caroljane

It is no puzzle to me, at all. I smoked from age 16 to 33, I quit but took it up again 20 years later and I am inhaling as I speak. Before you ask, the reason I did that is, I am a damn fool, and the occasion of my re-addiction is a good story. And not that you asked, my father and my husband, both of them, the men I loved the most in my life,were smokers who died of lung cancer at the ages of 60 and 58 respectively, and I watched them die. And i am not ready to quit though I know how to do it, even on my borrowed time. And right now I want to go back to America's slide to destruction along with my own, and fantasizing that Ayn Rand is still alive and smoking.

I can't agree that the inane headlines would do much damage. They could easily be satire headlines, and caveat lector about headlines anyway. However, I have had too much fun in serious discussion about whether Rumsfeld was a Lizard Person to be unbiased on this.

jts, I seldom watch your videos, unless they are like Dog Entertains Baby, which is my fave and I have watched twice and thanks for it. As you see from above though, other people do watch them, which I presume to be a main aim of yours, and in a perverse way I admire you for achieving it. You know that everytime you post one of these things, an OLer like MEM will challenge you on the facts. Look what you made him do, you provoked him to a level of insult to which he would not otherwise descend. You know I will whack you upside the head, not everytime just to keep in practice, not because I know or care what the video is about, but because you irk me. You know that WSS will occasionally sighingly try to reason with you, hardly a fun job for anybody. You know that you will provoke our reactions and if you enjoy them, good for you. You don't seem to get much enjoyment out of life otherwise. And you know that onlookers will read the post and hear the message, and if that gives you a sense of achievement, good for you. Some of them will agree with you although they won't tell you so and you can never know for sure, but on probabilities you will have spread the word a little. The dumb, misspelled word. You are not that bad of a propagandist. I've seen worse. Well, I'm sure I've seen somebody worse somewhere. By bad propagandist I mean BAD AT PROPAGANDA. The stuff you propagandize is not uniformly bad, technically speaking. Thus in the aforementioned perverse way I have to hand it to you. Like Ed Hudgins and Gulch, you keep plugging.

Shakespeare's "speeches" aren't unrealistic or preachy, and they don't burst the microcosm of his plays. They don't interupt the art so that viewers can receive a message/lecture from the author. They don't break the "fourth wall." They are not artistically awkward, jarring or verging on propaganda. J 'O for a Muse of Fire', powerful prologue to Henry V: Bliss. Great that Branagh got his K, wasn't it? I liked his Henry better than Olivier's. To Jonathan, I couldn't agree more. And the history plays were the greatest propaganda ever written. Tudors good, Yorks bad!

Hey, you are a girl! Are you new? Welcome to OL! I have been appealing for more women here forever, obviously I am not much of a marketer.

That is really interesting. I don't know any artists except the ones I have met here on OL, but of course, people in general love to talk about their work. Maybe this guy is the minority, who doesn't like to analyse his own process or think too much about it..."Geez, I was just painting, you know...you don't suppose I think about this stuff, do you? I just paint it/write it down etc." I know there are some writers like this. I didn't see the video, I am only commenting on your post.

I see that Ethel's Sunday sermon this week leads off with a question on "Moral Luck." She should have a lot to say on this subject. She decided not to be moral once, and she hasn't had much luck since.

Of course I'm biased, as is everyone and we often discuss. I've hardly made a secret of my own bias. And I often omit to comment on things, due to my bias. But I also know that I omitted to comment in this particular case, not due to bias against Glenn Beck, but for the reasons I stated only.

...Glenn Beck giving what's good for the goose to the gander, and giving it good.More power to him. I just wish he, and everybody else on every part of the political spectrum, wouldn't do it with the dung and urine. It's all about me. ME!!

You don't get my point - it wasn't about who was satirizing what, but about ME. I didn't comment on your above examples because I never saw them at the time, and knowing what they were about wouldn't make me want to look them up. You know damn well I believe in unrestricted free speech, even if it makes me throw up. I don't feel any obligation to support any cause by pretending that I find the way it is supported by others funny, when it, the way it's supported, makes me feel sick. And same goes for the reverse. If Bill Maher had done the same thing with a Romney doll I would have written the exact same post. You may think I am being self-deluding here, and maybe so. How would I know if I were? You are welcome to chide me anytime Michael, you know that. But this time you are off the mark. My first post was a jokey reaction to your topic title only. I never clicked on the video because the keywords repelled me. For the record now that I have been acquainted with them, I don't like them and I don't want to know anymore about them. My queasiness doesn't debate the relative merits of those who provoke it. I don't read watch or read about urinary stuff if I can avoid it, but as I had already elicited a response from you in my banter, I could hardly avoid it here. Once again, Michael, you might think it is about.... (continued in #15)

One contribution to the Democrat win was that they held a better convention. The part that stands out most in my mind now was Eva Longoria. She spoke of her struggling-actor days slinging hash, and she said, "Eva the actress doesn't need a tax cut, but Eva the waitress did". Of course to the OL audience, the implication that an individual ought to get something just because they need it, is an atrocious abuse of free speech, it is evil nonsense. But to many viewers that night, not all of them achieving productively beneath the Golden Arches, it was common sense. Many people (the entire population of Canada except Jerry Story, for instance) believe rightly or wrongly that the Bush cuts, still in place, and the Pledge helped cause the fiscal crisis and more of the same will not fix it. To those people, calls for continued obstructionism are merely self-serving on the part of the legislators. To those people, the reasons for the crisis no longer matter, and they are fed up with terrified long-term theoretical predictions. The Americans among those people are saying to their elected representatives, "You're a politician,we sent you to Congress. Now act like one. Horse-trade. Fix the damn thing."

