s terrifying to think of Islam wanting to bring this nonsense, and Sharia law, to our shores, the way it’s doing in parts of Europe. This is not a culture or society to emulate in any way, shape, or form.
But, the movie “Cairo Time” felt like taking a little trip to Egypt and bearing witness to a lot of this madness, with glimpses of the city and ancient ruins as well.
We left sad to see how little of pharaohic Egypt is really left, and how much Islam dominates a country we’ve always thought it would be interesting to visit. But, instead, we’d rather just go to the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas or visit the Field Museum here in Chicago where they have a great Egyptian exhibit. Maybe we’ll watch clips from “The Ten Commandments” or Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time” video on YouTube if we ever need a major Egyptian fix. The Bangles will do on 80s Request Night at Sidetracks as well.
Our friend Zara’s actually been to Egypt, and she said the Nile smells like a sewer and the men are even worse than what was shown in the film. When she went, she was with her brothers and father AND a hired Egyptian guide who carried a club like police here used in old-timey days. And the guide used the club on some of these street thugs on more than one occasion, when they leered too threateningly at Zara or her mother.
“That movie was all the Egypt I ever need again,” she said. “I remember the exotic nature of the place, but thankfully I couldn’t smell it, and I didn’t need to have a 300lb man with me ready to beat off guys who wanted to rape me. So, for $9, I had a better time than I did on that $2,000 vacation”.
That’s money well spent, then, in our book.
How to end a culture war and take a hammer away from the state media: SPOUSAL RIGHTS, ESPOUSEMENT, ESPOUSAL CEREMONY edition
Yesterday, we asked your input on a plan we have to take a heavy hammer away from the state-media and Left in general, and resolve a culture war Democrats use to divide Americans (while keeping the gay community in lockstep control).
“Gay marriage” is a term designed by the Left to be devisive.
It’s classic Alinsky strategy, to define, name, and project an issue of contention that has no hope of resolution just to make political hay for the Left.
In this case, it’s a wedge that’s used to keep hardworking gays from voting conservative in their economic best interests because Democrats need Republicans, and conservatives in general, to be depicted as perpetual villains (lest gays realize voting Democrat only means voting for higher taxes, and to support all of Democrats’ various corrupt pet projects, of which gays never benefit).
We knew a term could exist that would carry the meaning of “gay marriage” but removed the knee-jerk, negative cultural, emotional, and religious response those two words, pushed together, carry.
Yesterday, longtime reader (and friend) Kathleen hit a home run with SPOUSAL RIGHTS instead of “gay marriage”, with the terms “espousement”, “espousal ceremony”, and “spouse” following in logical fashion to cover the variations of the word needed for normal conversation on the topic.
Such as:
“Hey, did you hear that Jason and Jack are going to do it, they’re getting espoused? I got invited to the espousal ceremony that’s going to follow all of the legal mumbo jumbo they need to do to become officially espoused. First the guys are sitting down with a lawyer to cover all of the contractual bases and make sure they have their living wills and all that to give them all rights over each other, so that Jack’s family (who are jackasses, ironically enough) can’t prohibit Jason from making life decisions for Jack or taking away any of their property if Jack gets sick (because Jack’s mother would totally do that). Then, they’re going to Iowa to have a civil union, which is what everyone essentially gets if they are the age of consent and have filled out the commitment paperwork to be legally recognized as a pair. After all this is done, then Jason and Jack are having their espousal ceremony on the rooftop garden of the Center on Halsted here in Boystown, and I’m sure it’s going to be a big party. They’re going to have the Hearty Boys cater, and Cyon Flare is going to host it, and they’re getting Kylie to peform the reception. And then after they are officially spouses, they are going to honeymoon in Bora Bora, isn’t that just great?”.
Anything new is awkward at first.
But, we really think “espousement”, “spousal rights”, and “spouse” could catch-on. Especially if conservatives got smart and ran with this.
Sometimes, we realize there is a disconnect between the way conservatives think, and how we operate. Some of you out there don’t see the forest for the trees in a lot of our action items or strategy. Our brains are wired a little differently, we guess, and conservatives don’t often see the real damage they can do to Democrats by taking their favorite weapons away.
It’s like conservatives either want to pretend those weapons don’t exist, and be perpetually surprised by them, for some sick reason…or they prefer to carry shields they believe have weathered those weapons well enough in the past, so they might as well just keep doing those same things. Worked last time!
That’s why we have a 30 year, endless, status quo with a lot of this garbage…and the Left is happy to never go in for the final kill on any of it because having these wedge issues keeps the Left in business. The state-media, being lazy, isn’t about to nudge any of this towards resolution because these stories are so easy for them to write, in their sleep. “Republicans oppose gay marriage some more; Democrats outraged; Gay Community marches in protest”. That could have been written in 1984. 1994. 2004. But hopefully not in 2014.
TAKE THE DAMN WEAPON AWAY FROM THESE NUTTERS.
See what happens if you disarm this one cultural war.
What you don’t realize is just how much the Democrat Party depends on this divisiveness for its existence. It’s the ONLY THING that’s keeping gays under Democrat control, because it’s an issue that makes conservatives seem irrational and hateful, when we know for a fact they are not.
The issue boils down to the fact that for almost every other juncture in life there is a state event followed by a religious event, with clear lines of demarcation between the two…except for “marriage”:
(1) BIRTH…state issue birth certificate, then religious people have a baptism or blessing
(2) MATURITY…state requires men to register with Selective Service, religious have confirmation, mitzvahs, and other ceremonies for manhood/womanhood
(3) DEATH…state issues death certificate, while religious people have Last Rites of some kind…state requires burial/internment/disposal of remains while religous people have funerals
(4) MARRIAGE…the only word used to describe state and religious events, which are not equal and the same in any way shape or form…it’s like using the term “apples” to describe lemons and cantaloups too. It’s ridiculous, and the pure root of the culture war problems.
“Marriage” is a religious sacrament.
“Espousement” is what the state is doing when it legally joins two people in the contractural relationship it’s setting up with all the state’s paperwork.
The state should not be issuing “marriage licenses” or be in the “marriage” business with anything. That should be reserved for houses of God, whatever shape or form they come into .
If two people want to contracturally commit to spousehood together, whereby the state will stand behind their rights to make decisions for each other at the exclusive of all others, and give those two legal protections in terms of property ownership and financial matters, then the state needs to call that union between two consenting, legal-aged adults what it is: a contractural espousement.
“Marriage” then would follow for those who belong to churches that will peform “marriage”, just as the state issues its birth certificate for a baby and the churches then go on to perform their baptisms.
No state should baptize or marry anyone.
Because we’ve lacked clear terminology on this, and have allowed the word “marriage” to have two separate meanings, being used in two unequal arenas, we’ve let the word become a false synonym. And therein rests the problem, and the avenue from which Democrats have waged a cultural war for their own personal benefit for well on 30 years now.
