Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Elitism : The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources (from the FreeDictionary ) Mr. B, one of my fellow Post-Ralphaelites (yes, there is more than one of us) stopped by the house the other day and our conversation turned to the current political campaign. Said he, "I don't get why people consider Barack Obama an elitist. He came from a single parent family and put himself through college." What makes someone an elitist, anyway? Social status? Barack Obama : a young man from a broken family (his father and mother split up when he was 2) who lived with his grandparents until he graduated from high school. John Sidney McCain III : third generation navy, whose father and grandfather were 4-star U.S Navy admirals. Net worth? Barack Obama : $ 1.4 million (most of it from royalties on his writing) John McCain : $ 40.3 million...

Are you an unemployed spook? Polish up your resume. I don't know what part of my search criteria kicked this out, but Monster.com thought the following might be something I'd be interested in (warning: it may be delisted before you read it). DynCorp International , which bills itself as a "Global Integration Solutions" provider (i.e. another corporate-run mercenary outfit like Blackwater ), is looking to fill the following position in Baghdad. Senior Human Intelligence Advisor Duty Description: Assigned as senior intelligence advisor on matters concerning human Intelligence and counter-terrorism matters. Provides advise on collection, intelligence analysis, and investigations related to terrorists groups, insurgency, criminal activities, and related threats to include subversion, sabotage, and espionage threats . Knowledgeable on matters pertaining to criminal intelligence including organized crime, financial tracking and kidnapping for profit. Mentors and assists th...

Say you are an organization with a certain...let's say...political agenda. And there are a number of organizations who oppose, vigorously oppose , your agenda. Wouldn't it be useful to have a person on your payroll, a spy , in the upper echelons, maybe even on the board, of these opposing groups? Does it sound like some Cold War tale? Commies on the school board? Fellow Travelers in the State Department? Mary Lou Sapone, a "research consultant" ( oh yeah! ) for a "private security firm," has been spying on gun-control organizations at the behest of the National Rifle Association. For decades . Private Security Firm : a company offering services normally associated with the police or military. Blackwater is a private security firm. You know, mercenaries . The NRA likes to put forth the simple-minded fiction that it is just a group of good Americans standing up for their rights. Their actions suggest otherwise. It's been my experience in life that peop...

The other day I did something really stupid: I trusted Microsoft. The youngest son asked me if I could help him change which was the boot drive on his fancy gaming box (I won't get into the ugly particulars of this project). He's pretty smart, but I'm the Alpha Geek in the house. My mistake: I didn't do my research before sitting down at the keyboard. While at the XP Recovery Console, I ran a command called "FIXBOOT." It sounded like what I wanted to do, and indeed subsequent cursory research suggested that was the right command. But when I rebooted (without the old C: drive) I got " NTLDR is missing. Press CTR+ALT+DEL to restart. " The hair on the back of my neck now being to rise, I told Youngest Son to put the old C: drive back in and then reboot. Several attempts later, I get into Safe Mode and try and look at the drive I'd been working on. Bad Mojo -- screwy filenames, missing stuff, wrong size partition. Oh my. By now I've figured ou...

It's truly pathetic watching John McCain decide to start rolling around in the mud, even before either he or Barak Obama officially is nominated, because he does it so badly. George W. Bush's team had Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove running things. Rove was the Prince of Fucking Darkness, and his ads were evil and effective. The man will roast in hell, but he was good at what he did (in the same way that Joseph Goebbels was good at what he did). I gather McCain has a bunch of his old golf buddies running things, given the general lack of competence so far displayed. Of all the McCain commercials I've seen, so far not a one has anything to say about John McCain. Is that because he has nothing to say? One of the most recent is worthy of mention: Celebrity (the so-called "Britney-Paris" ad), in which flashes of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are followed by Obama, surrounded by enthusiastic crowds. The female voice over says "He's the biggest celebri...

Jonah Goldberg's recent essay, " A Losing Salute ," puzzled me at first. Why would Goldberg, National Review Editor at Large, and author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning , bother to write a long whiny essay about Tommie Smith and John Carlos's black power salute at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City? Surely the upcoming Beijing Olympics couldn't have triggered any remembered outrage, since Goldberg wasn't born until the next year. Says Mr. Goldberg: ...this was 1968, not 1938. By the end of the 1960s, America had seen two decades of steady — if too slow — racial progress. The black-power vision of an irredeemably “racist Amerikkka” was all but blind to the desegregation of the military, the accomplishments of Owens and Robinson, and the civil-rights acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and even 1968. This smug little prick seems to have overlooked the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Ke...

The Dallas Fire Department got a call today around 5 AM about a report of a man on fire on a utility pole. When they got there they found several cut copper wires on the ground and the man, his clothing in tatters and burned away from his body, atop the utility pole's power transformer. During what police speculate was an attempted copper wire theft, the victim grabbed the wrong wire and got 7,620 volts for his trouble. The force of the shock caused his skin to adhere to the metal transformer. Rescuers had to cut or peel him away before they could get him down. In addition to receiving third degree burns over 50% of his body, the would-be thief faces third degree felony charges, If he lives long enough. While I am full of the milk of human kindness, it is hard to work up a lot of sympathy in cases like this. With the rise in the price of copper in the US and elsewhere, copper theft has become a real problem in the last few years. Thieves will ruin $500,000 worth of equipment or p...