Last night before the big screen behind the Eiffel Tower, tens of thousands of English rugby fans died a slow, drunken death as
FranceSouth Africa beat England 15 to 6
There is a deeper issue here. Society should not base its morality on a denial of facts.
Word.
Belated congratulations to Andrew & partner.
The insane vulgarity of wretched humanity:
The twin forces of personal surveillance and nanny statism are operating a pincer movement against Blair’s “shared valuesâ€Â. Of course, anybody walking through a British town centre is upset by the number of fat people on the street and by scenes of youthful drunkenness. In the centre of York earlier this month I watched a man selling killer portions of hamburger to a queue of universally obese men, women and children. The experience was as offensive visually as it was medically. For a brief moment I would have applauded his removal by the police.
Voltaire and John Stuart Mill insisted there should be an ideological chasm between disapproving an act and wanting it halted. In modern Britain this chasm has become a skip and a jump. Whatever we dislike we require the government to ban.
I’ve interviewed many actors who have been to the Oscars and the parties that follow. They’ve all said the same: it was boring beyond belief. Last week I went to the London Film Festival to rub shoulders with the greats and the groovy of screen such as Naomi Watts, Colin Firth and Elle Macpherson.
If you want to know exactly what it was like, here’s what you should do. First, get dressed in your best outfit. Then pour yourself a glass of mediocre wine. Head off to a London Tube station at the height of the rush hour, push your way into a carriage and stand there, drink in hand, and try to make conversation with the person next to you.
“Winston Churchill! Jonny Wilkinson! Deep Purple! Hermann Goering! “
Sounds like we missed one hell of a party.
Dan,
Actually it was South Africa that beat the English. England had beated France earlier, according to my Rugby loving French cousin.
Yep, the ‘Boks:
LAST night before the big screen behind the Eiffel Tower, tens of thousands of English rugby fans died a slow, drunken death. South Africa stole the World Cup from Jonny Wilkinson’s team of veteran brawlers in an ugly, deadlocked game that broke the rugged tactics of the heroic but outclassed England squad.
It could have been so different but for a disallowed try just after half time. After that the Boks drained the life out of the game with their kicking and even the sudden appearance of the aging, raging bull Lawrence Dallaglio was not enough. The Boks won the game 15-6.
No shame in losing to the S’Africans…a damned fine side they have.
Colin Blakemore can kiss his career goodbye.
Such idiot exactitude applied to subjective concepts is reminiscent of the Soviet Union.
I like this Simon.
O/T: with about 85% of the precincts counted, it looks like congressman Bobby Jindal has more than 53% of the vote for governor of Louisiana. If he holds on to more than 50%, he will be governor-elect tonight, instead of facing a runoff election in November. A very rare accomplishment in Louisiana, especially for a Republican (unheard of, in fact). Maybe finally we will have some leadership in this state. Oh, and LSU will beat Auburn tonight (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it).
Opps: 90% of the precincts now. New Orleans Times-Picayune calls the election for Jindal.
Opps = Oops.
Oops.
That is really big news. It’s a huge wrench thrown into the Katrina narrative anyway.
Recall that Jindal was narrowly beaten by Gov. Blankstare 4 years ago.
Now we can begin the healing is the important thing.
Yes happyfeet – and Mayor Nagin is irrelevant and disliked now, with approval numbers similar to Congress. He’s term limited anyway, so he can go get a job with the Urban League in a few years, like the previous mayor. And Congressman Freezerbags will be sharing a federal jail cell with former Gov. Edwin Edwards, if there is any justice in the world. And then the healing will really begin.
Will Landrieu jump parties you think? Or is that impossible given her heritage and all?
Be ready for the howls, folks.
Boasso (the Democrat) came in for a miserable showing. Eighteen percent is about what you’d get if all the dead people in NO voted straight ticket — and if you follow Glenn’s link and drill down to the full story, Democrats are already complaining about “election irregularities”, by which they mean that the heavily Democratic (nudge, wink) districts of NO got stirred with a stick, and a lot of voters couldn’t figure out where to go to vote. Prediction: nationwide shrieks of outrage tomorrow.
Regards,
Ric
“Will Landrieu jump parties you think” Heck no.
Ric – don’t you love it when Democrats lose elections: it’s always due to “irregularities”, “faulty ballots”, “Diebold machines”, etc., or just plain “stolen election”. But when they win…well, not a word!
It’s like that scene in Citizen Kane, where they are trying to decide which newspaper headline to print – “Kane Wins Landslide”, or something to that effect, and “Fraud at Polls”. The Democrats have only these two headlines to choose from after any election.
Money quote:
It’s probably overly cruel to remark that if Mayor Nagin had made the buses available, the voters could have gotten to the right polling places.
Regards,
Ric
healing
LSU 30, Auburn 24, one second left.
I will sleep well tonight.
Enjoy your rest, BobM. Tomorrow is likely to be… interesting.
Feets, you have it backward. No Landrieau (it’s a family, or possibly a tribe) can “jump parties”. The party with Landrieaus in it is the Democrats, sort of like the machine with Coca-Cola in it is the Coke machine.
Regards,
Ric
Imagine all the rocks Jindal is going to turn over in Baton Rouge…
Got it. I wonder but that she’s not feeling Hillary out for a cabinet position then.