It’s time to take the weapon away…by being creative in getting the “spousal rights” and “espousement” verbiage out there.
And if you think Americans can’t change the terms they use and the way they speak about certain topics, just look at the history of any number of words. Black people have been called “coloreds”, “negroes”, “blacks”, “nubians”, and “African-Americans” depending on the flavor of the day (excluding insensitive pejoratives, of which there were many as well). Gays have been called “homosexuals”, “queers”, “same-sex orienteds”, and “faggots” (and are still called that here in the Illinois GOP by state chair Pat Brady). When the politically-correct Left wants to rename a group to serve a purpose, they just do it.
Conservatives need to do the same damn thing.
The way to beat Democrats is by learning to play their games, then getting better at it than they are.
It really is as simple as this, folks.
QUESTION: Have you ever seen a graphic showing EVERY building damaged in the Muslim 9/11 attacks?
One of the more absurd things Democrats have done in the last few weeks is attempt to claim that the building Muslims want to tear down to build their Ground Zero Victory Mosque really isn’t “at Ground Zero”, but “two blocks away”.
They want to define “Ground Zero” as nothing more than the exact footprints of the Twin Towers (and possibly the Marriott hotel that was also leveled that day).
But, MANY buildings were damaged when Muslims slammed jetliners into the World Trade Center, murdering thousands, including a personal friend of ours.
Several buildings collapsed that horrible day, when Islam smiled in Mecca and Medina and Muslims danced in the streets of the Middle East, celebrating their great “victory” (of which this mosque is meant to commemorate, in accordance with the Koran, which orders the creation of these conquest monuments wherever Islam scores “victories” against its enemies).
Have you ever seen a graphic that depicts ALL of the property damage from the 9/11 assault on New York City?
THAT is the true footprint of Ground Zero. Every last square inch of ground that includes any building that filed an insurance claim related to September 11th.
The property Cordoba House bought to build the Ground Zero Victory Mosque was chosen specifically by the Muslims involved because a piece of the landing gear from one of the hijacked planes smashed through the Towers and crashed through the roof of what had been a Burlington Coat Factory. This was instrumental in the site selection, because the Muslims behind this conquest monument required the property involved to have been damaged by the attacks, and thus touched by Allah. In accordance with tradition, these conquest monuments must be built upon land that was scarred in battle…and this Burlington Coat Factory fit the bill.
It is Ground Zero, because it was damaged directly by the assault.
We really need a graphic to depict exactly how large Ground Zero is and what it encompasses.
This is needed to refudiate the claims the Left is making that this Victory Mosque is really “two blocks away”. You betcha.
We will not allow the Left to get away with its Alinsky trickery. Not this time (and hopefully not ever again).
We’d also like to explore the logic of their claims that Ground Zero is just the footprint of the Twin Towers themselves, and not an inch more.
This give us all sorts of ideas for mischief against Democrat office-holders.
If Ground Zero is just the imprint of those two buildings — and not an inch more — than the homes all Democrat office-holders reside in are now to be defined as EXACTLY the footprint of their buildings themselves — and not an inch more — with their lawns, backyards, gardens, swimming pools, etc. not being considered part of their residence any longer.
Therefore, all of that land is now public park space, and the nation is invited to come and tailgate all over those lush, verdant lawns and skinny dip at their leisure in all of that gorgeous chlorinated water.
Like roses? Go take Claire McCaskill’s. She can’t do anything about it, see, because if Ground Zero is just the imprint of the Twin Towers, then McCaskill’s mansion is just the actual outline of the main residence itself, leaving her gardens to you.
If this thinking is what’s being applied to aid Muslims in building this abomination, it should be applied to whatever you want to do to Dick Durbin’s house, or to the former prostitution den that Barney Frank lives in.
Remember when Justice Souter pushed the Supreme Court decision strengthening the powers of eminent domain, and then a lawsuit was filed to attempt to seize his personal estate under eminent domain and turn it into a bed and breakfast?
That sure got Souter’s attention.
Something similar needs to be done to every Democrat claiming Ground Zero is no more than the footprint of the Twin Towers themselves.
It would surely get their attention as well.
QUESTION: Does the Hand of Loki exist, and is it guiding Democrats towards complete and utter ruin?
Before the Internet, in the 80s and 90s, there supposedly existed a clandestine organization here in the United States called “The Hand of Loki”.
Through the years, we’ve had a few friends who’ve claimed to know someone who was a part of it. Panda swears his mother, Lily, was an operative, though it’s hard for us to believe this stuff isn’t just urban legend and fantasy.
The Hand of Loki was like the old TV show “The Equalizer”, and it was rumored to be composed of thousands of people across the United States (and maybe even internationally) who would help even the odds and tip the scales against people identified as “bad” in one way or the other. Members of the Hand were people involved in credit reporting, tax collection, financial institutions, the post office, and anything with computers (back in the day when not everyone could get on the Internet and look up information).
If, for instance, a battered wife came on the Hand’s radar, its members would see to it that her abuser’s credit card payments mysteriously never got credited to the right accounts. Or, his truck would mistakenly be tagged for repossession. In error, collection calls would be made to his work, his parents’ home, and any other place that would embarrass the man. The Hand of Loki would do everything it could to drive this person crazy, by making anything that could go wrong invariably go wrong for him in the course of a day.
It consisted of a lot of “losing paperwork” and mistakenly typing the wrong information here and there, with every individual move easily explained as “operator error”, but with each mistake being a finger joining other Loki acts as a closed, punching, fist.
Another example, by someone who was briefly a Hand operative, was the pair of jackasses who demanded their subscription theater seats moved…and were quite nasty about it in a letter they wrote to the theater, saying the worst things imaginable about their neighbors. Since subscription seats mean you have to sit next to the same people for all the shows in the series, these individuals were upset the people who sat immediately to their left ate too much candy during the shows, were “ignorant”, and talked too much.
Every year, when renewing seats, subcribers had the option of being moved forward if space was available and other previous subscribers chose not to renew. A subscriber’s request to move forward could never be denied, and the person data processing that request had to move them to the best seats available at the time, no matter how nasty the people were.
So, the two complainers indeed got moved forward to new seats that were four rows closer to the stage, dead center…what could easily be called the best seats in the house.
BUT, wouldn’t you know it, the people who sat on either side of these complainers ALSO wanted to move closer, so the data processor waited until the next morning and then moved both of those couples forward four rows too…so essentially the whole row of six seats just shifted forward, with all neighbors left intact.
The Hand of Loki never got to see the end result of its mischief, and the person operating that computer never saw the look on that couple’s face when they realized they were still seated next to all of their old neighbors from last season, but this particular brand of mischief apparently happens all the time.
Maybe it’s no longer organized into a Hand of Loki…or maybe the Hand is at work in other ways these days, now that the Internet has given access to computers to everyone.
Sometimes, we really believe something like the Hand exists and is working against the Left, as much as the Left seems to use all of these sorts of tricks against the American people.
