Category — Schadenfreude

The Great Media Depression

The Great Depression was the darkest economic period in American history – yet it was consistently cited by the mainstream media as a point of comparison in 2008. Network news shows referred to the Great Depression 42 times just in the first four months of the year, nearly three times per week. [snip]

Given this news, perhaps the depression is relegated to just one sector: the media

[snip]
Half a dozen newspapers said they would slash payrolls, one said it would outsource all its printing, and Tribune Co., one of the biggest publishers in the country, said it might sell its iconic headquarters tower in Chicago and the building that houses the Los Angeles Times. [snip]

Talk about bringing this on oneself. It just took time.

Muslims barred from picture at Obama event

Two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally in Detroit on Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate. [snip]

In Detroit on Monday, the two different Obama volunteers — in separate incidents — made it clear that headscarves wouldn’t be in the picture. [snip]

I guess diversity is good except when it isn’t. Thus speaks the Obamadhi.

Nope, no do overs.

With the ordaining of McCain by the GOP, the RNCC is having a bit of a problem with the rank and file.

For your schadenfreude, here is a list of e-mails to Cole at the RNCC, 633 comments and growing.

Republican Solutions and a Positive Agenda
Posted By: Tom Cole, May 16, 2008 - 9:52 AM

Everyone needs a lift, this supplies it.

I have no idea of the political bend of the “Left in Lowell” blog, though the name and the word progressive in the banner might be indicative.

Seems that one of the posters had a dustup with the local powers causing worry that this might occur to “less influential” citizens.

She came home last Tuesday to find a “cease and desist” order posted on her front door. [snip]

Those of us who write on this blog and those of us who are involved in politics understand the impact of power, influence and authority. I am not worried about Kristin she can take care of herself. But my concern is for the average resident who is not an activist, who has no connection, who does not have a voice. What is he or she to do? [snip]

I believe they got what they wanted: more government. Tough when your pet bites you isn’t it.

Few sites can deliver the warm fuzzies as this. Stop by, poke them with a stick and enjoy.

The site is http://angryjournalist.com/

The story is here; comments section is here. This is better than any porn show anywhere.

You can read the whole article here, it isn’t too long. The schadenfreude quotient in this piece is delightfully high.
By the way, why haven’t we seen his fat face anywhere, pontificating his point of view?

Climate facts to warm to

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.
Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.” [snip]

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along. [snip]

THE Age published an essay with an environmental theme by Ian McEwan on March 8 and its stablemate, The Sydney Morning Herald, also carried a slightly longer version of the same piece.

The Australian’s Cut & Paste column two days later reproduced a telling paragraph from the Herald’s version, which suggested that McEwan was a climate change sceptic and which The Age had excised. He was expanding on the proposition that “we need not only reliable data but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics”.

What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: “Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. (emphasis added)[snip]

The missing sentences do not appear anywhere else in The Age’s version of the essay. The attribution reads: “Copyright Ian McEwan 2008″ and there is no acknowledgment of editing by The Age.

Why did the paper decide to offer its readers McEwan lite? Was he, I wonder, consulted on the matter? And isn’t there a nice irony that The Age chose to delete the line about ideologues not being very good at “absorbing inconvenient fact”?

With all the above going on, we get these fools:

At island retreat, Branson and friends seek to save a world ‘on fire’

“So, do we really think the world is on fire?” Branson, the British magnate and adventurer, asked several guests, as a manservant scurried off to fetch him another glass of pinot grigio. [snip]
Branson does - and so did most of his guests. So on this recent weekend on his private hideaway in the crystalline waters between the islands of Tortola and Anegada, they tried to figure out what to do about it and perhaps get richer in the process.

Yeah, like with the Gorbot, it is all about money.

Ain’t it so!

Defender of public morals eats ass out of large crow.

Spitzer devours a large crow served in a delightful marinade of alum and castor oil. Wanna bet his butt is as puckered as his punim.

Protein Wisdom opined thusly on the Spitzer cockup.

Who cares if Eliot Spitzer hires prostitutes?

[snip]
he previously prosecuted — quite aggressively and publicly – several citizens for the “crime” of operating an adult prostitution business. That hypocrisy precludes me from having any real personal sympathy for Spitzer, and no reasonable person could defend him from charges of rank hypocrisy. And he should be treated no differently — no better and no worse — than the average citizen whom law enforcement catches hiring prostitutes.

But how can his alleged behavior — paying another adult roughly $1,000 per hour to travel from New York to Washington to meet him for sex — possibly justify resignation, let alone criminal prosecution, conviction and imprisonment? Independent of the issue of his hypocrisy — which is an issue meriting attention and political criticism but not criminal prosecution — what possible business is it of anyone’s, let alone the state’s, what he or anyone else does in their private lives with other consenting adults?

See that? He paid f****ng $1000 per hour! Certainly that precludes any question of victimization, right? Leaving aside the issue of legality regarding an offense over which he gleefully prosecuted others with reference to criminal statutes . . . I mean, do you think he ought to be held to the letter of the law? Should he be treated more harshly because he was in a position of public trust, pledged to uphold the law? [snip]

No, he should be treated harshly for showing no fiscal responsibility (a Democrat foible). Paying some bimbo $5000.00 exhibits no common sense, it didn’t even buy silence.

For the charge of hypocrisy, having his johnson pounded flat on an anvil by a 3 pound lump hammer is light punishment.

Like most elitist clayfoot clowns, however, they never run for election on the prostitution platform. I don’t know why? If the public actions were compatible with personal morals, would not they be a shoo in to high office.

Worse, Spitzer’s problem doesn’t seem to be about getting dipped. He engaged in the activity called structuring, which he should know is quite criminal. He prosecuted many on Wall Street for similar missteps.

Let us clean up the political mess. The following steps make it easy:

1. First a warm and fuzzy auto-de-fe.
2. Then public crucifixions for all miscreants.

Where did I put my rack and sack of stones? And what’s with the stupid wife?

This post is for Vermont moonbats, our fount of all knowledge global warming. Can you spell Maunder Minimum?
For the Gorbots, dealing with facts is inconvenient; such is the difficulty of Godhood pretension. Global warming arm wavers had better save their carbon.

Forget global warming:
Welcome to the new Ice Age

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. [snip]

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter’s weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.[snip]

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased. [snip]

Isn’t that ice age the one that interfered with the “hockey stick” favored by all greenies? Nah, can’t be, otherwise the Goracle would have used it in the “hockey stick” computations.

I suspect the carbon loathing greenies will be arm flapping trying to keep warm.

It is when you get caught.

Drunken driving ‘tremendous error’

SALISBURY, Md. — Wicomico County State’s Attorney Davis R. Ruark apologized yesterday for his drunken driving arrest the night before, calling it “a tremendous error in judgment” and saying he hoped the community would forgive him.
Mr. Ruark, 52, was pulled over Friday night in Ocean City after officers observed him speeding and crossing the center line, police said.
After failing field sobriety tests, Mr. Ruark was arrested and taken to Ocean City police headquarters, where he agreed to take a breath test and was found to have a blood-alcohol concentration greater than .08 percent, Maryland’s legal threshold for drunken driving, police said. [snip]

We’re in the midst of an epidemic!