From the category archives:
This NYT piece about America’s emptiest county starts off with the usual stuff about closed-down schools and vanished churches. Then, without any warning, it segues into a story about Libertarians plotting to take over the county and legalise cannibalism (no, really!).
As they say, read the whole thing.
A local vicar wrote in today’s Plymouth Herald that the second half of the show, which is set in hell, made him feel like he was “in hell” …
(link via Neil Gaiman)
My wife forwarded this sequence of photos that are doing the rounds, headed “Irish Salvage”.
No doubt eagle-eyed Irish Timberites and readers will be able to point out that the truck is of a make used exclusively in the UK, or that the superscript on the manifest is of a type not found in the Irish localisation of MS Word.
Update: As expected, too good to be true. The second spill is faked. Still, it’s pretty funny.
Normally I do my comicsblogging at J&B. But this is just too important. (Tip to Farber, who also provides an executive summary, which unaccountably omits discounted Hulk Hands in the bathroom stall.)
“Scott McLemee”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html (Scott doesn’t do the permalinks thing, so this is liable to disappear sooner or later…).
bq. This summer, Jonah Goldberg is publishing a book.
bq. It hardly seems fair. Shouldn’t he have to read one, first?
I’m puzzled by the veep shoots lawyer on a quail hunt thing. I figure it’s gotta be Karl Rove sending a message to the base. But what? Then I read about Cheney’s penchant for avian mass slaughterfests and I vaguely remembered … Aha! I don’t think Kieran is right to quote Ezekiel …
I’m reading Off Center
When the debate over prescription drug coverage picked up in the late Clinton years, the pharmaceutical lobbying group PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, pronounced “Farma”) went so far as to establish a faux grassroots organization that putatively represented the elderly: “Citizens for a Better Medicare.” Despite the lofty title, Citizens for a Better Medicare had few, if any, actual citizens on its rolls Its main activity was to spend millions of PhRMA dollars on slick ad campaigns supporting an industry-friendly drug plan. When Citizens for a Better Medicare came under fire, PhRMA switched its “grassroots” efforts over to the United Seniors Association, a conservative direct-mail organization that had cut its teeth with frightening scare letters to senior citizens. The United Seniors Association board included, among other GOP political operatives, Jack Abramoff …
Greg Sargent and Kevin Drum have lately suggested that (as Kevin writes) “Dems might do well to tie the Republican corruption scandal to the broader theme of Republican addiction to special business interests.” Healthcare and the energy industry are the obvious places to start. But I haven’t yet seen anyone point out this fairly direct Abramoff/Medicare bill connection. Rather a useful factoid, perhaps, for purposes of converting the maddening complexities of this legislative boondoggle into damning talking-points. Medicare. It doth glaze the eyes over.
The backlash against the Medicare drug bill may or may not be a backlash against the people responsible for the Medicare drug bill. If it merely increases cynicism and deepens the sense that government can’t do anything right, then the ground remains fertile for the Republican anti-government message – even if it is Republicans themselves who betrayed their own anti-government message. Democrats have a very complicated (but absolutely true) story to tell here: They have to show that the Medicare bill was a guaranteed disaster from the start, that its consequences were not accidental but imtimately related to the corruption of the Republican majority, and that there is an alternative that would do more and cost less, and that Democrats would make it happen. We cannot assume that this story will occur automatically to people as they struggle with the program.
Someone is sure to say that this will lead to this. I mean: this thing has been tried in Rome before. Oh never mind, I already missed it by six months. Man, it’s like there aren’t any bad arguments about this left to make.
Via one of my colleagues, the answer for academics annoyed by RateMyProfessor
“http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/”:http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/
A friend just told me a story: he left a post-it in a book, returned it to a university library, was soon summoned into the presence of an enraged librarian, informed that post-it’s destroy books and the one he had returned had been sent to the lab for testing. If deemed contaminated with corrosive post-it glue, he would be charged for replacement.
I am very sorry to hear that post-its in books are like facehuggers on all the minor characters in the Alien films; because I use post-its like mad. I have a copy of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation with post-its on the post-its. (So I guess I should figure out whether post-it glue is bad for post-it paper, if I’m planning on saving those post-its for years.) I always assumed I was being kind to books, not writing on/dogearing the pages. I will change my habits if I must but I’ll miss the useful darlings.
