Sunday, January 01, 2012

The 2011 Fabulous Fifty Blog Awards...Ahem

Winner - 2011 Fabulous 50 Blog AwardsWhat a great way to start the New Year!

Over at Doug Ross’ blog he features an annual "best of", this one being his Top Fifty Blog Awards. For 2011, in the “Golda Meir Award for Best Anti-Jihad Blogger” category, Gates of Vienna tied with three other worthies. Our compatriots were Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and Memri. [Hey, maybe we’ll start getting the big money, too? From this keyboard to G-d’s eyes, please. Our donors would be most grateful.]

Take a look at some of the other groupings. What a hoot! Mixed in with the more serious categories, he has these political in-jokes:

  • The David Brooks Award for Demi-Conservatism
  • The David Frum Award for Faux Conservatism
  • The Jennifer Rubin Award for Pseudo-Conservatism
There are also winners of substance. The Foundry, for example. If I were well, you’d hear about them (see the link at the awards post, under “Best U.S. Econ Blog”). And Fausta won the best in her category. Americans in general ignore South America — to our loss now and to our eventual peril.

If you don’t read Director Blue on a regular basis, you’re missing some entertainment. His take on the news is light but never trivial. For example, on the home page there are two large charts worth viewing:

The first one is obviously of personal concern to The Baron and me since it displays the sad decline in U.S. employment numbers. Doug Ross calls it “The Most Terrifying Economic Chart of 2011”. We call it daily life in the slow lane.

As he points out, the angle of the dangle of U.S. unemployment levels increased markedly as soon as Obama ascended the throne began his reign term of office. From that point forward (or downward) the line began plunging and hasn’t looked up since. Smell them smokin’ brakes? Given our fearless leader’s congenital hostility to private enterprise I hope he has government workers busily placing sandbags at the bottom of that plunge because those numbers will never come back until it looks safe again to do business here.

The second chart in that post is linked to the first: the numbers of people now on food stamps. He says:

…please note the coincidental rise in food stamps and government assistance at the exact same time; free money to stay unemployed, dispensed with leaf-blower-like efficiency throughout the country…

At the moment, thanks to our donors we are not on food stamps. But then again, we never will be. When there is no longer enough income from blogging and assorted editing jobs, the Baron will engage in local money-making activities. Yes, they will be legal endeavors. Things like substitute teaching or tutoring. He is an old hand at surviving in lean times; we remember them when he was a landscape artist and did odd jobs like being a Kelly Girl. [No doubt that company has long since changed its name.]

[Anyone unemployed and raising children would do well to consider food stamps as a stop-gap measure. We never had to do so, but where children are concerned an adequate diet is crucial for optimal brain and bone growth.]

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I will always be grateful to Doug Ross for keeping the flame for Larwyn, since she can no longer send out her mass mail aggregations. I still miss them, and even more I miss her wonderful sense of humor. She liked all of us, despite our sins. In Linx today, see this letter from George Washington to Barack Obama. The author took careful pains to imitate the rhetoric of Washington’s time. It is a worthy effort. Extending the metaphor of America as a garden, he describes her current condition in sad detail. Here is just one snip of that long lament:

Our Garden is become a tangled bed of weeds and thorns as those of your school have beggared the working man, and stood as highwayman to the banker and merchant. Our system of public education is like unto an academy for the teaching of treason, and a university for the manufacture of a large class of impertinent mendicants for whom the taxpayers must serve as unwilling almoners in perpetuity. And you strive, through cunning and secret stratagems, to disarm the people, thereby subjecting them to the caprice of an all-powerful central government, in one stroke imposing tyranny and depriving the citizenry of the capacity for resisting it.

I like the fine, high rhetorical style he assumes here. Definitely he’s worth a visit, but don’t get lost like I did.

Welcome 2012. And thank you, Director Blue. What a wonderful way to end an otherwise annus horribilis!

Meanwhile, for our readers who love to be filled with fear and loathing, who enjoy their schadenfreude with whipped cream and cataclysms, there’s always the purported Mayan predictions for 2012. A nice distraction, no?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, and well-deserved. I don't necessarily see eye-to-eye with GoV on all political matters. Jihad Watch is an excellent site (crummy comments system - for my first year or so of reading there I was unable to comment). Spencer and his group have some excellent analyses. from a european perspective, the group around GoV is doing the best job. I only recently started looking at your "News Feed" posts - they are eclectic but highly informative. They are now a part of my routine reading. Sometimes one has to read between the lines, but that's no bad skill to hone (as the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus said: if the censor can understand criticism sufficiently to censor it, then it deserved to be censored).

Joe

Sagunto said...

LOL!

The Prize for "Pseudo Conservatism" might just as well stay indoors and justly handed out to the Economic blog, called "The Foundry". This blog turns out to be another pseudo free market, tax-reform (no actual cuts), Heritage Fnd venue.

I've read the "Heritage Plan", authored by Stuart Butler, who back in 2003 had this to say about US health care:

"In a civilized and rich country like the United States, it is reasonable for society to accept an obligation to ensure that all residents have affordable access to at least basic health care — much as we accept the same obligation to assure a reasonable level of housing, education and nutrition."

Nice one to keep in mind, alongside the fact that Mr Butler is Heritage's current vice president of economic policy. No surprise therefore, to find out that the tax plan (part of the Heritage Plan) isn't about actual tax cuts at all, just the usual "reform", i.e. the establishment's option. So with this in mind, one shouldn't be surprised when no effort is made to address the monetary fascism perpetrated by the US central banking institution and friend of politicians who don't favour tax increases (but monetary inflation, i.e. mega-debt instead).

Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag

Anonymous said...

GoV is also recipient of 2011 MOST ASTUTE GLOBAL ANTI-ISLAMIZATION BLOG over at Astute Blogger

Hearty Congratulations for titles well earned! Bravo e Brava!

Paco said...

Than you for your kind recommendation of the George Washington letter.

Anonymous said...

ChristianInfidel says:

Double Congratulations to Gates of Vienna! May this lead to increased exposure, recognition, and revenue in 2012 and beyond! God bless and Happy New Year!

Nilk said...

Yay, Gov!

I can't remember the last time I paid any attention to any sort of blog awards. I can see I should remedy that this year at least.

And well done on linking to Paco. He most definitely rocks and deserves more attention also.