Upbeat Cynicism

I have (finally) got my main blog, Benevolent Misanthropy, back up and working, with lots of old data restored. Today I ported all the posts from this backup blog over there, so this particular URL is going silent until needed again.

Found, lost for over 150 years, then found again:

SAQQARA, Egypt – Egyptian archaeologists unveiled on Thursday a 4,000-year-old “missing pyramid” that is believed to have been discovered by an archaeologist almost 200 years ago and never seen again.

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities chief, said the pyramid appears to have been built by King Menkauhor, an obscure pharaoh who ruled for only eight years.

In 1842, German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius mentioned it among his finds at Saqqara, referring to it as number 29 and calling it the “Headless Pyramid” because only its base remains. But the desert sands covered the discovery, and no archaeologist since has been able to find Menkauhor’s resting place.

Right out of an H. Rider Haggard book, or an Indiana Jones movie.

It looks like D.C. Thornton is un-retiring himself, and resuming blogging tomorrow.

I haven’t been reading as many movie scripts as I really should, but thanks to Simply Scripts, I came across a gem and I’ve got to share it.

I’ve only read most of the first act, but even just that far, I can tell you that Roughshod is very well-written, keeping you interested scene by scene and moving right along. The film is unavailable, so far as I can tell, and that’s a shame, if for no other reason than that it stars Gloria Grahame.

(IMDB doesn’t even have it listed to run on TV(!).)

But anyway, it’s a smooth read, it’s something most people have probably never seen (and won’t have a chance to anytime soon, darn the luck!), so you can read it fresh and just see the movie in your mind. And, while it has some formatting differences from modern scripts (modern scripts are not supposed to call shots, it’s perceived as impeding on the director’s job), it reads very, very well and will give you an idea of how these things work.

They’re big on omertà on the left. It’s part of how they survive.

— Peggy Noonan, 30 May 2008

Jay Rosen over at PressThink, never one to hide his biases or check his premises, has gone rather overboard with the upcoming release of Scott McClellan’s new (assertion-heavy, but apparently evidence-free) book, all but cackling and rubbing his hands with glee, the very picture of a fourteen-year-old girl who finally, finally has found someone who will take the Queen Bitch of the eighth grade down a peg or two, and then things will go back to the way they used to be, when everybody liked her, nobody disagreed, and Dan Rather was the most trusted man in America.

His language and diction are choice, coming from an ostensible professional in a profession he supposedly is trying to defend as dignified.

For instance:

The Today Show rocked today…

If I remember my teenage vernacular correctly, “rocked” is higher up the scale than “ruled”, but ranks somewhere below “totally kicked ass”. He goes on to tell you, the reader, that

You have to watch it.

He did, at least, leave out the “ZOMG” and triple exclamation point, so he exercised at least a modicum of restraint.

He also exhibits his typical MSM narcissism, claiming that the way things were run in our republic prior to Teddy Roosevelt are “extreme” and (implicitly) undesirable. The way things were run, of course, was without treating the press like a pre-sainted priesthood that must always be deferred to, a priesthood that not only stands in for The People, but knows the minds of The People better than those dirty plebeians ever could themselves.

It’s all pretty hysterical (as in over-emotional, not funny), overwrought, and ill thought out. But at least he doesn’t call Bush Hitler. Not directly.

(The question to apply to any Rosen rant involving Bush and his treatment of the press is: “If faced with an unremittingly hostile and antagonistic press — a press which has proven over and again that even outright fraud is not to be ruled out when working against you, so long as they think they can get away with it (see Rather, Dan) — how would you treat the press?” For Bush, Rosen’s preferred position would seem to be on his knees, begging forgiveness — if not performing a more Lewinskian act.)

The idea of nature’s intrinsic value inexorably implies a desire to destroy man and his works because it implies a perception of man as the systematic destroyer of the good, and thus as the systematic doer of evil. Just as man perceives coyotes, wolves, and rattlesnakes as evil because they regularly destroy the cattle and sheep he values as sources of food and clothing, so on the premise of nature’s intrinsic value, the environmentalists view man as evil, because, in the pursuit of his well-being, man systematically destroys the wildlife, jungles, and rock formations that the environmentalists hold to be intrinsically valuable. Indeed, from the perspective of such alleged intrinsic values of nature, the degree of man’s alleged destructiveness and evil is directly in proportion to his loyalty to his essential nature. Man is the rational being. It is his application of his reason in the form of science, technology, and an industrial civilization that enables him to act on nature on the enormous scale on which he now does. Thus, it is his possession and use of reason—manifested in his technology and industry—for which he is hated.

