I Still Think He Can’t Fight Worth a Darn

President Obama was awarded an honorary black belt in Tae Kwon Do by the President of South Korea. It seems that Obama dabbled in that particular martial art for years, but never had the fortitude or discipline to actually advance beyond an intermediate rank.

There is a joke going around. Why didn’t the Nobel Committee give Obama the prize for literature, as well as peace?

Because he has already written two books.

“The People 48%, The Reactionaries 52%”

I don’t remember the exact words but this was the essence of a headline in a Chilean leftist newspaper after an Allende referendum was defeated by the voters (as reported, IIRC, by Robert Moss in Chile’s Marxist Experiment).

The aroma of similar attitudes wafts from an AP report that has the headline, “Honduras vote to sideline president, enshrine coup”. Hey, nobody’s calling anybody reactionary here, but if you talk about a “coup” it’s usually an indication that you’re unsympathetic to the people who did it. Never mind that the president was kicked out by his own legislature and courts, following their country’s written constitution, after he flagrantly broke the law. Like global-warming hysterics, and lawyers for obviously guilty defendants, Zelaya’s supporters don’t have the facts on their side and so keep repeating unsupported assertions that are meant to shift the frame of debate in the direction of their narrative.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government, sensing weakness, is trying to push Obama around. This is the same Brazilian government that just received the great democrat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a widely publicized state visit. But Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, a democracy and a steadfast US ally, is a threat to world peace.

The Media Have Always Been Biased

From one of my favorite Bloom County Strips:

Milo: “Senator? This is Milo Bloom at the Beacon. Will you confirm that you sunk Jimmy Hoffa in your backyard pond?”
Senator Bedfellow: “What? Of course not!”
Milo: “Find, I’ll go with ‘Sen. Bedfellow Denies That Pond Is Where He Sunk Hoffa.’
Senator Bedfellow: “That’s not true!”
Milo: “Okay. ‘Bedfellow Did Sink Hoffa in Pond.’
Senator Bedfellow: “I don’t know where Hoffa is!!”
Milo:‘I Lost The Body’ Says Bedfellow.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all from this side of the Pond. We are having a Thanksgiving Teaparty by Lincoln’s statue in Parliament Square tomorrow afternoon. Any reader of this posting who will be in or near London is welcome. It will start at 4 and go on till 8 so there will be plenty of time to go on to other events though there will be food.

Thanksgiving and Temporal Bigotry

Stuart Buck encountered a teacher who said “Kids learn so much these days. Did you know that today a schoolchild learns more between the freshman and senior years of high school than our grandparents learned in their entire lives?” (“She said this as if she had read it in some authoritative source”, Stuart comments.)

She probably had read it in some supposedly-authoritative source, but it’s an idiotic statement nevertheless. What, precisely, is this wonderful knowledge that high-school seniors have today and which the 40-year-olds of 1840 or 1900 were lacking?

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