More Rim Shots

1. I love this business of the international community being "outraged" that the government of The Country Formerly Known as Burma -- TCFKB for short -- is resisting humanitarian aid in the wake of the cyclone. Let me see now, is this the same international community that has been basically ignoring decades of starvation in North Korea? Almost seems like it has to be the same hypocritical bunch.

2. Obama "might consider" Hillary as a running mate. Somehow the phrase "when Hell freezes over" seems to have fallen on deaf ears in the Obama camp. Hillary has already been "co-president" for 8 long years -- why take a demotion now? Surely she can't hope to reprise Dick Cheney's remarkable career as "vice president" -- hint hint. Who could? The office is normally synonymous with "Loserville", and with "one-way ticket to total obscurity". Sure, there are exceptions, but Hillary is just not the type to sit still while someone plants the kiss of death on her corpy lips.

3. A little word game -- easily missed -- appeared in a brief article about Pope Benedict's comments on the Church's stand on birth control. It starts out by saying that the Pope "acknowledged that the Vatican's instructions against birth control are complicated..." But the direct quote is "The teaching laid out in the 'Humanae [V]itae' encyclical isn't easy." What's the difference? It's a matter of translation, and what the American media always want to think about the Catholic Church. The opposite of "easy", in this case, is not "complicated". The instructions are very simple and clear -- no artificial birth control, period. And ditto artificial procreation methods. What's _not_ easy is the compliance part, i.e. it goes against the carnal and hedonistic baseline of Western culture, which influences even practicing Catholics and contaminates "liberal" Catholic teachings on the matter. It really boils down to self control, and that is a rare commodity in this day and age. And yet, for some strange reason, civilizations which dominate are, in the long run, characterized by self-control, both by rulers and the citizenry. Civilizations on the way to meltdown are characterized by the opposite. So which side of this divide are the "Western democracies" on? That's your assignment for next time.

4. I love this. "In Norway, a Vietnamese man lost about $35,000 after he was led to believe that mixing the cash with a special liquid would double its value." So here's my question -- how can someone who's that stupid even wind up _having_ $35,000? A lottery winner, maybe? More likely -- he was the beneficiary of one of the U.S. government's "small business set-aside" contracts.

5. The South Koreans spend more time on the job than the citizens of any other free-market democracy, according to the 2008 Factbook of the Organization for Economic Develoment and Cooperation. They are also second to last in leisure spending, first in suicide, and last in bearing children. Any chance we could air-drop a few million copies of "Leisure, the Basis of Culture", by Josef Pieper, on South Korea?