Overnight Open Thread (6-28-2015)

Quote of the Day I - Our New Reality

Exchanges established by the federal government are exchanges established by the state. Rachel Dolezal is black. Iran will honor an agreement not to develop nuclear weapons. ISIS is a JV team. There's an epidemic of sexual assaults on college campuses. Michael Brown had his hands up and pleaded "don't shoot." Caitlyn Jenner is a woman. Obamacare is working. 2+2 doesn't necessarily equal 4. The polar ice caps are disappearing. The IRS is doing a decent job. The border is secure.We've ended two wars responsibly. Hillary Clinton turned over all work-related e-mails. An $18,200,000,000,000 debt can grow without mention. People who burn down buildings and overturn cars aren't thugs. The OPM hack is manageable. We've reset relations with Russia. Entitlement reform can be kicked down the road. We're more respected around the world.

-- Peter Kirsanow in Reality Is Now Discretionary

Quote of the Day II - dar al Gay Edition

Two plus two equals five. A severed head plus "Allahu Akbar!" equals "Nothing to do with Islam." Network screenings of Gone With The Wind plus Uncle Ben's rice equals blatant incitement to mass murder. A nice chichi gay couple at 27 Elm Street and a firebreathing imam and his four child brides at 29 Elm Street equals the social harmony of a multiculti utopia.

Where is this story headed? The warriors of the caliphate divide the planet into the dar al Islam and the dar al harb - the house of war. In reality, it's a struggle between the dar al Islam and the dar al Gay: Liberty in the fin de civilisation west means sexual liberty and nothing else - which is why one consequence of yesterday's decision is that freedom of expression and freedom of religion will increasingly be confined to what Justice Alito called the deepest recesses of your home.

-- Mark Steyn

Quote of the Day III

After all, the greengrocer was a threat to the system not because of any physical or actual power he had, but because his action went beyond itself, because it illuminated its surroundings and, of course, because of the incalculable consequences of that illumination. In the post-totalitarian system, therefore, living within the truth has more than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension. If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why it must be suppressed more severely than anything else.

In the post-totalitarian system, truth in the widest sense of the word has a very special import, one unknown in other contexts. In this system, truth plays a far greater (and, above all, a far different) role as a factor of power, or as an outright political force.

-- Vaclav Havel in the Power of the Powerless

Meanwhile the Gleischaltung immediately rolls on:

Politico Mag Writer Says 'It's Time to Legalize Polygamy.'

Time Writer: Now's the Time To End Tax Exemptions for Religious Institutions

Politico Writer Says Gay Marriage is Superior to Regular Marriage

Dailybeast Writer: Did The Four Dissenting Justices In Gay Marriage Case Just Suggest Treason?

Andy McCarthy: It's Time To Give Up on the Supreme Court as a Court

Here former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy argues that we should just admit that the Supreme Court has now become a supra-legislature and treat it as such.

Did you notice that there was not an iota of speculation about how the four Progressive justices would vote?

There was never a shadow of a doubt. In the plethora of opinions generated by these three cases, there is not a single one authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor. There was no need. They are the Left's voting bloc. There was a better chance that the sun would not rise this morning than that any of them would wander off the reservation.

...And it is not so much that they move in lockstep. It is that no one expects them to do anything but move in lockstep - not their fellow justices, not the political branches, and certainly not the commentariat, right or left.

It is simply accepted that these justices are not there to judge. They are there to vote. They get to the desired outcome the same way disparate-impact voodoo always manages to get to discrimination: Start at the end and work backwards. Guiding precedents are for the quaint business of administering justice. In the social justice business, the road never before traveled will do if one less traveled is unavailable. But there's a problem. Once it has become a given that a critical mass of the Supreme Court is no longer expected, much less obliged, to do law, then the Court is no longer a legal institution. It is a political institution.

So forget Constitutional strict constructionalism and all that and simply strive to get conservative electors into our third legislative body to start voting against the progressive bloc.

