As always, I’m better than you. I cook onions.

Blogger extraordinaire Erick Erickson has a fascinating essay linked via Hotair yesterday. It’s called Reality Check. He definitely needs one.

In truth we offered him one of those back in 2012 when he was so impressed with his own media ascendancy that he decided to disdain all bloggers who weren’t interested in becoming partisan political activists.

So imagine our surprise when we read yesterday that he is repelled by the “politicization of everything.”

He begins with typical modesty.

Two nights ago I posted my thoughts on being on radio. I followed it up on radio yesterday afternoon. In both, I made this observation:

No one likes people who talk politics all the time. I’ve spent an entire segment once on the fine art of browning onions in butter. And you know what? It’s been a widely requested segment of my show for repeat airings. People care about more than politics and, on radio, they want to know the guy they’re listening to on the way home does too.

First, it is absolutely true — I spent 20 minutes on the radio talking about browning onions in butter and how cookbooks lie that it only takes 10 minutes. It has been a highly sought after segment of my radio show. But second, people were downright offended that I’d suggest there is more to life than politics. I’ve gotten angry emails from a lot of people on the left and the right.

On this point, hat’s off to him. If he can mesmerize a radio audience for 20 minutes on the subject of browning, er, caramelizing onions, he’s the Limbaugh of cooking. I’ve watched dozens of cooking shows involving this procedure, some by Michelin starred chefs, and I’ve never heard any of them take as much as 20 minutes to explain how to do it. But he’s not the Limbaugh of politics.

He leaps from onions to these extraordinary statements:

When I point out I find some things the President does, like talking about sci-fi, endearing and find Michelle Obama to be a very beautiful First Lady, my conservative friends go insane. While I was at CNN they were convinced I had sold out to the liberal media. Now, at Fox, it just perplexes them.

When I talk about my faith and my views on gay marriage or abortion, liberals are convinced I must be lying when I say I have gay friends and pro-abortion friends and we get along just fine and they are wonderful people. Surely I must think they are going to hell and how could those people be friends with me. Folks, I think we’re all going to hell, but by the grace of God.

There are subjects I do not tackle with friends with whom I disagree because I value their friendship far more than I value my view on some subject that divides our ability to be friends. As a Christian, to me evangelism and sharing my faith is much more about being a good friend to someone, regardless of their faith or world view, than about being right in an argument or going to some beach in Mexico to work on my tan while I hammer a nail or two in a hut and speak Jesusese to a total stranger.

Jesusese? What an ass. This isn’t Christianity. It’s a recycling of the “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” self-help pap from the 1960s. It’s also a beautiful illustration of what I said in my post about Erickson a year ago:

It’s just that the post struck me oddly. Simultaneously defensive, almost guiltily so, and yet condescending in the extreme.

What we’re seeing here is someone who is perhaps incurably shallow. He builds himself a successful media career talking about the nuts and bolts of policy issues, campaign races, where conservatives should align themselves right now to score political wins, and just as with his own avowed religion, he misses everything important. While he thrives on the politicization of everything that has secured him gigs on CNN, Fox, Laura Ingraham, etc, he is naturally bored by any exclusive focus on what he clearly has come to regard as a game. Post and riposte. No harm, no foul. Just talk.

But it isn’t a game. Just as Christianity isn’t. The country and the whole world are at stake.

He equates gay marriage with abortion. Well, same-sex marriage may be a game, a Hollywood-driven fad that will blow itself up in the reality of gay male promiscuity and lesbian cat fighting. Abortion is not a game. I’ve lost patience with everyone who can’t see that it’s a sickening, violent act of murder that can’t be camouflaged with obscene euphemisms like “women’s reproductive health.” I don’t want to be “good friends to them.” And I certainly don’t think they are “wonderful people.” It’s a deal killer, an ender of friendships. Final.

The same with the current political environment in the United States. The freedoms that are being attacked, being lost day by day, will ultimately kill millions if not billions of people. I don’t give a shit about Obama’s “endearing” sci-fi interests or basketball brackets. I don’t give a shit about Michelle Obama’s looks, especially given that the only thing I notice about her is a constant resentful sneer. That’s not attractive to me in any woman, let alone a First Lady of the United States.

