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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
Another natural wonder: Comet Ison — where to look when.
baracky is what happens when the trucks are too far apart
So is Jean-Claude Van Damme way easier to CGI than most people due to his odd looks, or is he just okay with getting hurt really badly at this stage of life?
Pal … no cgi, no wires, one take.
>Pal … no cgi, no wires, one take.<
Journey – Don’t Stop Believing Lyrics
I’m a Swede, and I approve of the content of this video. Now can we tie each of our president’s ears to a mirror and watch the same stunt?
– I would submit each of his nuts to a mirror would be more entertaining but Mooch probably keeps them in her purse.
– Looks like over at HuffNPoop they finally dropped the fascist hammer full bore. They are now refusing to publish comments and then censoring outright, and then suddenly access to the “conversations” (threads) goes away, poof. Apparently they’re so fucking panicked over the ObamaCare train wreck they’ve lost any semblance of common sense. So basically no need to even bother any more, which of course, is the idea. These actions showed up in an article by Debbie Poodlehead, wherein she claimed the Dems “did not” revolt today. The Comments section was getting hammered with people just fundementally laughing at their assertions and mocking their stupidty and lies.
– I would say that they have good reason to be panicked, their cult is fucking doomed.
House Speaker John Boehner said he plans to go forward with a Friday vote on the Upton bill. When asked if Democrats in the House would propose their own legislative fix, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters, “We’ll do what we have to do.”
….But of course theres been no, and will be no, Democratic revolt, Uh huh.
“Obama’s healthcare “fix” strictly political”
– Next week is going to be even more interesting, and the week after that, and the…..
“No competent American statesmen were harmed in the making of this video.”
“Any relation to actual people living or dead to characters in this video is purely coincidental, and does not prove that competent American statesman actually any longer exist.”
A lefty acquaintance of mine is trying the “everything is OK because all those cancelled plans SUCKED” approach on Facebook.
But then, this is they guy who thinks that people have a RIGHT!!!!!! to something he calls a “living wage.” He can’t seem to wrap his head around the notion that, just as an employer can exploit workers, workers can exploit an employer.
“no cgi, no wires, one take.”
No wires meaning one take is pretty much all you are going to get.
At least from Jean Claude…
The trucks could probably swing back around for another try.
Smart move, the trucks running in reverse. If one of those Volvos hitched and he fell, much less chance of getting hamburgered under 2 wheels than 16.
sdferr, this is right up your alley. NTTAWWT. )
That, and bullets. Plenty of those. Because thinking isn’t what ‘Community Organizes’ ‘Americans’ nowadays.
Thanks serr8d — just from a quick reading I think I can see that as a fine piece for further study. I especially like the potentials in the phrase “and we still feel the consequences of its complexity” — it’s a nice way to understate the possibility of inherent and irreconcilable conflict, if that’s what happens to pertain.
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/11/15/how-volvo-created-the-jean-claude-van-damme-video/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zXwOoeGzys
Ah! I was wrong about the wires (though they were for safety, not support) but no cgi.
sdferr
I gave it a quick read, too. My question would be, while acknowledging the complexities, is there really an inherent conflict between “rampant individualism” and associations? As long as the individual is free to choose (or even not choose) to commit to a non-governmental entity (religious, fraternal, business, etc) is this really a conflict?
I’d guess the author sees the terms “individualism” and association from a Tocquevillean point of view there, where rampant individualism could be understood as embodied in the bewildered or cowering person of a Kafka tale, whereas the association would conform to the habits of Americans as Tocqueville found them.
There is the earlier conflict which I had in mind though, particularized by the two principles *all men created equal* and *the primary right to liberty and property.*
Or to quote Tom West on Mansfield’s thought along those lines:
*** And that’s what Mansfield means, I believe, by his famous remark “a regime based upon the self-evident half-truth that all men are created equal will eventually founder because of its disregard of the many ways in which men are created unequal. It will be subject to revolution by its partisans — by ‘the’ partisans, rather, in this case, those of the few who it ignores.”
