We Two Kings

It seems I haven't posted anything for some time now. Time flies when you're . . . doing things . . . and stuff . . . and something or other. 'Cause I've been real busy, doing a little of this, a little of that, and serious stuff like pondering the mysteries of the universe. For example, just this morning while I was trying to remember whether I had already taken my meds or not, my brain presented me with a sudden realization: Jesus and Elvis had a lot in common. How had I not remarked on this before now? The more I thought about it, the more connections I saw. For example:

• The names "Jesus" and "Elvis" both have 5 letters, and both end with an "s."
• Jesus was born on Christmas, and Elvis often celebrated Christmas.
• Jesus had a disciple named Thomas; some of Elvis' fans are named Thomas.
• Both Jesus and Elvis often wore flowing white robes with gold trim.
• Elvis drove a Cadillac; Jesus thought so highly of the donkey that he rode into Jerusalem that he referred to it as “the Cadillac of donkeys.”
• Television audiences in the 1950s were shocked by the sight of Elvis’ gyrating pelvis; Jesus has never gyrated his pelvis on television, but if he ever does I’m pretty sure people will be shocked by it.
• Jesus fasted in the desert for forty days and was tempted by the Devil; Elvis suffered a dip in popularity and shook hands with Richard Nixon.
• Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, who was later beheaded at the request of some mean woman whose name I can’t remember; Elvis was probably baptized, and whoever baptized him is most likely dead by now.
• Both Jesus and Elvis were taken from us at a young age, and followers of each believe that, had they lived longer, they would have had many more #1 hits.
• People have reported seeing Jesus and Elvis alive even after they were declared dead.
• Judas shot Jesus in a theater and fled to a warehouse; the Beatles shot Elvis from a warehouse and fled to a theater.
• When there was only one set of footprints in the sand, Elvis was carrying you, and Jesus was carrying Elvis, and Jesus was standing on a turtle, and below that it's turtles all the way down.

Astounding, isn't it? Those are far too many parallels and similarities to be mere "coincidence." It has to mean something! But what??? The answer still eludes me, but I'm sure it is very significant.

But I bet some of you are skeptics who remain unconvinced. So I did some searching and found that I am not the first one to have stumbled upon this cosmic connection. Check out these links:

More amazing similarities!: Elvis vs. Jesus

O Come All Ye Faithful: The First Church of Jesus Christ, Elvis

From the Louvre to your living room: Velvet Elvis & Jesus in Heaven

That's all for now. Join us next time when we investigate the many amazing similarities between Norman Podhoretz and the homeless guy who told me that aliens from Sirius are giving nuclear technology to zoo animals.

John Leonard Rides Again

On this lazy latesummer Friday afternoon, I offer for your consideration the following fine example of spam gibberish. Not email spam gibberish this time, but blog spam gibberish, copied from a spam blog long since gone and lovingly preserved until it reached its peak of ripeness. If you like this sort of thing, then this will be the sort of thing that you like. Read, therefore, and enjoy.

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Enjoy the long weekend.

In which I revise my opinion of Reagan upward.

Update: Ogged informs me I've been hoaxed! Arrgh! I knew it was too good to be true. I shall let the post stand as a testament to my gullibility. Oh, for shame!

And in which I steal the entirety of LeisureGuy's post:

Direct quote from the just published The Reagan Diaries. The entry is dated May 17, 1986.

A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’er-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I’ll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they’ll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.

The Gipper was clearly a shrewd judge of character.

Protecting the Rights of the Accused

President Bush spoke recently about a very serious matter:

When Congress returns in September the Intelligence committees and leaders in both parties will need to complete work on the comprehensive reforms requested by Director McConnell, including the important issue of providing meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

When I first heard that there are people in our country who are alleged to have assisted our country following the 9/11 attacks, I was deeply, deeply shocked. These are very serious allegations, and it is hard for me to believe that there is any truth to them.

I am so glad that I live in a country where the law presumes that the accused are innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, the court of public opinion offers no such protection. That is why I look forward to the day when the victims of these smears can face their accusers in court and prove to the entire world that the charges leveled against them are nothing but vicious lies. On that day, they can hold their heads high and proclaim, "The allegations against us are false! We did not assist our nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001!"

Sadly, though, our justice system is not perfect, and sometimes the innocent are wrongly judged to be guilty. That is why Congress must act to offer meaningful liability protection to them.

So I praise the president for his call to action, but I wish he had been even more bold. The truth of the matter is that the world is full of people who make false accusations for their own nefarious ends. Therefore I call upon Congress to extend liability protection not only to those who have been accused of helping America, but also to those who are alleged to have volunteered in soup kitchens, those who are alleged to have helped old women cross the street, and those who are alleged to have given milk to stray kittens. Until the day when libel and slander are no longer commonplace, we must be vigilant in protecting the rights of the accused.