I don’t care about political horse races, congressional maneuverings and deals, and the hijinks of the Fed and the unlimited number of government agencies whose overpaid secretaries and deputies and unions seek to impose their will via this and that regulatory gambit. I care about what the loss of integrity and morality and commitment to our heritage are doing to the greatest nation ever established. That’s not politicization. It’s dirty, filthy, evil politics. Erickson doesn’t know the difference. Because he has good friends at CNN and the country club.

Politicization is something else. It’s the conversion of the MSM from investigative journalism to a leftist propaganda organ intent on injecting political opinions into every aspect of our contact with news, entertainment, and education. Why people are getting angry. Because there’s no place left to be free of idiotic insults on traditional values and faith without disconnecting entirely. Meaning we are being driven fiercely out of the national debate about who and what we are and should be. The Ericksons are the jolly whores who facilitate the process by propping up the pretense that we have a voice lefties tolerate.

Is there more to life than politics? Sure. But politics gets incredibly important when it starts suppressing, oppressing, and costing human life. Everyone here knows that I talk about more than politics. I don’t, however, regard politics as merely a tool for getting attention.

But I’ll give Erick the last word, because his last words really do tell the tale. For him it really is all about him. The good news is that he’s just above the rest of us. The good Christian with wonderful pro-abortion friends who tells his nominal conservative allies to go to hell for (Wow!) criticizing him. Try that on for size.

…I just cannot understand why so many self-described Christian conservatives are so angry so constantly that they get mad at the suggestion there is more to life than politics.

Truth is, there is more to life than politics. And while you and I can find things that outrage us and they may be different things, to hell with you for being outraged that I’m not outraged about something that outrages you.

While you’re firing up your twitter account or blog to tell the world what a terrible person I am for disagreeing or not caring or not apologizing for some perceived slight or injury you think I’ve caused, in the actual real world that exists off the internet I’m going to go build a train with my 4 year old and fly it through the rings of Saturn before sitting down under the oak tree in my backyard to have a scoop of homemade ice cream with my 7 year old and play a game of catch.

You should try it.

What the fook?

The little one behind the mountain range is Molly, a 65 pound greyhound.

But he’s still convinced he’s a lapdog. Just this morning he climbed onto the couch and curled up in Mommy’s lap. He’s worried about her. A lot. Hard to explain to him that he’s too big to sit in her lap. If you know how, please let me know.

“Sixteen years” has been both on my mind and in the news in recent days, with good reason. Following the science and politics of global warming and climate change has become a passion of mine, and last week, despite several scandals and issues far more important to Americans, it got the spotlight from Obama again.

I, for one, am glad that he threw his saddle on this particular dead horse. His big plan has a serious flaw, and it’ll be tough to garner support for an idea that requires a runaway greenhouse effect and unprecedented temperatures. England’s MET Office spells out the inconvenient truth, in spite of their heavy investment in the global warming agenda:

No warming trend in the last 16 years

Note the generally flat nature of the graph. Note the scale, 1 degree Celsius in the vertical.

A data set like this has spawned dozens of articles and opinion pieces in the print media and online. Robert brought this great summary to my attention back in April, but at the time I didn’t appreciate the significance: The End of an Illusion at Real Clear Politics. A key excerpt that was long anticipated by a precursor of this blog.

So basically, all that the global warming advocates really have, as the evidentiary basis for their theory, is that global temperatures were a little higher than usual in the late 1990s. That’s it. Which proves nothing. The climate varies, just as weather varies, and as far as we can tell, this is all well within the normal range.

That has been one of my complaints about the global warming scare since the very beginning. We only have systematic global temperature measurements going back about 150 years, which on the relevant timescale—a geological time-scale—is a blink of an eye. Moreover, the measurement methods for these global temperatures have been not been entirely consistent, making them susceptible to changes due to everything from a different paint used on the outside of the weather station to the “urban heat island” effect that happens when a weather station in the middle of a field is surrounded over the years by parking lots. And somehow, among all the billions spent on global warming research, not much money seems to have made its way to the enormous international effort that would be required to ensure the accurate and consistent measurement of global temperatures.