So Mansfield is saying that whatever may have been the hope invested by the founders in the equality idea, the reality is that the idea has led to democracy, and, as Mansfield believes he has learned from Tocqueville, democracy democratizes. ***
Carrese says, pointing to Tocqueville again “our founding was an unprecedented alloy, or amalgam . . . “.
We might think of it as an emulsion of egg-yolk and oil, prone to breaking if overstressed.
That’s some precision driving right there.
Full props.
Excellent ad.
I am inclined to think of this as akin to herd immunity via vaccines. As long as our society is has a majority of people who hew to principles of honesty, responsibility, honor, duty and obligations, we can tolerate (and ameliorate) the few who don’t.
If we tip the other way, we get Mexico.
basic disregard of the many ways in which men are created unequal.
Doesn’t that then depend on the intent of the founders when they used the word “created”?
IMHO it has nothing to do with physical differences, or differences of the class/station one was born into … it has to do with the rest of the phrase “endowed by their Creator.” It is not about men’s comparisons to each other but their relationship – one on one – with God. “Life, liberty & pursuit of Happiness” … Whether or not one’s results are better or worse when compared to another person, it is the HOW you got there that matters.
Dean Koontz’s character Odd Thomas is entirely happy being the best fry cook he can and living a simple life.
We are created equal because we are all created in God’s image, which means we can know the difference between good and evil, and act on that knowledge — and create moral consequences in the doing.
The ad is badass. The music sucketh.
leigh
[raspberries] sorry, I love Enya.
What better music to accompany my pics of Ireland?
http://vimeo.com/24091117
Arggghhhhh! You want me to have earworm, Darleen.
I’ll get you for this.
Doesn’t that then depend on the intent of the founders when they used the word “created”?
Not that I can see, since what he is talking about is the use which is made of the thought, rather than the intent behind it. The use I speak of here is the drive toward egalitarianism as such (“democracy democratizes”), which we see all around us.
Of course the pretty words may have had no such intent, but that hardly matters when they have been taken up for other purposes — which purposes we’d be foolhardy to deny have run riot with our polity. The key it seems, where politics is concerned is man’s tendency to err and to make mistakes, or as we witness with the reign of the ClownDisaster, to be capable of being fooled or to wishing themselves into a self-made foolhardiness.
Darleen wrote:
Or, actually – sadly – The United States in 2013 A.D.
The few of old have become the many, with some of those with low-cunning running all of our institutions.
And we’ve all been infected with the Leftist way of thinking to varying degrees.
I do not know if the romance with Leftism Americans have been carrying on for over a Century will come crashing down quickly or whether it will occur because of a rebellion like The Founding, but I do know this: any victory we achieve will not be long-lasting if we begin to rebuild with our Leftist Mindesets still intact. Any sacrifices we or others will have made will ALL have been in vain unless we reject the mutant, corrupt way of thinking that drove us to where we find ourselves now.
In addition to restoring the foundations of government and society laid down by The Founding Fathers, we must restore our own souls to Virtue, to Normalcy. This can only be achieved by a recapturing of that Moral Imagination which infused The Founders and men like Edmund Burke.
that hardly matters when they have been taken up for other purposes — which purposes we’d be foolhardy to deny have run riot with our polity.
I don’t deny that Leftists have raped language. I just refuse to accept it.
Whenever I hear some collectivist try and hijack Jesus in service of Big Nanny Government, I fight back.
By the way, as I’ve mentioned before, the origin of the equality principle seems to me more nearly to reside in the Machiavellian injunction to build politics on the way men are (i.e., governed by their passions and not by their reason), rather than on the way we would wish them to be. This in turn led Hobbes, following Machiavelli, to find the equality principle in man’s native fear of violent death, and from there to establish modern natural right on that ground (low and solid ground), thereafter modified by Locke, and inherited by us. It doesn’t come from the Bible, but from the Bible’s antithesis.
the Bible’s antithesis
?
If the highest thing is such love of one’s fellows that one would lay down his life for their sake, then making the highest principle of politics to be clinging to one’s life in fear of violent death, then I reckon the latter would look something like the opposite of the former.
