I just stumbled across this YouTube clip called "Origin Of Stupidity" and found it hilarious. She's really smart, witty, and the accent combined with all that curly blonde hair is pretty irresistible.
I clicked over to YouTube and watched more of her clips. I don't agree with all of it, but she's a riot, and there's that accent...
UPDATE: She's got a blog too.
Ahh... the wisdom of late 60's sitcoms.
Hat tip to Dragnet and Where Are My Keys for reminding me of how useless liberal hippies were, still are, and always will be.
This rant was posted on the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler yesterday, and it was too good to pass up so I added a few photos to spruce it up and posted it here on the blog for future reference.
If you read any objective book about the United States role in World War II you will see that it was our industrial might that most concerned the Axis. We were the manufacturing giants of the world, and we turned all our production towards defeating the Axis of evil. Our companies manufactured jeeps, tanks, LCVPs, trucks’ planes, and other instruments of war…..heck, I have an old WW2 M1 bayonet that was manufactured by Union Fork and Hoe, a farming tool company. It was our production might, and our ability to turn that production over to the winning of the war that turned the tide. We overwhelmed our enemy by sheer production numbers, a good example being how a second rate tank like the M4 sherman prevailed over far superior German armor, we just swamped the Tigers and Panthers with numbers……It was our industrial might, and belief in our nation and it’s cause that won the day.
Fast forward to 1960, and a new president makes a promise that America will put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. With our technological and industrial superiority, and our belief in America’s ability to meet this challenge…..we did it in less than 9 years…..and we did it 6 times. We were well on the way to the vision realized in the book and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was a vision that had us leading mankind into the heavens, breaking the restraints of this planet and taking the steps to building new worlds. We were leaders, we were explorers, and we were great.
But something happened to us as a people and a nation, something that restrained us and curbed our boldness as leaders and innovators and liberators. We became timid, and wracked with guilt and self accusation, and we grew uneasy about our role as the shining light of the world. We became obsessed with how the rest of the world perceived us, whether they liked us or not, and we became contrite. Couple that with the stifling of our industry by oppressive unions and government restraints, and the engine of democracy that was America began to slow to a crawl. Exploration and innovation and industrial might withered…..it was too expensive, and we needed that money to prop up a growing dependant class who couldn’t or wouldn’t support themselves. After all, we thought, shouldn’t everyone share in the dream of America?….shouldn’t everyone benefit from the sweat and labor of those who take care of themselves, and work hard to support their families?….and shame on you hard working Americans who want to keep your hard earned money to spend on your children’s education and your house payments….don’t you know we need that money to pay the hotel room rates for the displaced ungrateful Katrina welfare spongers?
Our new collective guilt, and the lust of politicians to enslave the dependant class as a voter base guaranteed that our forward progress and role as a world leader would no longer be a priority. The new priority is the expansion of government into every aspect of American life….from how much of our wages we take home, to what kind of light bulbs we use, to taxing us for using plastic bags at the grocery store….to telling corporations who their CEO is and what kind of products they can produce. We can’t innovate or explore without the approval of this or that bureaucracy…..we can’t wage total war on the enemies of freedom loving people lest we offend them or violate their human rights. We can’t lead the world forward anymore, it’s not our place to do so…..it’s too imperialistic.
So rather than offend anyone with our arrogance. We’ll abandon our role as the world leader, we’ll stop climbing the stairway of progress and freedom, we’ll stop extending our hand back to those struggling behind us….and exhorting them to “follow us!!!” We’ll allow ourselves to be drug back down to the cellar by those who are jealous of our freedoms and goodness. The dream of America is considered a quaint and antiquated notion today. We live in a world that doesn’t require a leader anymore, it doesn’t “require” a guarantor of freedom anymore, it is a world that requires a diaper change….being cowed as it has into perpetual navel gazing and hand wringing.
On the frickin' money. America started it's long, slow slide into the dustbin of history right about the time all the hippies got the right to vote or went into journalism. Coincidence?
Hat tip to CmBlake6.
Here is a though provoking pice by The Interface that I stumbled across the other day. He takes up a question posed by author Neil Postman in his book "Amusing Ourselves To Death". Which apocalyptic vision of the future is more correct, Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" or George Orwell's "1984"?
Postman’s Forward places before us a contrast between the equally chilling prophecies of two of the twentieth century’s earlier writers. George Orwell wrote in his novel, 1984, of a totalitarian society that burned books, of a Big Brother who militantly deprived the people of their autonomy, maturity and history. On the other hand, Aldous Huxley’s vision in his Brave New World foresees the day when “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” To quote Postman more extensively on this contrast,
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
As the ramifications of the last election are slowly (or not so slowly, depending on your level of consciousness) dawning on this country, I want to propose an expansion to Postman’s hypothesis that extends his predictions further into the 21st century in which we now find ourselves.
My hypothesis is based on the fact that both dystopias envisioned by Orwell and Huxley share a common denominator: the death of critical thought, indeed, of any thought, where “Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think.” The difference is the executioner and his methods, but the result is the same.
The Interface finds distrubing parallels in recent trends that lead him to believe we are heading toward a Brave New World:
Postman’s thesis that Huxley was right has been born out by history: we have become [...] a culture whose thought processes have been slowly shut down by a shift to the worldview that the visceral is superior to the cerebral, that feelings trump fact, and that the image is more important than the content of the message. All too many train wrecks along the cultural landscape, not the least of which being the most recent election, hinge upon the departure of average American’s neural material as he/she narcissistically gazes ever more longingly into his own navel (pay MY mortgage, Mr. President!).
Click over the The Interface to read the rest, including his chilling conclusion that we may arrive at one of these only in prelude to the other one.
Hat tip to Where Are My Keys.
Now that I'm done railing against the trivialization of our culture I think it's time for another addition to the Babes section of my blog. (-:
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