Chef Mojo

The Suspence Is Killing Me

Will someone please dump their CitiGroup stock, so it'll close under a buck and be delisted, thus putting the poor beast out of it's misery?

Garrison Keillor Is An Ass

From the Chicago Tribune

A day to remember
Garrison Keillor
January 21, 2009
One simply wanted to be present. Freezing cold or not, a crowd of 2 million, whatever—solemn warnings about tight security, long lines, traffic jams, cell phones not working. In the end, one wanted to be there on the Mall before the Capitol on Tuesday at noon amid the jubilant throng and see the man take the oath of office—our first genuine author-president.

(Emphasis mine)

Hold on there, cowboy. Not by a long shot.

Hey moron, let's try Thomas Jefferson, to begin with. 1782. Notes On The State Of Virginia, one of the great observational histories written up to that time. Sounds like an author to me.

Or, how about Theodore Roosevelt? He managed to publish The Naval War of 1812 upon his graduation from Harvard in 1880. Of course, Harvard wasn't dumbed down then like it is now. He wrote it as an undergrad. It's still the definitive book on the subject. Yeah. He was an author.

Woodrow Wilson. Congressional Government and Constitutional Government. And numerous other books. Yep. You guessed it. Author.

Kennedy's Profiles In Courage doesn't count. He didn't write it.

Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. 

Garrison Keillor is a bloviating fool, skating on the ever thinning ice of past, questionable talent. He wouldn't know real authorship if it crawled up his ass sideways.

I mean, really. Obama's pieces of masturbatory fluff are going to stand up to serious histories and analytics from people far more talented and intelligent than he could ever dream of being?

(Via Ace)

Haiku

Look out the window
Red Dawn rising to the east
Honey, get my gun

Maybe Truer Than He Knows...

Amidst the gloom, this gave me a serious chuckle. Count on the Onion to put things in perspective:

Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America.

(...)

Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

Investment Advice I Can Live With

From The Spectator:

If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1000 worth of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214. So based on the above statistics the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle.

Well, if you're going to take a loss, you might as well get a buzz while you do it...

(tip 'o' the hat: Instapundit)

Life Imitates Nigerian Spam

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Henry Paulson

Via Samizdata

I Guess There's A Certain Logic To This...

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University:

In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country. We don't have that in our country. In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who has told you that we have it...

Yeah. I guess he's right...

They must have been drug dealers...

While preachers preach of evil fates...

I'm hoping something good comes of Live Earth, Al Gore's global revival meeting concert extravaganza.

If it turns out that this is the fitful twitching of the '60s before it shuffles off this mortal coil into the vale of complete irrelevancy, then it will have done a great service.

While cruising the blogosphere this morning (Interesting aside: My automatic spellcheck in Firefox just flagged "blogosphere." Ok. Added to the dictionary...), I'm finding lots of amusing stuff about Live Earth, including one piece in which Reverend Al invokes the prophet Bob:

The Live Earth concerts, which start this Saturday, July 7, are also one last chance for Baby Boomers to relive the “flower power” activism of the ’60s. In a recent interview in Rolling Stone, former Vice President Al Gore invoked music icon Bob Dylan to promote the importance of these concerts. Citing Dylan’s ‘60 anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Gore rambled: “What’s the old Bob Dylan line? ‘Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call/Rattle your windows’ - what’s the rest of it? - ‘for the times they are a-changin’.”

But there’s just one problem with invoking Dylan to hype the global warming scare. And that is that Dylan himself has expressed skepticism — to the same magazine — to the notion that global warming is a catastrophe. When he was asked by Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner in the magazine’s 40th anniversary issue if he worried about global warming, Dylan replied with an unexpected rejoinder. He asked Wenner, “Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here.” Wenner, who has blanketed Rolling Stone and his other magazine Men’s Journal with doom-and gloom climate change stories (that often bash CEI), quickly moved on to other topics after he received his comeuppance.

Yet Dylan’s latest statement may signal that in the global warming debate, the times are changing. Even independent-minded celebrities are now questioning the establishment media orthodoxy that the debate over global warming and its effects are all but over. In a phrase familiar to those who study pop culture, it appears that the global warming scare may have “jumped the shark.”

(emphasis mine)

I love Dylan. Dylan can say stuff like that, and Jann Wenner, grinding his teeth, has to print it because it's Bob Dylan. Bob is a walking, living, breathing hypocrisy barometer. Needless to say, Bob is not hanging out with Reverend Al today.