The Ground Zero Victory Mosque and the wake-up call it’s giving regular, typically non-political people, could very well prove to be one of the defining moments in our lives…and the Left never saw it coming, and still doesn’t realize the inescapable trap it finds itself in.
Frankly, we’ve been waiting for something like this to happen for years, and sometimes can’t believe America’s luck that it’s FINALLY here…an event that exposes the Left for what it really is, so nakedly and plainly, that Democrats have an Emperor’s New Clothes moment and are revealed for exactly who and WHAT they really are. It’s the lizards on V having their masks ripped off, without realizing they’ve been exposed, and not knowing it will take generations for them to fool the public again.
At every step along the way in handling the fallout from Islami’s push to build a conquest monument at Ground Zero, Democrats have made the wrong moves and consistently side against the American people, proving how out of touch they are.
And not just Democrats in elected office, but Democrats in our state-run media too.
All of these professional elite, ground-thinking, America-hating Leftists are united in pushing for this Ground Zero Victory Mosque. They are squarely at odds with over 70% of the American public. They are fracturing Democrats’ own support along the traditional Democrat voting block lines, because black voters, Hispanic voters, gay voters, and women voters may be successfully played against each other or otherwise manipulated by the DNC on a regular basis…but when it comes to 9/11, and the thought of a Victory Mosque being built there, a good many of these typically blind-party voting Dems are waking up to the reality that the party is not what they thought it was.
Meanwhile, someone or something is telling Democrats with microphones to double and triple down on their stances, to entrench themselves, and to attack those patriotic Americans who are standing up to Islam and refusing to allow a symbol of conquest to be built on ground where Muslims murdered so many Americans not even ten years ago.
It feels like a Hand of Loki at work, playing the Left for fools.
Like an Iago whispering into their ears, pumping up their emotions, and sending them off to slaughter in the name of the Cult of Liberalism.
If feels like someone or something is intentionally maneuvering Democrats to throw themselves off a massive cliff, from which we see no chance of salvation.
It’s a beautiful thing, really, this perfect storm that’s emerged.
Not only are Democrats proving themselves to be out of touch with reality and American zeitgeist at a time when they were already going to suffer major losses in the midterm elections, but Obama’s losing the personal approval he has long enjoyed because this issue highlights his otherness, his foreign-ness, his lack of all empathy with the American experience. It reveals him to be the reptillian, Muslim-favoring, cold, anti-American-exceptionalist that he really is. And Americans don’t like this and never will.
The only thing the Left knows how to do is lash out and attack anyone that opposes it, but in this instance, with Americans paying attention and watching an emotional issue closely, it is EXACTLY the wrong strategy to take. This puts Democrats in the position of attacking 9/11 survivors and the families of victims. It’s punching widows and orphans in the face on live television, and every time Democrats do it, they make themselves seem “other”, out of touch, CRAZED.
Just at the perfect time for Americans to realize what a mistake they made by sending people with (D) after their names to Washington.
At precisely the moment when a massive movement of people have formed under the Tea Party banner to rebel against dictatorial Washington and a president who believes himself to be some sort of god who knows better than voters what’s best for them.
Seriously, if there isn’t some organization in place that’s deliberately goading Democrats into committing hari kari like this on a national scale, then this all is very much proof of a living God who loves America and is delivering unto us a generational sweep of Leftists from office.
Maybe it’s a little bit of both.
Whatever it is, we’ll take it…and as many more hands in this mix as we can get.
QUESTION: What would happen if the government taxed companies that outsourced employees? Would we bring those jobs back to the States?
Here’s a question for you: what would happen if the government taxed companies that outsourced employees, so that it removed the financial advantage of sending all those jobs to India?
Would that force these businesses to bring these jobs back to the United States?
In recent years, many customer service and telemarketing jobs have been shipped over to India…making it difficult for anyone wanting to change plane reservations, get computer support, or handle banking issues to do so by speaking with an actual American on the other line. Fifteen years ago, picking up a phone to call United Airlines or Chase bank would have sent your call down to Tennessee or Texas. Now, it’s going to somewhere unpronounceable where you will speak to “Judy” or “John” who are most certainly not “Judy” or “John” in their native language.
We have no beef against India, but we like talking to people in Tennessee and Texas, and want those jobs to stay here in the United States.
With Democrats so in love with taxing anything that moves, we started wondering if maybe there was an instance where taxing a company for doing something could actually result in MORE American jobs, and not the usual job cuts that result from increased tax rates.
The reason companies are outsourcing these customer service jobs to India is because some genius in a boardroom somewhere started the India Call Center programs to add more profits to the portfolio, to make stockholders happy. Apparently, people in India make pennies on the dollar. One report we saw on TV had a call center operator making $10 a week to answer calls from Americans. We’re not sure if every center pays that low, but this one did.
If these companies are doing business in the United States, and their customers are Americans, then this outsourcing may be adding plenty of profits to the company — but what about all those payroll taxes that a non-outsourcing competitor must be paying?
A minimum wage job in the US would be paying $300 or so a week, versus that $10 for an Indian outsourced worker.
What if the government taxed outsourcing companies $300 a week for each employee it has overseas? Meanwhile, companies that don’t outsource will not have to pay any outsourcing fees.
Would this encourage businesses to keep their employees at home, in the US, where we think they belong?
Why can’t ruined industrial towns like Cleveland, Detroit, or Pittsburgh be transformed into call centers and customer service hubs. If companies managed to build such centers in India, why can’t they do it in the rotting shells of our urban centers?
Public high schools could offer vocational training for students to pursue steady jobs in the customer service industry — instead of deluding themselves into believing that every student in the system should be college-bound, where a college degree might not be the best fit for all of them.
It would be great to find a way to keep MANUFACTURING jobs here in the States, too, because the loss of industry and manufacturing in this country actually keeps us up at night. It’s terrifying, really, to live in a country that’s daily losing its ability to MAKE THINGS.
We need these trades people — but without their unions. The unions sure don’t seem to be any good at keeping these jobs in the country, and only seem to parasitically exist to choke away more jobs, since companies don’t want to deal with these corrupt unions and the Leftist Democrats who run them.
This is a complicated issue, we know, but we’d like you to weigh in on all of this.
How do we bring outsourced jobs back home?
How do we spur a renaissance of manufacturing and industry in this country?
How do we break the backs of the unions and eliminate them as much as possible?
Tuesday Open Thread: August 24th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Tuesday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
Are typically non-political people you know talking about the Ground Zero Victory Mosque?
Spaghetti harvesting unicorn riding with Julia Roberts isn't what it's cracked up to be
Julia Roberts is a beautiful idiot.
There, we said it.