So we have not been able to establish what ought to be the starting point for any theory about global temperatures: a baseline for what is a normal global temperature and what is a natural variation in temperature

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The piece.also describes The Economist’s recognition that the whole AGW platform is collapsing, though they are quick to state that they still think it’s important. Just this morning, I read Charles Krauthammer’s take in the Washington Post, though I was disappointed in his personal concession that CO2 is a huge problem. The same blogger we know as The Boss also anticipated this kind of evasion of responsibility.

But beyond the 16 year ‘pause’ in global warming, something else happened in 1997 that is much more personal for this site. Sixteen years ago this month, Robert wrote in the Gloves Off diary about this very issue. Long before it blew up into an international movement, conspiracy, and scientific debacle, he simply asked some pointed questions. Even as we look at the graph above, I have to agree with some of his most basic queries, including:

The Definition of Average Global Temperature: Let’s think about this for a minute. What is the ‘average’ temperature on earth right now? Yes, I mean at this very moment. One hundred two degrees, as the thermometers in Arizona might report? Fifty below, as the ones in Antarctica would claim? Neither, obviously.

 

The Supposed Effects of Manmade Global Warming:

The scientists are talking about the melting of glaciers, the flooding of thousands of miles of coastline, the forced migration of major populations, the devastation of our agricultural equilibrium, and dozens of other effects of their one degree ‘average increase.’ So there’s a quite valid reason for asking whether they’re as certain as they sound.

 

Siting Stations and the Urban Heat Island Effect: Is it sufficient to record the airport temperature of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, add those temperatures together and divide by three? Probably not. Maybe we need to add Paris, London, Tokyo, Moscow, Sydney, and Little America in the Antarctic. Would that do? Again, probably not. That leaves out a lot of places, and measurements in the city are tricky anyway, because artificial structures like asphalt paving have a tendency to soak up additional heat. So we’d better add in a bunch of pure countryside and farmland – put some of our thermometers in fields, forests, mountains, ocean-top oil rigs, deserts, prairies, and plateaus. Still, this doesn’t tell us much about how to weight the number of instances we measure, so that we balance arctic and Antarctic cold properly against tropical and temperate zones.

 

‘Gridding’ and Determining True Local Weather: Because no matter how many thermometers you have out there, say one hundred thousand, you’d get more accurate data if you put another million in the spaces in between the hundred thousand, and more accurate data still if you put another hundred million in between those.

 

The Historical Record of Temperature and Weather: This must mean that our theoretically correct number is actually determined by the number of instances – and the standard of measurement precision – that was already established in the year 1897.

Eighteen hundred and ninety seven. William McKinley was President of the United States. The automobile was a curiosity that frightened the horses. The continents of the world were connected by steamship travel and the telegraph. Charles Lindbergh hadn’t been born. There weren’t any airports anywhere. The North and South Poles hadn’t been discovered yet. But the worldwide temperature recording system was already in place.

It’s like time travel! All of these questions have been hashed over in the now-popular climate blogosphere, but this was before any of them, before blogs themselves existed, really.

Rather than read most of the journal entry here (too late!), I wanted to announce a new section on A Deerhound Diary: The Gloves Off archive. I’ll make a page for it to be linked on the main banner, but for now, you can get to it in the Gloves Off category to your left. The July 25th piece about climate is right here, please read the whole thing.

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be selecting and posting these pertinent perspectives from 16 years ago. Many of Robert’s thoughts are bearing fruit right now, and the long view is worth examining. Most blogs live for the day, like Raebert, but this blog knows the power of the past, like The Boss.

Sometimes it’s just hot.

Doom & Gloom. Not them. My battery.

Two performances only 44 years apart. There was the first time. And then there was the second time. It’s all just Rolling Stones. New songs both times.