Here's hoping that this is the high water mark of Reverend Al's Apocalyse Now. Half filled arenas and stadiums featuring musicians, actors and politicians howling out in mass hysteria the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Tulip Bubble of 1637. But this isn't an economic phenomenon so much as an attempt to create a religion with all its attendant dogma out of whole cloth, slyly co-opting junk science and false reason to achieve it's aims.

Well, Al, let's throw a little Bob back to you, shall we?

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

That's one thing from the 60's that'll never lose relevancy...

(via Malkin and cross posted at Daily Pundit)

The Times Responds To Tony Blair

Last week, I posted on Tony Blair's little tirade against a free press. Now comes this sharp column in The Times by Simon Jenkins:

At first I honestly thought Tony Blair’s “poor diddums” speech last week was farewell satire. He could not really think himself the most persecuted politician since Carlyle declared the supremacy of the “fourth estate” back in the 1840s. Besides, how could the master of spin admit that he had botched his entire modus operandi? He called journalists “feral beasts” who hunted in packs and spread cynicism wherever they went.

What a perfect description of Blair’s office for the past 15 years. Yet the man seemed close to tears. So plaintive was his cry that a stage army of sycophantic columnists leapt forward to hug him and say how right he was. I recall no such media mea culpa when John Major made the same, and more merited, speech on retirement.

And you damn sure didn't hear that sort of crap from Margaret Thatcher.

Regardless, the fact remains that whether the press is biased or not is not the point; only that there is a free and independent press. Hell, up until quite recently, historically, the press has been extremely biased, mostly due to the fact that newspapers were the organs of political parties and various interests.

There is a fantasy that British newspapers were once pillars of journalistic independence and are now polluted by sensationalism, commercialism and venal proprietors. This is rubbish. Until the 20th century, indeed through to the second world war, most papers were owned, produced and written by and for political parties.

The Times was usually in the pocket of the government. The Westminster Gazette, founded by Newnes for the Liberals, was duly described by Rosebery as “a pioneer of clean popular literature”. The Express and the Mail under Beaverbrook and Rothermere pretended to run politics, their bluff occasionally called by Lloyd George and Baldwin. The office song of Labour’s Daily Herald was “We want no party, creed or bias; we want a peerage for Elias” (their chairman). As for Blair dredging up Baldwin’s “power without responsibility” quote, surely that was a cliché too far.

Newspaper editorials (and their promiscuous siblings, columns) are probably more independent than ever in history. This is partly because there are so many of them and partly because the companies for which they write are far more concerned with keeping their papers afloat. The 1985 Wapping revolution gave Fleet Street a decade of soaring profits, which it saw evaporate in a blizzard of price-cutting, freesheets and internet competition. Even so, more papers are being read on the streets of London than for half a century. More front pages are scanned, thanks to the internet, than ever before. More opinion is being formed, debated and regurgitated, to the point that arguments not worth a pint in a pub can circle the earth through the blogosphere.

Much the same could be said about the press in the United States. My problem with the press is not that it's biased. That's fine by me. What bothers me is the press insisting that it's not biased, when it clearly is. They should stop pretending otherwise and get on with it. After all, it's how the distribution of information is trending anyway.

(tip 'o' the hat: Chris)

Faint Glimmer Of Hope

Just when I've pretty much given up on the British, the Queen confers a knighthood on Salman Rushdie. This, of course, causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Muslim world. The Iranians are huffing and the Pakistanis are puffing, and Muslims everywhere are acting like their knickers are on fire.

I'd like to take this opportunity to extend some heartfelt thanks to Her Royal Highness for so honoring a good man, and at the same time, spitting in the eye of his oppressors.

Having said that, I now have to wrap my brain around the rest of the list, which includes Joe Cocker and Barry Humpries, better known as Dame Edna. I'm also scratching my head over CNN's Christiane Amanpour becoming a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. What's up with that?

The Birthday List is always full of things that make you go, "Huh?" But this year marks the first time I can remember it causing a great international kerfuffle.

Huzzah!

UPDATE & CORRECTION:

In the comments, I have been corrected by my Mother. Queen Elizabeth II is addressed as "Her Majesty," not "Her Royal Highness." The latter term is used to refer to a royal personage of lesser rank.

I should note that Mom is quite the Anglophile, and is well versed in these things.