The woman is gorgeous, and has a laugh like vaporized gold. We adore it, and years ago one of us had the chance to spend a little time with her here in Chicago, when he was ghost writing cook books for a chic restaurant and gave the pretty woman a tour of the wine cellar. She had an assistant or two with her, and knew absolutely nothing about wine, but cracked a lot of jokes that weren’t terribly funny (though her assistants HOWLED with laughter and slapped themselves on the knees repeatedly, like in a bad high school play) in a way that was charming, actually. There she was, on private time, away from an audience and she still felt the need to be entertaining and charming.
That was endearing. We can’t imagine what life must be like for someone like her, always having strangers come up to her and say things, good or bad, to her face, comment on her weight, what she’s wearing, etc. The line between the private and the personal blurred for her decades ago, and she’s never going to get that old life back. That’s a horrifying thought for us…and we certainly never want to live in a world of yes-men who howl with laughter at things that aren’t funny. That’s how people in the public eye go nuts, and make disastrous mistakes, because those around them keep telling them what a style-setting, fashion icon they are (part of Michelle Antoinette’s problem currently).
But, Julia Roberts is a far-Lefty, and has made numerous asinine comments about things she has absolutely no real knowledge of…things she knows less about than wine (“This is the stuff I like to drink. Lookit how big those bottles are! I could drown in that!” HA HA HA HA HA HA).
So, our opinion of her is impacted by that…but it doesn’t usually keep us from seeing her movies, like the recently opened Eat, Pray, Love (which Panda calls “Eat, Sleep, Forget”).
The movie’s terrible, but it’s actually worth seeing on Netflix (for free) sometime in the future for a few things:
(1) It’s a classic, unintended illustration of something we’ve long called “spaghetti harvesting, unicorn riding”, which is an idiom Robby’s sister Ann-Louise coined in her neverending phase of “finding herself”. A few years ago, Ann-Louise had just broken up with another of her too-old lovers (this one a Miami plastic surgeon originally from Sweden whom we all nicknamed “Dr. Old”, or “Ramses the Decrepit” informally), and didn’t know if she wanted to continue trying to possibly be an actress while only getting cast in low-budget Albanian horror movies (the whole “Scaredy Cats” series, which all of 12 people have seen). So, her big plan was to borrow a small fortune from her mother and father and go to Italy for “a year or two” and take cooking classes, and possibly paint or “model in Milan”.
It was the damn stupidest thing any of us had ever heard, and her brother Robby went back and forth with her for weeks trying to get her to see how ridiculous this was. “But I never got to do a study abroad,” Ann-Louise howled, and Robby reminded her she spent her junior year of college in Moscow. She also did the Semester-at-Sea cruise one summer, and spent the gap between high school graduation and college on a study program in Vatican City (because her mother Patricia thought that would somehow fix her…as John Paul the Great was still alive at the time, and if anyone was up to the job, it was JPII).
“Those didn’t count because Russia is cold and everyone was so mean, and then that boat was just a cruise and it smelled, and then that other thing was with all those nuns and I had to leave when they caught me with that Swiss Guard, who I think they deported. So I never did a real study abroad and I want to because I deserve it”.
Why she deserved this, none of us have ever known. The television and pop culture tell her these things, apparently, and she parrots it back. “I want a study abroad like on TV and I want to live in Italy and know what life is about”.
We imagined her, in her fantasy world, riding unicorns to the spaghetti forest where she would learn how the native Italians used long, whisky pitchforks to capture the fresh, warm, robust pasta and bring it down into the large wicker baskets the old village women used to collect what all the sweaty, young men had harvested that day. Ann-Louise would watch from the saddle of her unicorn, marveling at all the hard work that went into gathering all the locally-grown, organic pasta she would later eat at dinner with all manner of sauces that had magically bubbled out of the ground. “I want to find a river of alfredo sauce,” she’d tell one of the villagers. “Because I deserve it, and I want it, and it should be mine”.
Ultimately, Ann-Louise never went to Italy to harvest spaghetti and unicorn ride, because she was cast in an off-off-off Broadway revamp of “Jennifer Slept Here” (which she’s still trying to get made into a movie, or even a new TV series) that never made it out of previews, but did manage to put her focus back on acting and made her forget about her lack of a REAL non-Russian, non-cruise ship, non-pontif-related study abroad.
In Eat, Sleep, Forget, Julia Roberts is pretty much playing Ann-Louise (which is funny because when casting Ann-Louise in anything, we’d go with Missy Pyle, or Joan Van Ark if the lighting’s good enough). She’s a spoiled travel writer who gets to expense any vacation she wants, including pillaging of the minibar (but just not the way Congressman Aaron Schock does that here in Boystown). Her husband is a man-child who decides to have a different career every month, because he always wanted to be a fireman, an astronaut, a cowboy, a teacher, or a professional basketball star. Because he was seemingly raised in the late-70s/early-80s and went to what we assume is a Leftist-run public school, the man-child is a spaghetti-harvesting-unicorn-rider too. But, two of these perpetual children evidently can’t coexist in a marriage, so Roberts divorces him and decides to spend a year eating in Italy, pretending she’s in a cult in India, and we have no idea what she was up to in Indonesia.
The movie is like watching really bad home movies taken by someone you don’t especially like, who never does anything all that interesting. The best part of the whole thing, in this regard, is a trip Roberts takes to Venice or Naples or It Doesn’t Much Matter and she and a Swedish girl who’s also “finding herself” discover that if they eat too much pizza, they must buy new jeans so that they can eat more pizza. The two of them bond together over this, and there’s a big shopping montage that should have been set to Roy Orbison, because that would have made us so very, very happy (“You work on commission, right? Big mistake. HUGE. Ta ta, have to go shopping now”).
There are many scenes like the one Roberts did in Notting Hill, where she has dinner with people and tells them how sad she is that she is rich, beautiful, famous, and spoiled. Everyone eats too much, then wakes up the next morning (after having passed out in their clothes all over the living room furniture, in food comas) to immediately head back to the still-set table to eat some more.
Ridunkulous.
And kind of gross, really.
We imagine Oprah lives like this too, and there’s an actual toilet set at her dining room table so she never has to get up for anything, and this cycle can just replay day after day after day.
Gross.
But, interesting in the sense that it captures something we don’t like about a good portion of the people in this country, especially those who come from the suburbs and romanticize places like Italy into these spaghetti-harvesting, unicorn-riding fantasy worlds. In the movie, no one appears to ever work, and it’s unclear how they can pay for all of that food, and all the new clothes they need after eating all of the food. At several points in the movie, various able-bodied people who should be working SOMEWHERE are lounging about during broad daylight, waxing poetic about the Italian concept of “doing nothing”.
This is apparently the attitude that has gotten Greece into so much trouble, and what’s been infecting Europe from the Mediterranean up, like gangrene heading north from little piggies, through a leg, and up into the Netherlands and beyond.
“Just do nothing”. All day. Without a care in the world. Take four hour lunches. Maybe don’t even bother to reopen at the end of the day. No one will notice. Make barnyard noises at any woman who passes. Drink so much you make an ass of yourself, because everyone loves a drunk and you will be the most popular man in the town.