George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Warning: links to PDF), also quoted in his post “The nature of environmentalism“

I recently said, in conversation, that environmentalism, as a movement and an ideology, is driven by hatred of man, and used a paraphrased quote from David Graber to illustrate my point. The genuine quote is: “Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” I was accused of demonizing, because not all people who self-identify as environmentalists agree with this.

What I was in fact doing was thinking in essentials. When one thinks in terms of essentials, then rubbish such as the following is unsurprising and quite predictible:

This is a site for kids, put up by the Australian Broadcasting Company. Hardly the lunatic fringe of the environmentalist movement.

If environmentalism were not, in essence, anti-man, then putting up such a thing would be appalling, and putting it up and encouraging children to figure out when they should die to save the planet would be unthinkable. But no, a mainstream site programmed this test and put it up for all to see (in 2003, if the copyright is to be believed), and nobody involved in the process saw anything much wrong with it, else it wouldn’t be up.

(þ Wizbang)

Barack Obama, on Memorial Day:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

Upon learning the “secret” of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, I thought he could not possibly deliver a movie more heavy-handed, insulting to the audience, or just outright stupid in conception.

Holy crow, was I ever wrong.

I had some small hope for The Happening. But read the part of that review you have to highlight, and you’ll see that any hope at all would be foolish.

I haven’t actually watched a Shyamalan film since Signs. Looks like I might never do so. Oh well, at least I’ll always have Unbreakable.

To make up for the previous post, here’s Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Just Wild About Harry”:

If Odeo is being wonky, which it seems to be at this moment, you can download the Vorbis file.

No matter who wins the presidency, we’re going to be saddled with someone who wants to be a fascist dictator.

And the sad thing is, the only one for whom I could vote in any kind of good conscience probably won’t even get nominated, unless she steals it.

Barack Hussein Obama ((and if he didn’t like his middle name, then why didn’t he have it legally changed?)) has no experience, a disturbing sense of entitlement, and handles even the mildest adversity just terribly. Add to that his close ties to Wright and former terrorists, to say nothing of his wife’s disgusting views, and he’s a disaster waiting to happen. Sadly, he’s almost certainly our next President, as well.

John McCain served America honorably and heroically in the Vietnam war, but only himself as a US Senator. Anyone who supported, let alone authored, the direct assault on every citizen’s right of free speech that was the McCain-Feingold bill has no business anywhere but locked in stocks in the public square for daily ridicule, or else wearing a suit of tar and feathers while being given a ride out of town on a rail. The Presidency has had some vile men in it, but rarely one who has been so openly contemptuous of the Constitution before he even takes the oath to uphold and defend it. There is no way in hell I will for McCain.

I could vote for Hillary, despite her awfulness, for the simple reason that while she’s vile, she’s perfectly willing to throw aside any and all principles. That is usually a bad thing, but if America were attacked while she was President, she’d be so personally offended that whoever it was had the gall to attack while she was President that she’d toss aside all the touchy-feely “it takes a village” crap and nuke them back to the stone age. Of the three candidates, she’s the one most likely to do the right thing, however wrong her reasons for it might be. (“Most likely” meaning there’d be only a slight chance, but that’s better than no chance at all.)

But whoever we get, we’re going to be getting a power-lusting, self-aggrandizing potential tyrant who holds himself above the rest of the country, and can not wait to begin telling everyone what to do, how to do it, and start punishing everyone who disagrees with him as rapidly as possible.

The next four years, and possibly the next eight or twelve, are not going to be pleasant.

Instapundit links a post at The Volokh Conspiracy with the following quote, and his only comment is “HMM“:

There are lots of methodologies and modes of thought that are widely acceptable within at least some circles of academia, but would strike an uninitiated outside observer as nonsensical, academically dishonest, or otherwise discreditable.

Anyone who has ever encountered a professor who still maintains that “real” socialism works, it’s just never been tried (to pick but one of an endless variety of examples), would respond to the above quote not with “HMM” but with “DUH!”