“A generous heart will never care to go part way;- St. John of the Cross
it won’t be cowed
if there is passage anywhere,
but set out on the hardest road;
nothing can cause it misery,
and with faith soaring like a cloud
it feeds on something I don’t know
that one may come on randomly.”
I shy away from calling him heroic, but I thought I'd give him props for exactly that which made him suspicious in the eyes of the FBI: the man took his job to protect the public and find evidence of foul play very seriously, and advanced the case, or would have, at least, had the FBI not immediately deemed him their chief suspect and branded him a psycho bomber.
The media was pretty eager to run with that story. "Local security cop finds bomb evidence FBI didn't, ergo he must be a crazed psychopath in on the crime." It's almost as if they don't believe someone could just have a quite-healthy interest in protecting the public from harm, or have difficulty accepting the possibility that someone not formally credentialed by a prestigious institution could have any talents to contribute to society.
Whew, those were scary days - those Jihad guys might've followed us home and killed us!Indeed. It's true. The Jihadis might've. WaPo was correct that publishing the innocuous Danish cartoons would have exposed WaPo's employees to some additional level of mortal risk.
Standing up for the principle of free speech is not worth exposing our employees' lives to additional risk. For the safety of our employees, WaPo is willing to capitulate on that principle.
I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University.
1. It's dirty pool to spotlight a teenager. This young lady is maybe smarter than I was at her age. It's just that this is 60 seconds of cliched fun.
2. I object to the inane question:
"Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a map. Why do you think this is?"
My fantasy answer:
Miss Teen S.Car:
That is an inane question. Via our public school system, we tried to force geographic education on that 20%. They chose not to learn, and we chose not to penalize them. If we want 100% compliance, we can institute the death penalty, and then more people will comply. Further, through attrition, we can guarantee 100% statistical compliance. The producers of this pageant will no longer have feel liberal guilt over that 20%. Sheesh. I can't wait for the Miss America pageant. This teen thing is bull.
Norm Chow is paranoid. I'm Vince Young! Look - I'm on TV again - coast to coast - for the 30th time today, the 100th time this week, and the 10,000th time this season. Norm worries too much. I'm fine. I'm ready. I'm Vince Young!Soon enough, you get sloppy in your conversations and your interviews, and teammates notice it and roll their eyes. Next, because you are VINCE YOUNG, and therefore your team's losses must be your teammate's faults, you kinda sorta definitely interview-blame your teammates for a loss. It seems like nothing to you - but such a thing is actually a HUGE faux pas. Suddenly your career success is a bad bet - instead of the good bet it once was - and you don't even know it, because your image is still dominating most episodes of Sportscenter, and television idiots are still hyping the bejesus out of you in order to increase their ratings amongst the tricky Males 17-24 demographic. Yet: you think it's because you are the reincarnated - no, wait: BETTER than the reincarnated football Michael Jordan. You are 23 years old. How could you think anything else?
"The next time someone trots out the adage about bloggers not being reporters, we're going to note that reporters aren't exactly reporters these days either."
Brady Now!
Buddy Ryan believed he could defeat the Run and Shoot by blitzing it. He believed - much like a basketball press doesn't become really effective until the opponent tires a bit - constant pressure would tire a QB, and eventually cause him to turn the ball over, and/or become a bit gun-shy, and/or literally become injured....has its roots at Thomas Jefferson High, in Port Arthur, Texas, where Todd, a Methodist preacher's son, played quarterback from 1978 through '80. Under coach Ronnie Thompson, Todd threw the ball about 30 to 35 times a game, which was unheard of at the time in Texas [my emphasis -g]
[...]
Todd caught up with Thompson again in the late '80s, when Thompson was the offensive coordinator at South Garland High and Todd held the same position at nearby McKinney High. "Ronnie had put together a little package that included some Port Arthur, a little old University of Houston run-and-shoot and a little of Dennis Erickson's Miami Hurricanes pro-style one-back offense," says Todd, who drew on Thompson's expertise. "At McKinney we replaced the I [formation] with the spread, and we really lit it up. I've used four receivers out of the shotgun ever since."
Blake freaked out a bit. He's a shy kid who doesn't welcome scrutiny. He sorta wanted to play in college, then have a quiet NFL career, then go home to live near Port Aransas. After that practice, Blake got dressed and drove 7+ hours to Port Aransas, to his beloved grandmother's house. Now, TCU coach Gary Patterson is going to have to fly to the Port Aransas area after Saturday's practice, then do his best impersonation of Bambi's father, and try to help Tommy Blake "buck up", so to speak.2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.
[...]
5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.
[...]
12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
[...]
98. If an attractive young couple enters my realm, I will carefully monitor their activities. If I find they are happy and affectionate, I will ignore them. However if circumstance have forced them together against their will and they spend all their time bickering and criticizing each other except during the intermittent occasions when they are saving each others' lives at which point there are hints of sexual tension, I will immediately order their execution.
Mr Sarkozy has rekindled a French suspicion that the habit is for self-centred individualists such as the Americans who popularised it. “Jogging is of course about performance and individualism, values that are traditionally ascribed to the Right,” Odile Baudrier, editor of V02 magazine, a sports publication, told Libération. Patrick Mignon, a sports sociologist, noted that French intellectuals had always held sport in contempt, while totalitarian regimes cultivated physical fitness.
~4~ The top gift from Italian parents to daughters graduating from High School is ____ ____.Those who love America show it by denigrating and beating the s[***] out of her at every opportunity. Call it the Ike Turner school of patriotism.
Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. [...] Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody -- and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.