We have never subscribed to any of this garbage, and doubt we ever will.
Last night, at dinner over tacos at D.S. Tequila here in Boystown, a big group of people sat down on the patio next to us, clearly wasted, at about 5 o’clock. One of the men was generically foreign, but since we’re not nationality experts, we have no idea what foreign land he was from, but if we had to guess, it would be Italy. He was singing loudly, clumsily spilling things, and talking as if he was at a NASCAR race and needed to be heard over the roar of dozens of engines (and not, in reality, seated in a quiet little oasis between two giant brick buildings in Boystown).
Everyone at the table ate these antics up, except for the fairy’s princess that tagged along in what was otherwise a gay sausagefest. Periodically she’d look over at us, mouth the words “I’m sorry. They’re so drunk” and generally give the universally-recognized shoulder-shrug gesture of “What are you going to do?”.
We love to have a good time, and we love seeing people out having a good time. Last year, we lost our dear friend Lionel to cancer, so we know full well how short life is, and how fast Death can pluck any of us off a table and slam us six feet into the ground. You should indeed relish every meal. You should always order dessert. You should eat every bite on your fork and slurp every morsel off your spoon with gusto. But we don’t think anyone should be a loud and obnoxious ass about it.
But, so many suburbanites we know would have LOVED to have been at the table with that foreign man, as he carried on like a fool, spilled things everywhere, and made an ass of himself. “What passion!”, “What life!”, “He really knows how to live!”.
Panda suggested these people would probably also love to have dinner with a monkey. They’d marvel at the various things the monkey would put in its mouth, and the faces and noises it would make. They’d giggle and cheer when the monkey did something ridiculous, or when it would try to bite someone or rape someone’s leg (or small service animal). “I know, because I used to have a monkey, and people loved eating with the monkey, and fighting the monkey for bread, and they’d keep loving it until the monkey started flinging feces. That’s usually when the check would come, right after the s*** started flying and then the monkey suddenly wasn’t so amusing. They really can bite, too. Mean little f*****s”.
Ann-Louise, and Julia Robert’s character in this movie, had the fantasy of going off to a magical place where everyone gets to be monkeys, and no one has to work, and days are all spent eating and napping and then waking up to eat some more and then generally indulging in whatever whim comes next.
All of us get this same experience, and it’s called infancy, toddlerhood, and preschool.
After that, when we hit kindy, and we have to get out our crayons and start coloring in the lines and making it through the day without any uh-ohs, we’ve mostly had enough of being Eloi.
Not so for Ann-Louise. Not so for Roberts’ character (whose name we never did learn from the movie). Not so for the millions of suburbanites who dream of this spaghetti-harvesting, unicorn-riding life.
We have no idea where this nonsense comes from in our culture, but we bet it’s linked somehow to the Left’s idolization of Europe. Maybe this garbage is what sucks so many into Democrat lockstep voting, because it’s what these fools think of when the Left starts advocating for America to be more Europeanized. Perhaps they are thinking we’re going to get unlimited pizza eating and free unicorn rides to the spaghetti forest, instead of VAT, crushing deficits, and a backwards, insufferable, bureaucracy that operates healthcare death panels.
It’s imperative, going forward, that we collectively find some way to burst this fantasy bubble. Because there sure were a lot of young women in the audience for this movie who left saying “I want to do that too! I deserve to go away for a year and find myself!”.
We’re all about following your bliss and finding a way to make a living doing what you love, but there has to be a line drawn somewhere. Please tell us if we are wrong about that.
(2) The other small bit that makes this movie actually worth seeing comes near the very end, after we wanted to walk out a dozen or so times. But, something, SOMETHING, told us to just sit there and wait, because there’d be redemption for the price of admission.
And it came in the form of this throwaway line Roberts had, as she was sitting at a desk writing a letter to one of the men she’d been involved with on her adventures. She started talking about something called “Quest Theory”, whereby she believed that we are all on quests, and that everything in our lives is a clue that should lead us to where we need to go. Everyone we meet is either there to help or to hinder us on that quest, and we’ll only know what we were questing for when we get there and achieve it.
As ridiculous as Julia Roberts is, and as stupid as some of the things she as a person has said, we actually really like this “Quest Theory” concept.
You can plug and chug whatever else you want into it, and add healthy doses of religion if you want to believe in a higher power guiding that quest, but this little website right here is something we never intended to do, and something that has at times been quite a challenge for us to maintain, but we keep pouring our heart and souls into it because we feel that SOMETHING wants or needs us to keep going for some reason that will become clear in the future.
All of you who read us every day and chime in either in comments or direct emails help or hinder that quest, as the case may be. There are a lot more helpers and angels than there are trolls and goblins, thankfully, but if we look at HillBuzz through the lens Roberts provided, we do see a path that we are on, leading us to someplace in the future where this little site will play a major role in a big battle for this country.
We personally feel — from the bottom of our hearts — that our ultimate mission, our quest, will prove to be that of heralds and gatherers. We think we were quested with the challenge of finding a way to broadcast an SOS for America, and to see who we could get to answer that call. Someone out there reading this site every day will save this country from ruin. We are 100% certain of that.
Someone who was energized to do something for America because of the connection that person made to us at HB (and to all of you readers) will be the deciding factor in the war that’s being waged for the heart and soul of this nation.
We believe a future president is reading this site. We think future Senators, Congresspeople, Governors, etc. are reading too. Some of these people might be children, so it could be their parents who are reading, but things are being filtered down to them that originate here in Boystown…things we believe will save the country.
So, we’re a light house, and a 21st century morse code beacon in the dark, and that’s what our quest was to become…with the quest continuing into the future to amp up our reach and become whatever it is American needs us to become.
We also think part of that quest was to become this surreal bridge between conservatism and the gay community, whereby we generally infuriate each side day to day in some regard, but in the end we serve the purpose of challenging stereotypes on both sides and blurring all the lines the Left has so carefully set up to divide people.
Every day is a challenge to take things to the next level, to survive the assaults from the trolls, and to further the reach deeper into the country…to activate more people who are needed to stand up when America’s in distress.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll emphasize it here: America will be saved my moms, grandmas, aunts, sisters, daughters and the men who love and support them.
Our roll has always been to herald the arrival of the Momma Grizzlies and their crew…before we even had a word for “Momma Grizzlies”.
And, we’ve reached a point, because of the constant letters of affirmation from many of you out there, that indeed God has sent us on this quest, because the unlikeliest guys from the most unlikely of places are just the sort He, with his sense of humor and irony, would send as PUMAs to the lions in search of all those grizzlies.
Great Merciful Zeus, we love this country. And we accept readily any role we can play in a quest to save it.
So, it’s funny this “clue” was left for us to find in a movie that we didn’t really want to see, but only saw because of that tour of a wine cellar one of us gave to a very polite actress with the world’s greatest laugh. It’s comical to think of what leads you to anything. If not for that encounter with Roberts, and those brief moments with her, we would have passed on this spaghetti-harvesting, unicorn-riding flick, and would have missed out on the concept of “Quest Theory”, which we think’s going to give us a new insight into what we do on a daily basis.