Googling I’m getting some confirmation of the ‘post-its are bad’ thesis. But why haven’t I heard this before? Is everyone else in the know? Did the Volokhs already take sides two days ago and I missed the memo? I often walk around carrying library books that flutter like colorful tropical birds. I never noticed anyone glaring at me.
In other news, have you ever noticed how computer and software and general IT advertising often features a picture of a multiethnic, mixed gender group of co-workers, smiling faces all lit by the light of the monitor of the obviously excellently working computer they are gathered around. When in fact the only time five people are ever staring at the same lit computer screen is when one of them is saying something like ‘really? even the off button doesn’t work?’
No, not another post about how legal scholars are into it. Via Adam Kotsko, I learn that anonymous blogging is a lot less legal than you probably thought.
The fine print of the Waste of The Supreme Court’s Valuable Time Waiting To Happen Act Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act:
“Whoever…utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet… without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person…who receives the communications…shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”
Given that for all x, such that x is a political opinion, there exists some y, such that y is a person who will be annoyed by x, hell I’d say it’s no longer legal even for the NY Times to post unsigned editorials on their website. I guess you can invoke some sort of doctrine of double effect here. But you get into a position in which it is legal, say, to intend to damage someone’s political career by criticizing them; but not legal to intend to annoy that person? Am I missing something here?
UPDATE: Comments inform me the Volokhs are already debating this. Sorry to have missed that. (I should read more blogs.) Kerr says it’s just a kerfuffle. Eugene V. says maybe it’s really a problem.
After viewing an episode of “Fraggle Rock”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009RQSSW/kieranhealysw-20/ with my daughter, I am led to wonder whether the Emperor Gorg (shown here on the left) bears rather more than a passing resemblance to L. Ron Hubbard (on the right). In the matter of bearing, demeanor and possession of the notion that they rule the universe, they are of course indistinguishable.
Via Andrew Sullivan (and Hit and Run) this fine, fine video. You have to watch the whole thing, because it really grows on you. I agree with scruffy hipster Julian Sanchez: “Anyone who can watch this and complain about the pernicious effects of cultural globalization has no soul.” Finally, a Numa Numa dance video for the generation that grew up 30 seconds ago.
“Noam Scheiber”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=3075 has a brilliant plan.
bq. Our boss, Peter Beinart, has a theory about how to undercut the conservative punditry’s assault on the mainstream media: coopt it. The basic idea is that most of the conservative animus toward the MSM comes from feeling spurned by it. If that’s true, then the easiest way to fix this would be for establishment media institutions to hire lots of bright young conservatives. … I agree. But that George Will column Jason linked to earlier suggests another reason why the mainstream media might want to start hiring conservatives, at least conservative opinion journalists: It would allow conservatives to say and write what they actually think, which is usually both interesting and important. As Ryan Lizza noted last week, many of the conservatives who’ve spoken out against George W. Bush lately–people like Bruce Bartlett and David Frum–have done so at considerable risks to their livelihoods. That’s because the conservative “movement” is incredibly centralized and hierarchical. People who work at conservative think tanks or receive conservative foundation money, even people who work at conservative media outlets, risk having the plug pulled if they deviate too far from the party line.
But then “I would say that, wouldn’t I”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/01/affirmative-action-for-campus-conservatives-a-modest-proposal/. Entertaining as it is to see something like my April 1 squib recycled as a quasi-serious plan of action, it can’t compete with Chris’s experience last year, of being (perhaps unintentionally) “directly”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/17/the-real-threat-the-the-life-of-the-nation/ “plagiarized”:http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2004_12_01_archive.asp#110333522580034888 by William Gibson. Now that’s real geek street-cred.
Being an anti-anti-elitist anti-elitist intellectual is fancy footwork. J-pod shows us how its done:
We shall see what we shall see. From here on in there’s really nothing to be said until the confirmation hearings actually begin (save for the unexpected bit of information). And so, as Wittgenstein said, "Whereof we cannot speak, therefore we must be silent" (I just put that in there to drive the anti-elitists bonkers; I actually hate Wittgenstein).
To put it another way, riding herd on the base is tough these days. Used to be you could toss it culture war red meat at semi-regular intervals. Flag-burning gay marriage. Now you have to drive it mad with quotes from the Tractatus. Presumably when it’s goaded beyond all endurance you aim it at some liberals, release and hope for the best? What’s he got against Wittgenstein, I wonder?