Oh Darleen. That reminds me, about a week or so ago I bitchslapped my priest about invoking Jesus as a socialist. I almost felt bad for him. Then I remembered he used to be a lawyer and I got over it.
Darleen says November 16, 2013 at 3:32 pm
the Bible’s antithesis
?
The Koran/Kuran/Quran/Q’ran/Q’rap
Visually, a GI falling on a grenade to save his comrades, vs. a nervous politician, rather than be condemned to a blindfolded fate in a courtyard at daybreak, actually keeping his oaths? Love versus fear, addendum: Love willingly sacrifices (fear sullenly forfeits).
There’s a passage in The Closing of the American Mind, in the chapter on Culture where Bloom quips about a new divorcee who would extol on the virtues of the the traditional, extended family (presumably, as seen on PBS, or perhaps read about in National Geographic) clearly does not have the first clue as to what he (or she) is talking about, having already proven incapable of living under even the modest constraints on individuality that this country asks of us.
So to my mind rampant individuality, isn’t just freedom to choose, but freedom to unchoose with little or no constraint on either; or what Rick Santorum called “‘no fault’ freedom.”
Late to this party, I know. But what are you going to do?
That isn’t true freedom, Ernst. It’s a caricature of freedom.
It’s the “freedom” to fail to uphold your end of a contract. And if you can do that at no cost, then no one can rely upon another to enter into any commitment at all. And that means that people can’t associate with one another for mutual benefit, because they can’t trust each other to do their part.
You can’t even buy and sell goods for cash because one party could hand over his side of the transaction and the other party could say “I don’t feel like giving you this.”
Without the ability to enter into enforceable deals with one another, humans cannot exist above a basic hunting/gathering level, which is exactly where the Leftist mentality is stuck.
Agriculture, industry, and everything else that makes it possible for billions of people to live on this planet, cannot hold. Which is just fine with the envirofascist Left.
I guess to them these are features, not bugs.
And that means that people can’t associate with one another for mutual benefit, because they can’t trust each other to do their part.
This looks rather like a description of Hobbes’ state of nature — a condition of war of all against all.
Setting aside the question of modern day leftist mentality, the wonder was, how would something like that ever end? Or, as I I hear tell Rousseau put the question, where did reason come from? How do we get from there to here?
But then there’s another view of the thing: we never left there. We’re still enmired in a situation of a war of all against all. We just can’t face up to it though, so tell ourselves fairy-tales to ease the pain (this, with but little jest, seems to be Machiavelli’s telling).
in truth if we are to be truthful the moly is not particularly holy it just rhymes
The moly was the root that Hermes in disguise gave to Odysseus to keep him from falling under the spell Circe would put on him. And the passage marks the first appearance of the word physis (nature) in western literature.
good old Hermes when he has your back you can have improbable and amazing adventures even if there’s witches trying to rain on your parade
Or even better a time when improbable and amazing adventure tales were taken for improbable and amazing adventure tales and not as a means of ordering one-sixth of the world’s largest economy from the top down.
americans are a curiously gullible and sheep-like people
put these ones between a rock and a hard place and they wonder if there’s any corn chips in the kitchen and if there’s not they have to track down who has the ebt card
Or it’s the freedom to be natural versus the freedom to rise above one’s nature.
Americans are sheep-like because of a century of indoctrination to be such.
Think of it like this, as important and effective as Goebbels was for the Nazis, he was using, compared to today, a new science in it’s infancy and primitive tools.
Well, the science has been perfected, and the tools have advanced by light years.
The world truly is like the Matrix, where reality is nothing like the perception of the masses. I think few of the readers even of this blog realize that.
For example, If you think the elections of 2014 and 2016 still matter, you are in the Matrix.
I should do a whole take-off of Foxworthy’s bit:
If you think Republicans are the opposite of Democrats…you are in the Matrix
If you think the police are there to “protect and serve”(the people)…you are in the Matrix
If you think the USA is a constitutional republic…you are in the Matrix
If you think the Department of Education exists to educate…you are in the Matrix
If you think the EPA exists to protect the environment…you are in the Matrix
If you think the Affordable Care Act exists to make care affordable…you are in the Matrix
Shit, I could go on all night…