There are, apparently, clues hidden everywhere.
Even in Hollywood dreck aimed primarily for the overindulged, underdisciplined Ann-Louises of the world.
BRAINSTORMING: "Gay Marriage" alternative verbiage ideas
Last night at Sidetracks, during the Retro 70s portion of the night, The Captain & Tennile came up on the screen and a big, bearded guy who may or may not have been Zach Galifianakis (or possibly the recently deranged Joaquin Phoenix) shouted, “Hey, lookit, it’s Kiki Dee!”, so proud of himself that he “knew” who that woman was.
Uh, no. That’s not Miss Pink Overalls A Singin’ With Elton John In Her Bowl Haircut. That’s Toni Tennile. But, does a 70s, female singer by another name sing any less sweet?
This kind of thing happens all the time at Sidetracks, but usually during Showtunes night, because so many of the women in those old musical clips have been dead for decades, and guys in their 20s and 30s have a hard time differentiating between Esther Williams, Ethel Merman, Kate Smith (whom they call “Kate Bush”, we think because it’s the “God Bless America” clip and Ronald Reagan’s in it from one of his war movies, so hence the “Bush” brain-fark), and even Shelly Winters (for crying out loud).
Their performances stand the test of time, no matter what they end up being called by the assembled gays (and their fairy’s princesses) in the bar. For those who know who Esther Williams is, they’ll never make the mistake of calling her Ethel Merman…and no one seems especially inclined to make a big deal of it and correct the younger gays who can’t tell the two apart.
Which got us thinking about verbiage, the power of words, and lines drawn in the sand with naming conventions.
Sidetracks is owned by Art Johnson, who we consider to be Chicago’s Harvey Milk. The man’s just plain awesome, even if we don’t agree with him on everything. He’s humble, and doesn’t do very much press, but he’s the heavy lifter here in Boystown…always putting pressure on corporations in Chicago to support LGBTQ charities and for the big name politicians and celebrities to come out for our fundraising events. He’s the driving force behind Equality Illinois, and is one of the people who are dead-set on accepting nothing other than “gay marriage” as terminology for marital equality.
This is where we disagree with Johnson, while remaining so grateful for all he does for the community.
Equality Illinois, and other gay organizations coast to coast, don’t realize the problem with their initiatives is the word “marriage” being co-opted by the gay community when it has an existing meaning to people in the religious community. “Gay marriage” is a problem for many because of the second word, not necessarily the first.
In the year 2010, we think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Americans who don’t accept the reality that some men are going to live with other men and some women are going to live with other women, and no one is going to be able to change that. This has, actually, always been reality…but it’s pretty hard to hide from this and deny it these days. That’s thanks to gay pioneers in the 70s and 80s, and people in Johnson’s generation, who came out of the closet and in many cases dragged others with them, so that gays were visible to mainstream America.
Just as visible as interracial couples, and all the other pairings that were censored out in the days of black and white movies and visually restrictive media.
Where we think that generation above us fails is in adapting to the modern age and quicksilver culture, especially in terms of brand management and market research. Equality Illinois is an organization that shouts itself blue in the face demanding “gay marriage” in a blue state like Illinois, but makes little ground because it’s not listening to mainstream America…which keeps sending signals that it accepts male-male and female-female couples (even if it doesn’t think those are any more ideal than interracial pairings) but is averse to the word “marriage” being used for these unions.
At Sidetracks last night, we thought about all the words that are made up in the gay community all the time, to describe things that don’t exist in the larger straight world.
For instance, the aforementioned “fairy’s princess” is a word we ourselves started using a few years ago because we didn’t like the pejorative-sounding “fag hag” or “fruit fly” to describe straight women who like to hang out in gay bars (and then wonder why they are single). There was clearly a need for a word to describe these women, and things that rhyme are usually the easiest to catch on…hence we were stuck with “fag hag” for so long…and those poor, misguided girls had to be “hags”, when they are almost always anything but. “Fairy’s princess” hasn’t caught-on nationwide, yet, but we hope it does at some point. This way no one has to be a hag or a fly to be around us, and instead those women can be princesses whenever they enter our magical little world of strong frozen drinks in rainbow colors and endless homage to a pantheon of divas up on the video screens.
There’s also a “fruit loop”, which is a term for what you do when you first walk into a gay bar to ascertain what’s going on that night, who’s there, and which bartenders will give you the best drinks. You step inside, then do a complete loop of the bar, hitting every room, saying a quick hello to people you know (but not doing a stop-and-chat, or the gay equivalent, which is a block-and-hug…because you literally block the aisle so other people can’t walk passed, while you are busy hugging Frederick or Blaine or whomever, oblivious to how rude you are being), making sure you know which bartender you are going to get your drinks from (because he/she is either really good at what they do, gives you your third drink free, or doesn’t have a long line at his/her bar), and generally scoping out where you and your friends are going to sit or stand. You end up back at the front at the end of your loop, at which point you then head to wherever you’ve determined would be the best place to hold court that night. Periodically you re-loop to see who else has made it to the bar, and if you have any exes you either want to mess with or ignore, the latter happening if you look especially good that night.
So, we gays are great at coming up with names for things that need names, but have never been dubbed this, that, or the other.
Why hasn’t the gay community done this with:
(1) What to call two men in a civil union?
(2) What to call two women in a civil union?
Because two straight people in a civil union are called “married”, in that they have then gone on to have a “marriage” ceremony in a religious venue. That’s called “marriage”.
Two strictly non-religious, or usually religious-averse, straight people (typically of a Leftist bent) proudly call themselves domestic partners or common-law spouses when they want to avoid the religious connection to “marriage”. We know quite a few straight couples, legally joined, in California who make this firm distinction because they want no connection with a church.
Sometimes, you hear “life partner”, “special friend”, “lover”, “boyfriend/girlfriend”, or just “partner” used for two gay people in a committed relationship, whether or not they have any legal paperwork backing that up.
We think there should be terminology coined to differentiate gays who have taken those legal steps, and have drawn up the contracts and other paperwork to commit to each other.
We think those words should be something FABULOUS, because typically when these gay guys and lesbians take this step, they have an awesome party that’s better than Showtunes night at Sidetracks, where everyone dresses up and a huge amount of money is pumped into the special events economy.
Typically, in dressing up, these men and women go all-out, and wear their best new Armani, Dolce & Gabanna, Vera Wang, you name it.
So, it occurred to us there’s a potential for taking those designer brands, and the occasions they are worn at, and solving the whole “gay marriage” impasse by co-opting some of these labels.
Maybe two guys who commit to each other and have a big ceremony for the joining could be “Dolce&Gabanna-ed”, or just “gabannaed”, for short.