By the way happyfeet – her the Senator’s brother, Mitch Landrieau, was elected Lt. Governor tonight. Mitch is a good guy though, will work with others regardless of political persuasion. I think he might work well with Gov. Jindal, I hope anyway. Besides, the Lt. Gov. is an overpriced 5th wheel kind of job, with no real political power in this state. Mitch has his eye on the governor’s mansion in a few years himself, so he’ll be nice for a little while.
There’s got to be a backstory on why he wasn’t a candidate for governor that I don’t know about, I’d guess, but what’s truly sad is the racial element that will be in play tomorrow (I think Ric is right on how this will play), and I’d go further and say it won’t take but til midmorning that Jena gets conflated.
Nagin beat Mitch Landrieau for Mayor of New Orleans last year, partly because Mitch never took the gloves off, and was intimidated by Sharpton and Jesse, and the threat of endless lawsuits if the election didn’t go a certain way. The Lt. Gov. is a safe place to stay in public office and lick your wounds – if Landrieau wanted to run for Gov. as a Democrat this time around he would have to get in line. It was a rather crowded field, with about a dozen candidates.
This is a dangerous man.
“The storms didn’t cause all of our problems – they revealed a lot of our problems,â€Â
Exactly.
Or to paraphrase a local radio host – The Storm didn’t sink us, our own politicians sank us.
Healing
The NYT above has this too…
But that AP article makes it clear that two of the people in the race were self-financing, so I can see how Mitch probably could not have cleared the field enough to make it a good bet.
But the NYT also has this:
insinuations about his excessive intellectual capacity? That’s just bizarre.
Anti-intellectualism is nothing new in politics, especially in this part of the world.
There’s even a justification for it. Truly intelligent people rarely miss any meals; there are all kinds of ways for smart people to earn a comfortable life. Politics isn’t a very comfortable life, and it takes a certain personality type to enjoy it that bright people rarely exhibit. What all that means is that bright people who go into politics tend to be unscrupulous, or (at best) to have agendas that may not accord with the desires of the people, and if they’re smart enough they can put their agenda over against the duller opposition.
Jindal is bucking that perception somewhat. His campaigning has included plenty of good-ole-boying, but he didn’t try to portray himself as less intelligent than he is; what he did was try to convince the voters that his agenda was what they wanted, and it looks as if he was successful. He could, just possibly, be a paradigm buster in more than one way.
Regards,
Ric
Interesting to note that the same Adam Nossiter who did the NYT article had this to report in 2003 when he was with the AP covering Blanco’s defeat of Jindal:
Anyone expecting any talk of “snapped winning streaks” in the morning?
Sorry. here’s the 2003 Adam Nossiter article.
I see what you’re saying Ric, but there’s an uncomfortable resonance with stereotypes of Asian immigrants there as well. Or at least there would be if a Republican was pointing out the “excessive intellectual capacity” of an Indian-American Democrat.
Simon Jenkins is a farce. For all his professed concern about nannystatism, he embraces global warming fascism zestfully:
Britain used to be so cool.
It’s pretty amazing that the Springboks could be made negative by “draining the life out of the game by kicking” and a “disallowed England try” as in the link abouve. There was no try and England played the negative kicking game from the kick-off. Only SA were better at it!
This article has it all in true Britpress style. Cliches that is. Heroic English, nasty racist South Africans, cheated of victory blah-blah-blah. Trouble is, SA were yards and a bit better on the night in every single department. Including heroics.
From the Sully piece:
That word, liturgy, does not mean what he thinks it means. Unless we’re changing the definition of that as well.
I’m happy that Andrew is happy, and I’m sorry his ambitions have been frustrated, but my position has hardened somewhat.
The arrangement is not a “marriage”. Neither is it an “elephant”. Some important characteristics are missing.
Regards,
Ric
Subtext: Vote for me, I’m stupid enough to run Louisiana’s government.
–“Some important characteristics are missing.”
– Yes. Like sanity. “I now pronounce you two people”. Somehow it just seem to have the same ring to it.
– doesn’t seem….
“They must be discouraged from overheating their houses in winter and cooling them in summer.”
So, they get to keep the shacks? Talk about class elitism, sheesh. I bundle up in winter (well, my ARIZONA winter), and can’t help but cool my house in summer (or I die). Because I’m not in a poor area of the world, does that mean I’m ok?
I must have missed something…
(quote by Happyfeet)
Wow, talk about holding a man of color down…. And hurting the poor?
How Progressive. Somebody’s mask slipped it seems.
“That word, liturgy, does not mean what he thinks it means. Unless we’re changing the definition of that as well.”
If you take St. Andrews ego into account, you wouldn’t have to change it much.
Now, suppose the judge accidentally pronounced them black. It wouldn’t be quite what they were looking for, but it would be damned close to Absolute Moral Authority. All they’d need to do is get themselves transgendered and it’s “Hello, divinity!”
Some condoleces.
Happyfeet — Hindus are fighting blacks in Jena?
I was just thinking more of an African-American disenfranchisement / “feeling increasingly marginalized after years of steady gains” angle emerging is all. Maybe that’s just wrong; it seems that the official spin is being eschewed in favor of a “nothing to see here” approach.
There are only 8,000 peopleses of Indian/Pakistani descent in Louisiana I think I read somewhere last night. Hopefully a good percentage of them are in the restaurant business, cause they do amazing things with chick peas I think.
Happy –
How many Dunkin Donuts do they have in Louisiana?
And what’s sad is that Indian sweets are so underappreciated here. You can get them made in America here These guys are on my Christmas links year.
<Ross Perot voice>
“Ah now pronounce you, you people.”
</Ross Perot voice>