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Monday, August 09, 2010

You gotta have a strong constitution

It is becoming increasingly clear that the illegal al-Obama X Administration* is flouting the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution.  Moreover, as cutting-edge conservative legal scholarship has shown, many of the post-Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution contravene the intentions of the Founding Fathers.  Most alarming of all, however, Tea Party Patriots™ have recently discovered that the Constitution itself does not understand the true original intentions of its framers.

It’s all very confusing, we know.  So in order to keep things straight, we here at American Airspace have decided to offer this handy summary of the 2010 GOP Platform on Amending the Amendments to the Constitution:

First Amendment.  Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of the Christian religion; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.  All but the first of the foregoing clauses may be refudiated in times of dire Emergency.  Most importantly, the right of conservatives to speak without being criticized for their views shall be respected at all times.

Second Amendment.  The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.  Perhaps this should be in ALL CAPS.

Third through Seventh Amendments.  These are badly outdated and no one really cares about them anyway.

Eighth Amendment.  Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted, unless there be a Ticking Time Bomb, or the possibility of such is equal to or greater than one Percent.

Ninth Amendment.  This one can stay.

Tenth Amendment.  The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people, lest there be any attempt to ram “health care” down their Throats.

Eleventh and Twelfth Amendments.  Bo-ring.

Secret Thirteenth Amendment, recently discovered by Nicolas Cage.  If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honor, such as a subscription to Esquire, or shall, without the consent of Congress accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, such as a Nobel Prize, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person, we are looking at you, Barack Hussein al-Obama X, shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, if indeed you ever were, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.

Other Thirteenth Amendment.  It would be unlucky to have two Thirteenth Amendments.

Fourteenth Amendment.  1.  All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside, except persons born to Illegals. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, unless such person wants to marry another person of the same sex or unless such law or such deprivation is determined to be really really necessary (see “dire Emergency,” above).

2.  The Confederate flag shall be recognized and revered as a symbol of Southern heritage and pride.

Fifteenth Amendment.  Oh, all right already, you people can vote.  Just stop your whining.  And what are you all doing with cellular telephones, if you’re so “poor?”

Sixteenth Amendment.  Revised to read, simply, taxation is theft.

Seventeenth Amendment.  Crossed out with a big black magic marker.

Nineteenth Amendment.  Under further review (no, seriously).

Twenty-fourth Amendment.  Repealed.  Freedom isn’t free, you know.

OK, now you’re all caught up on the latest developments in True Original Constitutional Intentionalism!  Don’t forget, people– vote Tea Party™ in November, and take your country back!

_______

*Because the al-Obama X Administration was installed in the White House by the JournoListers of Bilderberg, the “election” of 2008 is null and void under natural law.

Posted by Michael on 08/09 at 08:14 AM
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Friday, August 06, 2010

Just once more, and just for Roy

I used to be a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged that Barack Hussein al-Obama X is trying to start a race war by slyly alluding to I’m Gonna Git You Sucka.

Posted by Michael on 08/06 at 04:02 PM
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Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Skeptics gather for scientific conference

Washington, DC, Aug. 4, 2030 – Scientists and political analysts converged today for the First Annual Heartland Institute Conference on the Evolution of the Gulf of Mexico.  Building on the Heartland Institute’s groundbreaking work on climate change, the conference aims to challenge the widespread belief that recent changes in the ecosystem of the Gulf are “manmade” in origin.

“Mass extinctions are a fact of life in the natural world,” noted Heartland Institute president Joseph L. Bast.  “Indeed, the emergence of human life on Earth would not have been possible without them.  Similarly, complex chemicals are the foundation of all life, nature’s own building blocks.  Understanding the evolution of the Gulf of Mexico, we believe, will go a long way toward combating the spread of the AGW (Anthropogenic Gulf Waste) hoax among scientists and policymakers.”

President Cuccinelli videotaped a welcome message to open the conference, praising conferees for their “courage” in the face of “harassment and intimidation.” “Don’t be afraid of the label ‘Gulf skeptics,’” Cuccinelli advised the group.  “Skeptics are the winners of every scientific debate, always, everywhere. Because skepticism, as T.H. Huxley said, is the highest calling of a true scientist.”

George Will, the first day’s keynote speaker, noted that if the United States were to proceed with long-delayed plans to repopulate the Gulf with marine life, it would cause “more preventable death and suffering than was caused in the last century by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Obama, Pelosi, and Pol Pot combined.”

Bast seconded Will’s remarks, adding, “It takes more than four Norwegian socialists to win a Pulitzer Prize, so I’ll put George Will’s Pulitzer Prize and his Bradley Prize up against Al Gore’s Nobel any day.”

The issue of Gulf evolution has sharply divided Congress in recent months, as Democrats and Republicans continue to spar over the likely causes of Gulf evolution.  “I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I do think it’s possible that the long-term toxicity levels in the Gulf of Mexico may have something to do with the events of 2010,” said Senate Tiny Minority Leader Jack Reed (D.-RI), chair and only member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  “It seems plausible enough to warrant further scientific investigation.”

But Speaker of the House Bristol Palin (R.-AK) disputed Reed’s claim, pointing out that the “oil eruption in the Gulf” is part of a “natural geological process.” “I refudiate the irresponsible claim that we brought this on ourselves,” said Palin via iMind transmission. “We don’t go around blaming people every time a volcano erupts, and volcanoes are far more destructive than anything that happens underwater.”