Maybe two lesbians could be “BadgleyMischkaed”, or just “mischkaed”.
You know damn well something like this could indeed catch-on, because the gay community is all about the labels and the cute.
“Hey, did you hear? Tony and Todd got gabannaed over the weekend. It was so choice. Primo everything. I got so drunk, I thought I was Liza Minnelli”.
“Did you get the invite in the mail yet? Lisa and Becky are getting mischkaed. They’re registered at Home Depot, of course. I don’t know what they will ever do with all those power tools, but God love the two of them”.
Maybe “gabannaed” and “mischkaed” won’t be the FINAL terms, just like we hope “fag hag” and “fruit fly” will eventually give way to “fairy’s princess” or something even better, but we think purpose is served by using these made-up words to take the debate away from the sensitive wording of “marriage”.
What a lot of gay people don’t understand is that feelings are hurt when “marriage” is seemingly taken away from people who believe in God and their Church and don’t want to see their traditions co-opted by others, and made into something it is not. One of the most disgusting and obnoxious things we ever saw was back in the 90s when one of us was an event planner in Cleveland, and a white, hippy, overindulged, middle-aged pair from Shaker Heights decided to get married…and have a big, Indian style wedding with the bride in a sari and the groom in a giant Captain Nemo turban.
It was ludicrous. They had a groom’s cake shaped like one of the Hindu elephant gods, with the main wedding cake a vanilla Taj Mahal, served an Indian buffet that also included a briskett (because the bride was Jewish and her relatives demanded it), and just cherry-picked whatever they felt was “Indian” and looked pretty for their wedding.
Having been to an actual Indian wedding, where Indian people were married according to their traditions, it was absurd to watch these two whiter-than-white hippies flounce about making a mockery of Indian culture.
The equivalent would have been to have a “black wedding” with everyone eating watermelon and fried chicken, everyone in the pews raising their hands and “testifying” excitedly, and the bride and groom dressed like gangsta rappers — because this is what ignorant people would think was the flashiest cliff’s notes of the black community, and most interesting for a big party.
Shameful.
And this is what we try to tell the gay community it’s doing when it takes “marriage”, which is a religious sacrament, and tries to twist and pervert it into something it is not, to the chagrin and offense of the millions of people who love God, His Church, and everything that means to them.
We’ve yet to meet a truly religious person who would ever deny any of us happiness in life.
We’ve yet to meet at truly religious person who would ever say we have to live alone, never have anyone special in our lives, or have to forfeit property we worked hard for, because we can’t secure it legally with a person we chose to spend our time on this Earth with.
No one who loves God would ever stand in the way of someone else’s true happiness or prevent them from knowing joy, peace, and comfort in this world. That’s not what Jesus taught, and it’s not what God communicates to His children today. That is most certainly not what the Bible means or stands for.
But, we don’t think it’s appropriate for two big, bearded bears to nance around in a mock cathedral wearing big, flouncy, Princess Diana wedding dresses while the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus sings “Going to the Chapel”. We don’t think two lesbians should dress up in tuxes and demand all the trappings of a Catholic wedding, when that’s not what the sacrament of marriage involves.
We also don’t think the gay community has a right to take baptism, confession, communion, confirmation, and last rites and cherry-pick what they want from those sacraments, creating chimeras of existing traditions and whatever the gay community wants to do that day.
Though many won’t want to admit this, religion, especially the Catholic Church, is mysterious and exotic…maybe more so than India was to those hippies. Most Americans grew up with some sort of religious tradition, and those of us who grew up Catholic had a heaping portion of that…which never leaves your DNA. Elements of this exotic religious past seem destined for any ceremonies gay couples would have…just like a lot of things Americans do have roots in British tradition. There has to be a way for gays to get the cultural, exotic, and symbolic elements they want without being offensive to those who remain part of the religion these things are borrowed from.
The stars and stripes have elements similar to the Union Jack, but the American flag is decidedly different, has a different name, and does not carry any impression it is masquerading as or attempting to mock the flag flown over Britain.
And that’s where this verbiage impasse comes in.
That’s where our “gabanna” and “mischka” terminology plays its part.
Brainstorm other words in the thread below, or go on a whole other tangent if you want. For too long now we’ve been fighting the same culture wars over and over again, where the Leftist Media pits the religious community against the gays, and vice versa over the word “marriage”.
We think we could play a role in ending the impasse by getting creative…and hope you can play a part in that too.
UK Telegraph article about Obama wanting to become "post-American, post-president" in 2013
The UK Telegraph is still better than any newspaper we have in this country, even when it’s drivel, like it is in this article about Dr. Utopia, our illustrious president, wanting to become a “post-American, post-president” and not really caring about winning re-election in 2012.
Instead, the article hints, Obama is very much looking forward to become a black Jimmy Carter — and serving as a national embarrassment on the world stage for the rest of his life.
There are many in the “global community” who have made good use of the useful fool that is Carter. He is a rabid anti-Semite who is always good for some slam against Israel and yet another glorification of “the Palestinians”, whatever those are. Since “Palestine” is a made-up convention and as real as Candyland, and the people who are “Palestinian” to Carter are mostly Jordanian in reality, Carter is just using them as convenient props to take the swings at the Jews that he loves popping off.
But, this doesn’t make Carter loved anywhere. Even those using him, as a former US president, to further the anti-Israel message they want to send don’t really respect him. They, too, know he is a deranged fool. A walking failure. Someone so much of a loser that the only reason he’s probably still alive is that neither Heaven nor Hell want him, and Nixon won’t share purgatory’s waiting room with him.
Is this what Obama really wants, to become the new Carter, as Carter prepares to depart the mortal plane?
Of course not. Dr. Utopia believes he is so loved, so adored, that he will rise to some position of global prominence, and become a President or Emperor of the World.
It is at that point that this egomaniac’s delusions of grandeur will collapse around him.
He is not going to become UN Secretary General because the UN will never allow an American to hold that position. Perhaps, as a means around that, Obama will renounce his US citizenship in the future and start carrying a Kenyan passport…because African nationals ARE able to become Secretary General, as Kofi Anan proved. We doubt this would work out any better for Obama than a similar game has thus far worked out for Wyclef Jean in his bid to become president of Haiti. It’s just not going to happen, no matter how much the overindulged megacelebrity wants it.
That leaves Obama to travel the world slamming America for the rest of his life, collecting big checks to talk about how evil this country is, and how much he tried to “save it” by destroying it. Perhaps he’ll always find work in the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia especially, for this sort of thing, but we think his general appeal will quickly fade away in most parts of the world in 2013.
Because, you see, as much as some of these countries hate it, the world needs a strong America leading the way, being both good cop and bad cop when it needs to be, and doing all the things the rest of these countries in the UN have never been able to do. We’re the only superpower in the world for a reason, and that’s largely because we’re the only country that can get things together. We’re so great, in fact, that we’ll survive the Obama presidency and everything this man is trying to do from the Oval Office to tear the country apart and render us a Third World wannabe.
