Baffled am I

Today I'm utterly baffled by what I just saw. Standing on the back deck, smoking a cigarette, I witnessed a pickup truck drive by with a twenty-foot log strapped down to the trailer... with an out-board motor attached at the back end. I have no way of knowing if the driver is on his way for some Sunday yachting in January, or simply delivering both a log and a motor to the same destination.

I wish I'd had my camera.

Naomi Klein: Half-wit

Smart enough to recognize that the boycott is an effective measure, dumb enough not to recognize it's only effective against parties which value stability and progress:

The relevance of the South African model is that it proves [boycott] tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

[Emphasis mine]

To be clear, Klein here is advocating that our western world (a world made rich by economic trade) affect the economic destruction of a "small and trade-dependent" country whose success is based on the same model. She's not just anti-Israel, she's anti-western-civilization. That her self-loathing opinions are published at all is a testament to our tolerance of fools like her. Even in a world-wide recession, she's in no danger of losing her job by writing this. Damn but we're rich! Rich enough to support a leisure-class of critics who pine for our destruction.

(Via: Hot Air)

P.J. O'Rourke on "the failed Obama Presidency"

From The Weekly Standard:

In the language of politics there is only one translation for the phrase "hope and change," to wit, "big, fat government." Mr. Obama, if you're going to give us big, fat government, you need to be a big, fat politician. You need to be a Tip O'Neill, a Teddy Kennedy, a Richard Daley, a Bill Clinton at the very least. And you don't seem to be a big, fat anything--literally or otherwise. You seem to be .  .  . smart and organized. Like Jimmy Carter!

So we may speak without compunction of the failed Obama presidency.

Clever stuff! He's just riffing, of course. Playing with words in the way that only comes natural to a select group of talented commentators. But the words, "It's only funny because it's true," are cold consolation to a lover of limited government such as myself.

Early on in that seemingly interminable campaign of '07/'08, Obama declared war on cynicism. But P.J. is out to prove that the cynics have the upper hand in that battle.

For myself, I wish our new President well. I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude before launching my own critique, round about Jan 21st. Then it's on like Donkey Kong.