John Hinderaker of Power Line suggests that if we're now in a post-constitutional era, the conservative justices should start discovering new 'fundamental rights' more to our side's liking:

For example, how about a "fundamental right" not to pay income taxes in a percentage exceeding that which other Americans are charged? Why isn't the progressive income tax a violation of the equal protection clause? That is a much stronger argument than the one the Court has just accepted on gay marriage. Or, how about a theory that the Internal Revenue Service is violating Americans' right of privacy-that same right of privacy that the Court found among the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution's actual provisions-in seeking extensive information about taxpayers' finances?

Or how about a fundamental right to affordable energy-or, rather, to be free of government policies that unreasonably raise the cost of energy? If the Supreme Court discovered such a right, the EPA's anti-coal regulations would be unconstitutional. You could write a decision in support of such a "fundamental right" that would be at least as persuasive as Justice Kennedy's "fortune cookie" travesty. What is more fundamental than heating your home and driving your car? To paraphrase Justice Kennedy, what if a voice cries out in the night, saying, "Honey! Can you turn the heat up?"

If conservatives are willing to abandon the archaic notion that the Supreme Court is a court and not a super-legislature, there is no telling what conservative policies might be advanced.

Post-Obergefell, Dissent Is Now The Highest Form Of Bigotry

And must be suppressed.

I thought about this in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, especially when a friend alerted me that the editors of The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, PA, had declared, within minutes of the announcement of the decision: "As a result of Friday's ruling, PennLive/The Patriot-News will no longer accept, nor will it print, op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage."

In a tweet later in the morning, the paper's Editorial and Opinions Editor John L. Micek (until recently a state capitol reporter-yikes!) explained himself curtly: "This is not hard: We would not print racist, sexist or anti-Semitic letters. To that, we add homophobic ones. Pretty simple."

...This is why it was important for the LGBT movement that same-sex marriage be affirmed by the high court rather than piecemeal in the states: Statutes are contingent and temporary, dependent on shifting allegiances and majorities; the Supreme Court is permanent, accountable to no one. The people and our elected representatives are subjective and unreliable; the Supreme Court is objective and irrefutable.

The Patriot-News isn't censoring bigotry. If it were, it would have been rejecting anti-same-sex marriage letters yesterday as well as today. It is censoring dissent-dissent from the new orthodoxy proclaimed by our secular Magisterium, dissent from the prevailing viewpoint of our oligarchs, dissent from the state. And we are to conform ourselves to this orthodoxy not because it is good, but because the state so ordains it.

The Patriot-News later backed off a bit and said that they will allow letters with wrong-think about gay marriage for a limited amount of time.

The 20 Hottest Conservative Women In The New Media for 2015

Grexit Coming: Greek Banks, Stock Market Closed Tomorrow, Capital Controls Imposed

The Greek government called for a referendum on July 5th on whether to accept the ECB bailout terms or leave the Euro. But events may be already overtaking their plans.

Greece has moved to close its banks and impose capital controls to prevent financial chaos following the breakdown of bailout talks with its international creditors. The dramatic move on Sunday night came after the European Central Bank announced it would freeze the amount of emergency loans it supplied to keep the Greek banking system afloat.Officials said the bank closure would last for several days and would be accompanied by limits yet to be announced on bank transfers abroad and withdrawals from cash machines. The cashing of cheques would be halted and fixed term deposits would be locked down. The Athens stock exchange was also set to be closed.

WWII Weapons In The Syrian Civil War

Each weapon is vignetted with a representative still image, followed by still photos and video footage of the actual weapon(s) in question being used in the conflict. Notable weapons include a chromed or nickeled Beretta 38 submachine gun, a cache of MAS 36 rifles, what appears to be a rearsenaled or civilian production M1 Garand, a PTRS-41 14.5x114mm anti-materiel rifle, and of course several of the StG-44s captured from a Syrian government stockpile by rebel fighters.