The economy globally is going to get much worse before it gets any better. America is going to be needed as an engine to set things right and get things back on course. In the midst of the chaos to come, the LAST thing people are going to want to hear is more of Obama’s “blame America, hate America” shtick. It would be like paying hundreds of dollars to see a live performance of Crank Yankers. That prank call puppet show had it’s moment of popularity…but it’s stale, irritating, and unfunny now. As unfunny as the meta prank call the Obama presidency has been in this the Golden Age of Hope and Change.
We envision Obama being majorly disappointed in the years ahead, as historians are forced to accept the reality that everything the Left did in his presidency was a miserable failure. For thirty years, Leftists have wandered in the wilderness plotting what they would do if only they could take over the US government. Well, they had their chance, and all of their theories are being refudiated. You betcha.
And when our 45th president takes office, and she reverses all the damage Obama has done, and Americans (and the world) see that the Left’s pet projects and obsessions benefit no one, then Dr. Utopia is not going to be sitting as pretty as he now thinks.
He’s going to be seen as a worse president than Carter — and a colossal disappointment to the Left that put all of their hopes and dreams into him. The Left is crazy. Crazy people have a difficult time confronting harsh realities. They are emotional, irrational, and vengeful. When they’ve realized that everything they pushed failed, miserably, and the majority of Leftist thought is discredited, they are not going to blame the thought itself, or all of their long-hatched plans…they are going to blame Obama for blowing it.
Who knows what the price will be for this, but we can’t imagine these trolls, orcs, and goblins of the Left are going to be too happy with President Palin in the White House and the massive hit in public support Democrats will have taken during Obama’s brief tenure. The Democrats might never recover from the civil war Obama’s caused in the party, or the mask-ripping he’s done that has convinced such a large number of Americans that there really is no such thing as a “moderate Democrat”. It’s like finding one of those “moderate Muslims” the Leftist-controlled media is always talking about. Where are these people? Who are they? Are they all off riding unicorns together somewhere, in hiding, so beautiful and magical that if any of us were to ever spot them they’d all turn to pixie dust and blow away on a gentle summer’s breeze?
A big part of Obama’s legacy will be people like us, who were Democrats for decades, and blind party voters, but who will more likely than not never pull a lever for a Democrat as long as we will. The Obama presidency has made us realize that Democrats in office are bad for the country, because the Leftist wing of the Democrat party really calls the shots, and it hates America. Thus, voting Democrat is voting against the best interests of the nation in almost every circumstance. It should not be something the majority of Americans ever do again.
And Obama will be a cautionary tale for many years to come for what happens when conservatives sit their butts home or play purist games before an election. Too many people forgot the lessons of having Carter in office. Now, a whole new generation sees just how bad things can be with a Democrat in the White House who is not a Clinton. It’s been a painful lesson to learn, but it’s there for anyone who wants to wake up and see the truth.
As for Obama himself, the man, we can’t imagine a future for him that does not involve Hawaii. We believe firmly he has Parkinsons’ disease, made worse by all of the cocaine he abused for many years while living in California and New York (not to mention whatever he picked up from his visits to bathhouses like Man’s Country in Chicago). All of those press visits to gyms during the campaign, and all of those shots of him playing basketball with Reggie Love, Kal Penn, and all the other men he so enjoys hanging out with, were meant to paint Obama as being the portrait of health. It’s what campaigns do when someone has a chronic illness and they want to keep the true nature of that from getting out. So, they plant the “he plays basketball, he works out a lot” meme into the public consciousness and hope it sticks as permanent narration. Which, it largely has.
But, we don’t see Obama on the world stage commanding large crowds while he bashes America. We think he will be too sick, too weak to do that. Instead, he’ll become a kind of recluse, on his beautiful estate in Hawaii, not far from where his presidential library will be built. We can’t help picturing him in a floral print muumuu, in his wheelchair, with all sorts of pool boys, cabana guys, and shirtless groundsmen attending to him as he bakes in the sun, struggling to dictate his latest ramblings into a tape recorder for whatever book he’s writing next (which, like Carter’s, few will ever read).
Michelle Antoinette’s off somewhere enjoying herself without him in this future, happy for the first time in her adult life. We think a large part of Michelle’s problem, and why she’s always scowling and projecting such negativity, is that she’s the beard for a closeted gay man who is much crazier than she is. But, she wanted all the trappings of royalty, and she’s got them, and will have them for the rest of her life. At some point after they leave the White House, we think Michelle might actually evolve into a fun, lively, and general hoot of a woman. Maybe she’ll become more like her mother, Mrs. Robinson, who seems very nice, actually. A lot of women in bad marriages (or sham marriages, as the case may be) don’t come into their own until after their husbands are gone, or incapacitated in some way. It might take a decade or two, but eventually we might have a happy, sassy, joy to watch former First Lady emerge from the scowling, spendthrift brute currently on vacation yet again somewhere on the taxpayers’ dime.
We can’t imagine a future where Obama’s seen as the Lightbringer or Messiah his cultists in the media proclaimed him to be back in 2008. His policies are wrong. His hubris is pumped up not by achievement but by the wishes and dreams of the Left. His arrogance and anti-Americanism and his complete lack of empathy for the American people are painfully tangible.
It’s going to be as crushing for him to ultimately accept all of this as it’s going to be for his Parkinsons’ to put him in that wheelchair.
It’s going to be a lot like Richard Nixon in the Frost/Nixon film. On the estate, living in his own little world, seeing very few people, save for those who are sure to dote on him.
Except Nixon didn’t keep trying to have the Stanford men’s water polo team over for clothing-optional sleepover pool parties, where he’d shout “Speedo! Speedo! Speedo!” as loud as his crippled, weak body would allow.
THAT’S going to be Obama’s post-presidency, somewhere near Honolulu.
Back on the mainland, America’s going to be just fine. President Palin will have her terms, followed hopefully by President Allen West…the nation’s first competent, America-loving, successful black president. America will survive Obama, very well in fact.
But, Democrats will not survive him. The Left will not survive him. He’s going to cripple them, in the end, the way Parkinsons’ will cripple his own body.
And America will be better off for all of it, truth be told.
Monday Open Thread: August 23, 2010
What’s on your minds this Monday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
Have you seen Democrats take a hit in the polls yet over their support for the Ground Zero Victory Mosque?
Have you read, like we have, that the project cannot go forward unless ConEd sells the Muslims a building it owns? If this is true, then we have a new avenue for stopping this abomination…pressuring ConEd to not sell, or finding a pork-processor, bikini-maker, or gay bathhouse that could buy the building from ConEd and pay more than the Muslims will. If ConEd does not sell to the highest bidder, then it’s discriminating against the other entities that would want that building. Just imagine having a branch of Steamworks or Man’s Country right next to where that that Ground Zero Victory Mosque is supposed to be (Obama would be so very delighted, but not so much for his brethren).
