Sharks With Freakin' Lepers on Their Heads!

Paul Hindraker over at PowerLine needs a dictionary. He recently wrote the following of JFK:

Kennedy didn't even like to be bothered by issues like the minimum wage (and indeed civil rights). He wanted to focus like a lazar on protecting our national security.

From the OED:

lazar - n., (archaic) a poor and diseased person, especially a leper.

Dr. Stupid

No matter how low the standards are for bloggers you can count on James Taranto at Opinion Journal's Best of the Web to drive them southward. The man is clearly retarded. Or a compulsive liar. Or both. I’ll explain. Commenting on a letter by Dr. Susan Roberts, he wrote the following bizarre passage:

..she is not a real doctor but a professor of political science, at North Carolina's Davidson College

A position for which she has a Doctorate of Philosophy. That makes her a doctor. A real doctor. Now, she’s not a Doctor of Medicine, but she is a doctor, nonetheless. Clearly, many readers pointed this out to him, but he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care. One respondent mentions Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. which elicits the following response from Jimmy the blogtard:

We make an exception for Dr. King because he's an American hero. But as for "Dr. Roberts," we'll start calling her that as soon as one of our complaining readers lets her perform surgery on him.

Actually, James, we refer to Martin Luther King, Jr. as a doctor not because he’s “an American hero” (a daunting qualification for any doctoral program) but because he has a PhD from Boston University. In fact, James, there are many different types of doctorates; there are medical doctorates and theological doctorates and educational doctorates and legal doctorates. If there was a booger-eating moron doctorate, no doubt you’d have it.

Mirengoff is an Idiot

Over at PowerLine Paul Mirengoff advertises his own ignorance. Writing about a recent study which casts doubt on the existence of a “boy crisis” he comments “I lack the expertise to weigh in on this issue…” He then weighs in on that issue for almost 200 words. He concludes his utterly worthless posting with this:

…my daughter reports from summer camp that her nine year-old bad boys are as unruly and obnoxious as she expected, but that they cry when subjected to discipline. That's what I call a boy crisis.

Ah, yes, nothing really substitutes for actual research and knowledge quite like some brat’s observations from summer camp. Move over, Max Weber.

And by the way, Paul, if male crybabies constitutes a “boy crisis” then you three bed wetters over at PowerLine are nothing less than a Chernobyl of male meltdown.

Prepping the Language

Here’s an interesting use of the word “prep” from yesterday’s New York Times. The article is about the massacre at Haditha and the accounts of it given by the marines under investigation. The squad of soldiers has entered a house from which they have received fire (or so they claim), then…

A marine with experience in the deadly house-to-house fighting in Falluja a year earlier rolled in a grenade and another marine fired blind "clearing rounds" into the room, Mr. Puckett, Sergeant Wuterich's lawyer, said.

The technique is known as "clearing by fire," said a marine who was with a nearby squad that day but who asked not to be identified because his role in the events is under investigation. "You stick the weapon around and spray the room," he said. "It's called prepping the room."

News Round-Up

It turns out Hugo Chavez is sitting on a shit load of oil. True, most of it is sludge, but it’s better to have 230+ billion barrels of oil sludge than not to have 230+ billion barrels of oil sludge.

Recess is being cut back at many schools across the country. Some schools are eliminating it altogether as they try to meet various mandated educational goals. It strikes me, though, that the real, if unintentional, educational goal here is to get the kids used to working for long hours without a break. Get them in the harness early.

Dale Chihuly is a big, crying, one-eyed baby. If you want to see glassworkers with real talent – here and here.

In The Weekly Standard, David Gelernter reviews The Moral Imagination written by Gertrude Himmelfarb - who just happens to be the mom of his boss, Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol. And guess what? He loves it!!

Finally, Immanuel Wallerstein nails it:

The United States became the unquestioned hegemonic power in the period 1945-1970 and shaped a world-system to its liking. The United States became the premier economic producer, the dominant political force, and the cultural center of the world-system. The United States, in short, ran the show, at least for a while.

Now, the United States is in visible decline. More and more analysts are willing to say this openly, even if the official line of the U.S. establishment is to deny this vigorously, just as a certain portion of the world left insists on the continued hegemony of the United States. But clear-minded realists on all sides recognize that the U.S. star is growing dimmer.