Reviews? Here. And here.

This post is just for Dave. Everybody else should just watch the Glastonbury concert. Dave is a hard case.

Scotland the Brave

Just a nod of recognition. End of a 77 year drought for the Wimbledon toffs of the Old England Club. Last time a Brit won Wimbledon, my long dead dad was fourteen. So congratulations seem, uh, polite. But it was a Scot what done it. In the usual Scottish way, with lots of heart stopping, nerve wracking, and seemingly disastrous moments.

Kind of like an average day with Raebert.

Did WHAT?! No fookin’ way!

It’s okay, though. He went right back to sleep.

Pink sneakers are cool.

Apparently. The Internet is alight with the shoes of Wendy Davis, who became a liberal hero by filibustering a Texas bill that would have stopped abortions 20 weeks into pregnancy. What a woman.

She has nice tits too.

Oops. Shouldn’t have mentioned her tits. The mainstream media that has already lionized her choice of filibuster footwear…

Having seen what he called “probably the most famous shoes in politics,” was Zeleny ready to move on to more serious questions? Nope. He had to verify the color of the shoes, asking Davis if they were indeed pink. She replied, “I would call it a pink, or a salmon pink, yeah.”

Having confirmed that the shoes were pink, Zeleny still wasn’t done with them: “But you’re also a runner. I mean, these are legitimate running shoes.” Keep in mind that this man is a senior Washington correspondent, not a style editor

…is now in a huff at the possibility that the MSM foot fetish might be sexist. So they probably wouldn’t like anyone mentioning her tits, either, however nice.

There’s a difference between liking Wendy Davis’s shoes and liking Wendy Davis because of her shoes. What is that difference? I know, let’s call it sexism…

[T]his is a phenomenon unique to women in leadership positions—that media stories about our intellects and accomplishments are often literally dressed down with descriptions about our clothing. In groundbreaking research, the Women’s Media Center and Celinda Lake showed that media commentary about what women candidates are wearing has a detrimental impact on their candidacy. In other words, the media simply noting what women are wearing—let alone critiquing or judging it—hurts the prospects of women in leadership.

Yeah. Obviously the biggest part of the story. If you’re a liberal. Some female psychopath with nice tits and pink sneakers lobbies for hours for the right to kill babies and noticing her shoes is sexism. Right.

I AM making a point here. Liberals are supposed to be the smart ones, the best educated, the most tolerant, the most perceptive about nuance. Right? So why are they all semiconscious idiots imprisoned in the present tense of their own tiny lives. Didn’t Hillary’s daughter graduate from Stanford?

Chelsea Clinton: My great-grandparents didn’t have access to Planned Parenthood’s crucial services

It’s one thing to support family planning while being glad on some level that a distant ancestor couldn’t plan you into oblivion and another to pander to Planned Parenthood in the same breath that you’re talking about what an inspiration your grandmother, who otherwise wouldn’t have existed, was to you. It’s like getting your mom a Mother’s Day card that ends with “Sorry your parents didn’t have a choice whether to have you.” Um, happy Mother’s Day.

I’m not inclined to give the benefit of the doubt they always give at Hotair. It’s almost a fetish with them to bend over and hold their ankles in the name of fairness to liberal propaganda. Are we really supposed to think Chelsea would support her dead grandma’s right to preempt her existence? Or that it’s even occurred to this spoiled millennial bitch that her existence could have been preempted? Well, why not? To me it’s the same kind of myopic liberal consciousness that never sees the big picture for all the little pictures they get from their well connected contacts. Screw Chelsea. Comments like hers are at least tangentially related to this story and picture.

Kids with wire hangers. Their mothers are barbarian whores. No matter what you say.

I know. Let’s do a search for wire hangers. And we could follow it up by showing the little tykes what hangers are used for in preventing little lives like theirs. We could do it with crayons and poster paper and anatomically correct drawings. We could even do a Google search for “tools used to penetrate the cervix and puncture babies in mommy tummies.” Kids love computer graphics. Like that idea? No. Probably not. You liberals prefer a search for pink sneakers. Which isn’t a bad description of who you are at base.