Amity Shlaes of the nonpartisan Institute for Advanced Equivocation sought a “middle ground” between the sparring parties, acknowledging that while it is necessary to avoid the “regulatory zeal” that might damage the sputtering American economy, it is nevertheless possible that the Obama Administration had some role in the events of 2010.  “It now looks as if Obama deserves at least some of the blame,” said Shlaes during a breakout session at the Heartland conference.  “The East Anglia JournoList emails are pretty damning.  It appears to me that investigative reporter Ben Shapiro has uncovered an active conspiracy among liberal journalists to deflect attention away from Barack Obama at the very outset of the crisis, which turned out not to be a crisis after all, despite liberal hysteria.”

John Stossel took a different approach in his blistering closing speech to the Heartland Institute conference.  “A small group of elite scientists have been trying to control public discourse for decades,” he said to thunderous applause, “and it’s time for the people to reclaim their freedoms.  The same experts who told us that ‘evolution’ is not just a theory now refuse to accept the very notion that the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico can evolve.  The explanation?  Liberal hypocrisy, once again, liberal hypocrisy across the board.”

The Heartland Institute has announced that next year’s conference will be held in New New Orleans.

Posted by Michael on 08/04 at 09:03 AM
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Sunday, August 01, 2010

It’ll stick to your ribs

Corexit—it’s what’s for dinner!

(H/t Bill Benzon.  And Jonathan Franzen, white courtesy phone!)

Posted by Michael on 08/01 at 09:20 AM
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Monday, July 26, 2010

Deception

Inception: Daily Caller is a manic, needlessly complex, and ultimately trivial movie—good for a few hours’ entertainment in a sweltering summer, but mind-numbingly insubstantial.  The initial premise is promising: former Beltway star Tucker Carlson, anguished at having dropped to the Schlussel-Breitbart level of American punditry, assembles a team of accomplished sociopaths and professional liars (led by newcomer Jonathan Strong) to sedate young Ezra Klein and journey deep into Klein’s unconscious to find the vault where he keeps the names of the members of a secret society known only as “Journolist.” It’s like Fantastic Voyage meets The Matrix, and some of the special effects—like a free-fall fistfight between Dave Weigel and Jeffrey Goldberg in a zero-gravity hotel corridor—are remarkably convincing.  But the plot goes awry when the intrepid Carlson discovers that the sleeping Klein is dreaming of yet another list.  This is apparently made up of a still more shadowy group of academics and political commentators who are, in turn, collectively dreaming of ways to develop techniques for “inception,” that is, planting ideas in other people’s minds so deeply that the people believe the ideas to be their own.  This could have been an opportunity for some genuinely innovative and challenging filmmaking, the dream-within-the-dream-within-the-dream taking any number of surreal forms.  But it’s just at this point that Inception: DC runs out of imagination, revealing a secret society in an Arctic fortress devoted to some of the most banal and mundane machinations ever machinated.  Middling obscure and openly left wing university professor Henry Farrell is shown dreaming up an “Open Letter” together with 106 fellow sleepers (giving new meaning to the term “sleeper cell”), while on still deeper levels, teams of liberal and center-liberal dreamers plot to criticize Sarah Palin for her ignorance and inexperience.  At which point the befuddled viewer can only ask, was this trip really necessary?

There may be some kind of paradox in the fact that the dazzling high-tech wizardry of Inception: DC is ultimately deployed to uncover the weakest-sauce “conspiracy” in the history of conspiracy theories.  Meanwhile, the real mystery, as always, lies hidden in plain sight: the mystery of how a team of accomplished sociopaths managed to get so deep into John McCain’s brain as to persuade him to nominate Sarah Palin in the first place, and then to “suspend” his campaign in response to the financial crisis so that he could fly back to Washington and stand around the White House muttering and looking angry.  The day that bizarre story comes to light is the day we’ll finally have a political/psychological thriller worth watching.

Posted by Michael on 07/26 at 10:16 AM
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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Fuzzy Dice

Mark C. Taylor, writing in a New York Times forum on tenure:

Tenure is financially unsustainable and intellectually indefensible. The fundamental problem is liquidity – both financial and intellectual.

If you take the current average salary of an associate professor and assume this tenured faculty member remains an associate professor for five years and then becomes a full professor for 30 years, the total cost of salary and benefits alone is $12,198,578 at a private institution and $9,992,888 at a public institution. To fund these expenses would require a current endowment of $3,959,743 and $3,524,426 respectively and $28,721,197 and $23,583,423 at the end of the person’s career. Tenure decisions render illiquid a significant percentage of endowments at the precise moment more flexibility is required.

Capital is not only financial but is also intellectual and here too liquidity is an issue. In today’s fast changing world, it is impossible to know whether a person’s research is going to be relevant in five years let alone 35 years.

I do not know what to say about this.  I have one minor editorial quibble:  although it’s true that research on stuff nobody cares about, like Duns Scotus, will not be relevant in five or thirty-five years, the proper locution is “in today’s fast changing world today.”

But never mind the words—let’s look at those numbers.  As director of Penn State’s Institute of Advanced Research in Totally Made Up Arithmetic, I am tempted to respond to Professor Taylor’s claim that faculty at public universities average just over $285,500 in salary and benefits by awarding him a Distinguished Visiting Professorship and a research account in the amount of four-twenty ten-eight scintillion dollars.  But for now I think I will simply board a plane to Las Vegas, where I hope to put Professor Taylor’s system to use at the gaming tables of that fair city.  By my calculations, the Taylor Theorem suggests that your average craps-shooting college professor has a 95 percent chance of tripling his stake every twenty minutes, so if you’re in the house, stop on by! 

Posted by Michael on 07/21 at 07:23 AM
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