Saturday, May 24, 2008

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends - The Watchers Council Edition

Watcher of Weasels (love the name !) runs something called "The Watchers Council".
It's a group of a dozen bloggers who, every week, submit their best piece of writing to the rest of the council. They use a complicated Watcher of Weasels-like percentage vote on who did the best job, and the winner gets lots of links and web traffic to whatever he/she wrote.

They also nominate one blog post apiece written by someone from the outside.

Wolf Howling, who has been in the blogroll to your right from day one, took a liking to this thing I wrote about Blog for Human Rights Day. Mr. Howling threw it in the ring for consideration by the Watchers Council.

These people, out of all the stuff blogged about last week, out of all the millions and millions of worthwhile blog entries out there....they decided that my Human Rights Day thing was the best. So now I'm getting traffic from here and here and here and here and here and here and here and about eight other places.

If I were a Democrat, I'd say that I'm humbled by the recognition.

But that's a total misuse of the word "humbled", isn't it? If people throw rotten vegetables and eggs and dead animals at you, and then say you're a total idiot, then you're humbled. How did we ever start using the word "humble" incorrectly? Any time someone gets an award or recognition, they say they're humbled. In my opinion, when you don't get an award, or win the game, or finish the marathon....you're humbled.

Instead of saying "I'm humbled", I should say that I'm pretty dang proud to get some recognition from The Watchers Council.

In the name of LinkLove, here are my picks for the best things written by the Watcher's Council:

The Education Wonks have an interesting post on the recent gang warfare in the Los Angeles Public School System. Read this, and tell me if any parents in their right minds would consider sending their kid to these schools. One thing that would've been an interesting side note.... No real teaching is going on in these places, since they're Gladiator/Gangsta Training Academies, and students risk their lives by showing up. So what's the biggest news in education from California these days? The teachers union is lobbying the state to outlaw home schooling. The mind recoils.

The Glittering Eye is running a series of editorials that Gittering Eye's father wrote for The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. The first one, Adolph The Great, is about students at Yale (and Time magazine) nominating Hitler as "Man of The Year" due to his turnaround of Germany's economy. There are several other pieces by his father in there - just keep hitting the "father's editorial" links.

Rhymes With Right takes one of my least favorite politicians to the metaphorical woodshed. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin recently claimed that John McCain's family having four generations of military service somehow makes McCain unfit for Presidential leadership. Mr. Rhymes With Right has some harsh words for Senator Harkin, and says he should be ashamed of himself. I agree, but for totally different reasons.
Tom Harkin, the senator from Archer Daniels Midland, should be ashamed of himself because he's a whore for the ethanol industry. A worn out, pimped out, used up, totally bedraggled slut. John McCain has proven that he can take care of himself.

Done With Mirrors takes a look at the problem we Christians know as "theodicy". Prompted by the historical and theological explorations of Reverend John Hagee, Done With Mirrors asks, as an outsider, how can monotheists reconcile the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful God with some of the totalitarian outrages of the previous century. (The short answer: We can't.)

Joshuapundit specializes in deep lengthy posts about the Middle East, almost all of which are worthwhile. But I've got to give you a link to this YouTube parody of an academic sensitivity training session. Funny stuff.

SoccerDad is another blogger who focuses on Jewish issues, Israel, and the Middle East. He's got so much interesting stuff in there that my head hurts. I look forward reading all these people in the future. If I have to settle on just one post to highlight, it would be "What Makes A Pro-Israel President?"

The Colossus Of Rhodey has some commentary on a Mark Steyn piece about John McCain vs. The Democratic Party . Senator Tom Harkin, who is shaping up nicely as the villain of this post, also comes in for some well-deserved abuse. But not nearly enough.

Bookworm Room liked the new Indiana Jones movie even less than I did. She's correct when she states that Cate Blanchett looks fabulous. She's mistaken when she states that (the fight scenes were) "like a Rock ‘em Sock ‘em robot, only the heads stayed attached at the end," because Cate Blanchett's head doesn't. But that's trivial. The movie was not good.
BWRoom also has a link where like-minded commenters can recommend their favorite books.

Cheat Seeking Missiles has a discourse on the lowered height requirement in the North Korean Army. (It's now 4'3". That's four feet, three inches tall.) Cheat Seeking Missiles believes this is due to systemic malnutrition in the Socialist Paradise of North Korea.
Well, there's a perfect control group of people with identical ethnicity in the Raging Capitalist Hellhole of South Korea. I wonder how the two nations compare? Can someone let me know if the South Korean military has to admit 4'3" recruits? I think not.

Wolf Howling, who was good enough to get me into all this, has a post on Oil, Gas, Supply & Demand. He talks about the belief that supply and demand have nothing to do with cost and price. He's also the 3rd or 4th one of these folks to post the YouTube video of Rep. Maxine Waters threatening to nationalize the oil companies.
As a small "l" libertarian, I think Maxine Waters' statements are mildly comical. (Imagine what The U.S. Postal Service could do for UPS. Imagine what a V.A. hospital could do for Harris Methodist hospital in Fort Worth. Imagine what the Department of Motor Vehicles could do for Toyota.) The Watchers Council apparently thinks this video is knee-slapping, rolling in the floor laughing, blow-your -drink-through-your-nose funny.
If you can imagine Maxine Waters and her minions taking over an oil company....yeah, it's pretty funny.
Also, while you're in there, check out the various wolf pictures above each blogroll category. The first time I saw the one he picked for "The Left", I laughed for hours.

Hillbilly White Trash has some marketing advice for the Republican party in "Rebranding The G.O.P." One explanation that may be needed for those with other belief systems....RINO stands for "Republican In Name Only".
The Hillbilly has the largest blogroll I've ever seen. He also did 2,200 posts in 2007. The Hillbilly is committed to his cause.
In his leisure time, he runs something called The Hillbilly Ecosystem. (Go ahead and click the link.... it's a blog traffic ranking system using redneck stereotypes as the hierarchy categories.) By one of his standards - blogrolls - I'm a Heavily Armed Moonshiner. By another - hits and comments - I'm a Heavily Armed Saloon Keeper.

Perhaps if all these good folks keep sending traffic my direction, I'll achieve a solid "Heavily Armed Saloon Keeper" status by the end of summer.

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