Pink is the color of closet communists, who really do believe that people are just units in a vast encompassing state. Sneakers are the ones who hide their brutal motives beneath political jargon, oxymoronic euphemisms, and incredibly vicious invective. Pro-choice? Whose choice? And your opponents are anti-woman? Really? And what if YOUR opponents think you’re sick fucks for using toddlers as (wire hanger?) puppets in promoting the abortion rights their mothers just barely didn’t exercise against them?

Something to put it all in perspective:

But dress it up as they might, the truth remained ghastly: What Wendy and her team of protesters were trying to do was block a bill that would have made it illegal to deliberately kill an unborn child after 20 weeks of pregnancy. And that is a disgrace.

The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson wrote that, during the filibuster, Davis explained “how a pregnancy unfolded — all points on which, she noted, her male colleagues seemed vague.” Perhaps Davis is right that many of her fellow human beings know embarrassingly little about how they grew. I’d venture, though, that this is to her advantage: It is precisely the knowledge of how babies develop that informs my revulsion at their execution.

We might recap: By the time that a baby has been in utero for one month, blood is pumping around the body. In the second month, facial features develop, including the growth of ears, eyes, arms, legs, toes, and fingers. At six weeks, the baby’s brain, spinal cord, and central nervous system are all pretty well formed — in outline at least. By the two-month mark, sensory organs begin to develop and bone replaces cartilage.

Three months in, arms, hands, fingers, feet, and toes are fully formed, and the baby can grab with its fists as well as open and close its mouth. Teeth are on their way, as are reproductive organs. In month four, the baby is fully formed, and eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, nails, and hair develop. At this point, a baby can suck his thumb, yawn, hiccup, stretch, and make faces. At 18 weeks, the baby can move around, and experience REM sleep, including dreams. At 20 weeks, some studies show, it can recognize its mother’s voice.

You liberals. Your education consists entirely of SAT crib sheets. Your tolerance consists entirely of approving people who approve your narcissist desires. And as for nuance, your moral stature doesn’t even rise to the level of rats, who persistently fight to preserve their young.

Enjoy your pink sneakers. Wear them every day, all the time, so the rest of us might know you when you walk our way. Pardon us if we walk away.

And, oh yeah. Screw you and the tits you rode in on. Women are a sex, not a religion. They’re not an excuse for anything, let alone legalized torture and murder. If you can’t remember that, you’re even dumber than I know you are.

Oh. I almost forgot. The “liberals” at MSM outlets USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles refused to run this print ad.

They don’t want us to imagine taking this “fetus” apart, limb by limb.

Liberals. You’re monsters. If you had any education or moral perception, you wouldn’t even be able to look in the mirror. Keep wearing those pink sneakers. We’ll know what you can never learn.

My wife and I watched the 1968 “Rolling Stones Circus” tonight on PBS. We’ve learned never to watch PBS except during pledge drives, when they’re forced to pretend they’re not a half century behind the times. But every so often, 50 years behind the times is the right amount.

Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil by oggys

The first half of the show was dated and slow. Jethro Tull looking like Jethro Tull and the Who looking like geeks. Lennon dissed Jagger, handing him an empty dinner plate to dispose of. Jagger was humble about it. Then the Stones took the stage. The geezers at PBS insisted that this was the best live Stones performance ever.

Bullshit. But it’s historically significant as the moment the Stones took the crown from the Beatles. Lennon was done. Yoko performed with him. Just as the Stones launched their self-proclaimed reign as the “Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World.”

Which, apparently, they still are a half century later given this and this. But you’re allowed to decide for yourself here. And if you want a point of comparison, compare the video above to what happens at Glastonbury 23 minutes and 40 seconds in. Maybe the lyric “many a long year” will sound different. Suit yourself.

Me, I don’t need to see them anymore. Because I can listen whenever I want. I still have total sense memory. Do you?

Does he have lot of sense memory? Yeah. But what’s the point? His nose is a pitiful nubbin.