I'm starting to think about chucking. It isn't you or Glenn or free speech, it's just me. I have an extraordinarily low gag reflex threshhold on scatology and related, to the extent that there are some common words I just cannot say. Reading or hearing them doesn't bother me, it is just having to confront images. Thus I cannot appreciate bathroom humour although it has a long and honourable history in comedy, and I know Mozart whom I revere enjoyed it. You can imagine at what point I gave up trying to read Alongside Night. Drs Campbell or Hardin might speculate that this phobic condition is rooted in some forgotten childhood incident, and might be treatable, but so what. I don't want to learn to appreciate Glenn Beck sloshing jars of urine around,

Lohan has been arrested. Bowler is still at large. Justice must be seen to be done, but I hope the judge goes easy on her. Maybe probation, if she promises to avoid movie sets and get a steady job as a jewellery saleslady or nightclub waitress or something.

Further to previous jts, now that you have cleared up the question of what the Founding Fathers really wanted in 1776, maybe you could give Ed Hudgins a hand in deciding what the American electorate really wanted in 2012.

Oh, so that was the reason! I always thought it was so that the citizens* could defend themselves from attacking Indians on the way home from church. It's true, you learn something new every day. *This included the Quakers. If they felt overwhelming impulses to shoot the Indians in defence of the meeting house, they could stay true to their pacifist principles and shoot themselves. Most of the FFs were Quakers as leading Constitutional scholars have proven.

Later, our Mystery Author wrote a Greek tragedy. A beautiful princess inherits her father's kingdom, and a handsome prince from a foreign land, chosen by her father before his death, marries her. They dwell together in happiness and there is prosperity on the land. But madness overtakes her and she becomes enamored of a swineherd. The gods visit war upon the land, and the prince and one of the couple's sons die of a pestilence. A seer tells the princess that all can yet be well, if she but listen to the gods. For years she dwells with her son and daughter, ruling the kingdom well, but the madness comes again and this time the gods drive her from her kingdom, for impiety and polluting the polity. She is exiled to the distant kingdom of the late prince. There she behaves herself, somewhat, but her nature does not change. Fragments exist of tragedies about her son and daughter, as they worked out the fates of their parents in their own ways, but the entire texts have been lost.

I gave you the info on it upthread, I don't have a copy to send you.

You're right, it is different here, there is no death penalty anywhere in Canada, no supersession required. I did not watch the vid because I avoid reports about puppies, kittens etc. I am no big animal lover but just helplessly mawkishly sentimental and sad story or feel-good story, I will end up crying. I mean, I enjoy crying as much as the next person, but there is a limit.

I don't either, but how could we when they don't understand it themselves? This is Hollywood where "nobody knows anything". They likely paid Kearns a fortune for her advice which they threw out, whatever it was. Lincoln is so huge a subject that it's wise to focus on just one short period in his life however. I don't think an entire movie of his life could be done. I didn't read the bio, but I did enjoy her biography of Johnson. I saw the biopic, with Randy Quaid as Lyndon B,, and he knocked off every sock I had. Wonderful performance. What an actor. It is tragic that he went crazy. Randy Quaid is now a refugee here in Canada, where he just blends in with the crowd.

I thought it was just me. Reading a previous post of Jerry's on alcohol, sent me straight to the pub in a suicidal depression.(The self-medication alleviated my condition). Maybe he is trying to kill us.

PS to previous post It must also have been incredibly difficult to write.

Barbara Branden wrote the (to date) definitive biography of Ayn Rand, The Passion of Ayn Rand. It is excellent by every standard, journalistic, scholarly, literary. It is one of the best biographies I have ever read, and without vanity, I have probably read more of them than most members here except the Corners, but then I have had more time to do it as I am very old.

I meant only, it doesn't help your argument, as an argument. Because it opens you up for the response: "No doubt some voters want taxes raised on the rich, but just couldn't bear to vote for a Hawaiian because of that terrible vacation on Maui", etc. (I paraphrase your argument as, "A majority doesn't provide a mandate, because the voters don't really want all the things the person they voted for promised, ..and we can prove it by exit polls etc about every issue.." all you are doing is stating the obvious (voters have mixed motives) and inviting the question, "Should a majority provide a mandate?" which you would probably not want to address. Of course it should, when I personally want it to. Of course it shouldn't, when the bonehead majority allows a mandate for evil, destructive actions. Democracy is a very bad system of government. It's the worst, as Churchill(I think) famously said, except for all the others.

Psychologizing the voters in this way does not really support your argument.

If Lincoln had never done anything with his life except write the Gettysburg address, he would still be immortal.