What It's Like to Be in the Blue Man Group

In the smaller shows there is typically seven full time guys. In the bigger shows, like Vegas, there are upwards of nine guys full time. The reason is because we do so many shows. In New York, the typical Broadway run is eight shows a week, and we will often do much more than that. On a slow week we'll do 12, and on a high week we can do upwards of 20. So we need those extra guys to do those shows. This is also another reason why guys stick around for so long, because there is less of a grind that way. There will be slow weeks and you can take leaves of absence to do other artworks. Its just a much more stable, supportive environment that way. And for a theater gig. it was 12 years with 401K, full benefits for me, my wife, and my kid, a really stable setup.

So immediately after the show, we go and clean up a little bit. And this has been a really important part of the show since the beginning, we go and meet the audience as they're leaving the theater. That's a really special part of the show too, or one that I've always enjoyed because you can shed the character slightly. We always talk about that it's 80 percent  Blue Man and 20 percent just yourself at that point. So if someone comes to you and says, 'That show meant so much to me,' you can very quietly say, 'Thanks a lot.' We're not the hardcore character in that moment even though we're still in make up.

The point of that part is so that the person right next to you can have that connection, but the person across the room still just sees a Blue Man. ...So that's about 15-20 minutes. Then we go downstairs, and as we're getting out of makeup, in this other important Blue Man tradition, we have about a 20 minute conversation with the stage manager of the night and the band. We talk about all these different parts of the show. And this is why, again, that guys can stay in it for so long, because it is always, always, always considered a work in progress. There's always stuff that can be done better. Just because there's a guy who's been doing it for 12 or 15 or 16 years, doesn't give them any kind of 'Get Out of Jail Free' card. We're working on stuff day-to-day just as much as trainees are basically.

Early 80s Comedies: Cocaine Fueled Cinematic Insanity

DC Cab (1983)

When Mr. T is the most subtle and nuanced character in your film, you know there's issues. You can't tell me Gary Busey isn't on near-lethal levels of coke in this movie; it's almost scary to watch. Also, take note of the mad inclination of all the male characters to start randomly dry humping.

Sad News at Casa Maetenloch

On Friday we had to put one of our cats to sleep due at aggressive liver cancer. We had Kitty for 9 years but he was already 5 to 8 years old when we rescued him from living (unhappily) under a neighbor's back porch so he was an old cat. He had a very happy life during that time and even his final hours with us in the garden were as happy as they could be given his condition.

After we had had him for a while Mrs. Maetenloch demanded that he be given a real, official name so I dubbed him Kittybot Cougar Unit12. She was not exactly pleased with this. So he became known as Kitty to friends and family and Cougar to outsiders.

He was a good-natured cat who truly loved to be with us and people in general. He was happiest just being wherever humans were and would follow us from room to room to hang out. In fact many an ONT was created with Kitty sleeping at the base of my desk. From waiting in the bathroom in the morning while we got ready for work to greeting us at door when we got home to sleeping in our bed at night, he was a constant happy presence in our lives for nine years. And now we have a Kitty-sized hole in our lives.

RIP Kitty, a good loving cat.

Weekly Commenter Standings

Top 10 commenters:
1 [720 comments] 'mynewhandle' [101.09 posts/day]
2 [384 comments] 'Ricardo Kill'
3 [367 comments] 'J.J. Sefton'
4 [360 comments] 'Christopher Taylor'
5 [355 comments] 'just saying'
6 [350 comments] 'Anna Puma'
7 [348 comments] 'Boss Moss'
8 [341 comments] 'rickb223'
9 [334 comments] 'Grump928(C)'
10 [328 comments] 'Mike Hammer, etc., etc.'

Top 10 sockpuppeteers:
1 [86 names] 'The Political Hat' [12.07 unique names/day]
2 [63 names] 'Turd Ferguson'
3 [49 names] 'Prince Ludwig the Indestructible'
4 [47 names] 'HAL 9000'
5 [46 names] 'Mickey Shwarma'
6 [44 names] 'Uncle Busyhands'
7 [39 names] 'Article V'
8 [38 names] 'Mike Hammer, etc., etc.'
9 [38 names] 'wth'
10 [37 names] 'Miley Cyrus'

The group. Banned on 12 universities.

Where it's at - the Twitter

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posted by Maetenloch at 11:08 PM

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