Ow!

I think a bee just stung me! On the heel, of all places! I didn't see him, but it must have been a bee.

This Banal Moment in the Life of Someone You Don't Know™ has been brought to you by Blogger, the Internet, and the letter X.

Death Cat's a Cutie

Oscar the cat knows when you're going to die.

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.

His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means the patient has less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," Dr. David Dosa said in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Consider the Alternative

I must agree with Josh Marshall--the only possible explanation for the fact that Alberto Gonzales remains Attorney General of the United States is that, were he to resign, his successor would surely feel compelled to do at least a minimal amount of investigating, which would inevitably lead to prosecution of numerous high-level administration officials, and the president is not about to let that happen.

In other words, the President George W. Bush is choosing to allow the ongoing public exposure of the fact that the Justice Department of the United States, during his presidency, has become a gross, exaggerated caricature of incompetence and corruption because the alternative would be something even more embarrassing.

At this point no other explanation makes sense.

“an azimuthally equidistant projection showing all the countries in one circle,” flanked by crossed olive branches

It had never occurred to me to wonder who was originally responsible for that logo we've all seen thousands of times. Now, thanks to Michael Bierut at Design Observer, I know his name: Donal McLaughlin.

In other news, 15% of Americans think the voices in their heads have a liberal bias.

So this morning I had a look at Instapundit (don't ask me why I keep doing it) and noted that Mr. Reynolds was shocked (shocked!) to see the findings of a recent Rasmussen poll:

By a 39% to 20% margin, American adults believe that the three major broadcast networks deliver news with a bias in favor of liberals. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 25% believe that ABC, CBS, and NBC deliver the news without any bias.

That proves it, right? There really is widespread liberal bias in the media!

But wait a minute. How good are people at evaluating bias in news reports? Do these numbers really tell us anything meaningful about actual bias in the news media, or does this tell us more about the ideological lenses through which people view the media? Here is what Rasmussen Reports has to say about that:

Not surprisingly, there are huge partisan and ideological differences in the data. For example, among self-identified liberals, all of the media outlets are believed to have some net bias in favor of conservatives. . . .

Conservatives throughout the nation see things entirely differently. Sixty-two percent (62%) see a liberal bias at the major broadcast networks and 55% say the same about CNN.

So, believe it or not, biased people tend to see evidence of bias in the media! Conservatives and liberals can look at the very same news networks, and liberals will see conservative bias, and conservatives will see liberal bias! Astounding!

Is there bias in the media? Of course there is. Anyone who looks hard enough can find evidence of both liberal bias and conservative bias. But the really sad thing is not that there is bias in the news media, but that we are slowly but surely losing our sense of what unbiased journalism is even supposed to look like. We have been led to believe that balanced journalism means giving liberals and conservatives equal time to try to spin the facts their way. If we add the 39% who see liberal bias to the 20% who see conservative bias, we learn that 59% of Americans see pervasive bias of some sort the news media. And once we see begin to distrust the media, we are less likely to believe actual facts that might contradict our political beliefs; we can just dismiss anything that makes us uncomfortable as yet more evidence of bias. We will have forgotten that somewhere out there there are actual facts, facts that are not biased one way or the other, just plain old facts.

There is one more thing worth noting in the Rasmussen poll results, something truly astounding.

There is one major exception to the belief that media outlets have a liberal bias—Fox News. Thirty-one percent (31%) of Americans say it has a bias that favors conservatives while 15% say it has a liberal bias.

Yes, you read that right. Fifteen percent of Americans believe Fox News is biased in favor of liberals.

Objectivity is dead.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

President Bush says, "I strongly believe that democracy will trump totalitarianism every time."



That's a fine thing to believe, but how is that relevant to the current situation in Iraq? Yes, our democracy made mincemeat of Saddam Hussein's totalitarian regime, but that regime is long gone. What replaced it was neither democracy nor totalitarianism, but chaos. The current situation is, according to the best information I can gather, a free-for-all. Whoever has the most firepower in a given locale controls it, but only for as long as they remain. The U.S. could arguably keep the peace in any given Baghdad city block indefinitely by keeping a sufficient number of troops there, but our troops can't be everywhere at once, and by all accounts chaos returns the moment they move on to the next block.

I know that Bush would like to frame the issue in terms of fighting totalitarianism, or "Islamofascism," but that's not what we're fighting in Iraq. We're fighting anybody and everybody with a gun or an improvised explosive who feels like taking a shot at us. And Bush consistently fails to give us any indication that he understands this. He wants to fight totalitarianism, and while a totalitarian regime may eventually emerge from the chaos of Iraq, there is no totalitarian regime there today. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we must deal with the enemy we have, not the enemy we wish we had.

Rock may beat Scissors every time, but we're not fighting Scissors right now.