[...]
For example, Zubaydah disclosed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- or KSM -- was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and used the alias "Muktar." This was a vital piece of the puzzle that helped our intelligence community pursue KSM. Abu Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States -- an attack about which we had no previous information. Zubaydah told us that al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the U.S., and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location.
[...]
We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures.
[...]
Zubaydah identified one of KSM's accomplices in the 9/11 attacks -- a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh. The information Zubaydah provided helped lead to the capture of bin al Shibh. And together these two terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
[...]
KSM revealed that Khan had been told to deliver $50,000 to individuals working for a suspected terrorist leader named Hambali, the leader of al Qaeda's Southeast Asian affiliate known as "J-I". CIA officers confronted Khan with this information.
[...]
Based on that information, Zubair was captured in June of 2003, and he soon provided information that helped lead to the capture of Hambali. [...] Hambali's brother was soon captured in Pakistan, and, in turn, led us to a cell of 17 Southeast Asian "J-I" operatives. When confronted with the news that his terror cell had been broken up, Hambali admitted that the operatives were being groomed at KSM's request for attacks inside the United States -- probably [sic] using airplanes.
[...]
KSM also provided vital information on al Qaeda's efforts to obtain biological weapons. During questioning, KSM admitted that he had met three individuals involved in al Qaeda's efforts to produce anthrax, a deadly biological agent -- and he identified one of the individuals as a terrorist named Yazid. KSM apparently believed we already had this information, because Yazid had been captured and taken into foreign custody before KSM's arrest. In fact, we did not know about Yazid's role in al Qaeda's anthrax program. Information from Yazid then helped lead to the capture of his two principal assistants in the anthrax program. Without the information provided by KSM and Yazid, we might not have uncovered this al Qaeda biological weapons program, or stopped this al Qaeda cell from developing anthrax for attacks against the United States.
[...]
Terrorists held in CIA custody have also provided information that helped stop a planned strike on U.S. Marines at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti -- they were going to use an explosive laden water tanker. They helped stop a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi using car bombs and motorcycle bombs, and they helped stop a plot to hijack passenger planes and fly them into Heathrow or the Canary Wharf in London.
The shocking thing isn’t that we did these things to Abu Zubaydah. The shocking thing is that we didn’t do more. And another surprise is that these milquetoast interrogations yielded any useful information at all. That they did is a testament to the professionalism and prudence of the CIA interrogators who accurately gauged what Zubaydah could handle, and got he information with no more cruelty than was necessary.
The researchers then contacted a primary news source named in each of the stories and asked him to complete a survey about the accuracy of the piece. A news source was defined as a witness or participant with firsthand knowledge of the events described in the story. Only "hard," objective errors alleged by the news sources were included, and the study assumed that the factual assessments of the news sources were correct.link to Slate article
The results might shock even the most jaded of newspaper readers. About 69 percent of the 3,600 news sources completed the survey, and they spotted 2,615 factual errors in 1,220 stories. That means that about half of the stories for which a survey was completed contained one or more errors. Just 23 of the flawed stories—less than 2 percent—generated newspaper corrections. No paper corrected more than 4.2 percent of its flawed articles.
Obviously, a newspaper can't publish a correction until it learns of its error. But the studied dailies performed poorly when informed of their goofs. Maier found that 130 of the news sources reported having asked for corrections, but their complaints elicited only four corrections.
media is a scammified* industry which is well-populated by shallow, immoral pretenders.
`
Example:
List of journalistic transgressions, courtesy of Randall Hoven, of American Thinker.
Example 2:
A takedown of a Reuters article about bloodthirsty and racist Texas evangelical Christians.
Example 3:
Seattle Times Editor Scolds Staffers For Cheering Rove Resignation
By Ken Shepherd August 15, 2007 - 17:40 ET
Example 4:
Video: Boos in MSNBC newsroom during Bush’s 2003 SOTU, recalls Scarborough
posted at 11:05 am on August 16, 2007 by Allahpundit
`
Here, I will stop listing examples. I could go on for weeks.
`
*Scammified: should be a word. You know what it means.
SEATTLE (AP) — A woman attacked a karaoke singer belting out Coldplay on Thursday night, telling him he “sucked” before she pushed and punched him to get him to stop singing, bar staff said.
The man was singing “Yellow” when it happened.
“It took three or four of us to hold her down,” bartender Robert Willmette said.
I recognize this in my own life. I am - to some degree which I cannot quantify - an excitement/adrenaline junkie. I have used excitement as a drug - many times.What actually provoked me to wonder about wonder was an essay by Dennis Prager on how Excitement Deprives Children of Happiness -- which is another way of saying that immersing children in over-stimulating activities will inevitably lead to an atrophied sense of wonder. As Prager writes,
"because we parents so delight in the excitement we see in our children at those moments -- because they seem so happy then -- we can easily fall into the trap of providing more and more exciting things to keep them seemingly happy at just about every moment. And they in turn come to rely on getting excited to keep them happy and to identify excitement with happiness. But excitement is not happiness. In fact, it is the ultimate drug."
Never before in history has so much excitement been available to people, but are they really any happier or fulfilled? I agree with Prager that
"all this excitement is actually inhibiting our children's ability to enjoy life and therefore be happy."
It "renders young people jaded, not happy.... That is why the frequent complaint of 'I'm bored' is often a sign of a jaded child, i.e., a child addicted to excitement and therefore incapable of enjoying life when not being excited."
"You tell everyone who has ever doubted, felt they did not measure up or wanted to quit, you tell them to look up, get up, and don't ever give up."
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