Category: Thoughts

I remember learning in grade school that the United States was a great nation because it was a nation of laws, not a nation of men. That is, the United States was just because nobody was above the law and it was durable because it did not depend on having a virtuous and charismatic leader at its helm at all times.

The Wall Street Journal disagrees. Now, for many years, the Journal’s editorial pages have been the land of crazy wingnuts, and the rest of the paper has been a decent source of information. However, this has gone on for far too long. The honest and factual side of the paper lends respectability to content that would otherwise be relegated to a rightist organ like the Washington Times or the Free Republic. It’s time for the paper as a whole to suffer the consequences of publishing this kind of trash.

There is simply no excuse for the legitimate journalists of the Wall Street Journal to be carrying water for those who advocate the dismantling of the US government and its replacement with tyrrany. Weren’t right-wingers just recently throwing words like “treason” and “sedition” around when people dared to criticize the policies of the government? THIS, my friends, is sedition.

No, really. 50 Cent’s mansion is up for sale, and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Connecticut palace– too big, too many amenities (helicopter pad, anyone?) — only with its own strip club installed.

Somehow, this house seems a lot like my brain right now.

The National Review‘s Thomas Sowell writes “When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.” Remember kids, “degenerates” is a Nazi codeword for “Gypsies, Jews, radicals, and queers.” If I see this sentiment on Fox News, I’ll really begin to worry.

On the plus side, we have an example of the many different kinds of success that spring from the US educational system: George Tenet and Ron Jeremy were high school classmates.

Maybe this will pump up my search traffic more than blogging about Hayden Panettiere and Hannah Montana sex tapes.

From Bloomberg: To say that ex-housing the economy is doing just fine is tantamount to claiming that, ex-Iraq, Bush’s Middle-East policy is a rousing success.

The thing is, I still eventually want to buy something. And if I were absolutely sure I’d be there for more than five years, I’d be tempted to buy, even now. But I don’t have the job security — unless they have tenure, nobody does– to be sure. Buying a house is a bet, it seems to me. And I am not a gambler.

Where do you see yourself in five years? Can you say with confidence that you’ll be able to pay the same amount of money for housing?

Blind items from E! suggest that President Bush has started drinking and smoking again, and that Laura Bush is now living at the Hay-Adams hotel, and using the side door to avoid photographers.

David Beckham just spent twelve million dollars on a mansion in Beverly Hills. I saw a new condo building in Cambridge this weekend that starts at $300k for 500 square feet. With a view of Mass Ave. The noisy, fume-choked units top out at close to a million. The only reason to build something like that, it seems to me, is to sell to people who are too rich to bother with thinking before they shell out that kind of cash, or to people who are so desperate to own something that they’ll pay any price, sign any mortgage, buy at the top of any market, just to be able to talk knowledgeably about mortgage interest deductions at cocktail parties.

What’s the common thread here? I’m not sure. Outrage and absurdity, perhaps? Too much money and not enough brains? Let’s get hopped up and make some bad decisions?

We’re a ship of fools with an angry drunk at the helm. We’re all gonna die.

Saturday afternoon Megan and I made the mistake of trying to be all tough and self-reliant and change the oil in our motorcycles by ourselves. Step one is to turn the bikes on and let them run for a few minutes, so the oil is warm enough to drain properly, and to stir up all the sludge you’re trying to drain out. We did that OK. Step two was a little harder. On my bike we easily located the drain bolt, but it was screwed on so tight that it wouldn’t come off. I stripped a couple corners off it before giving up. On Megan’s bike there was, I swear, no bolt that looked anything like the picture in the manual. It’s supposed to be near a spring on the lower left side of the crankcase, but we didn’t find it. The only thing we ended up with was a burn on Megan’s hand when she touched the exhaust pipe while trying to look underneath the bike. At that point we gave up on her bike as well.

Then we went to the movies: King Corn at the Independent Film Festival Boston. It was excellent– it didn’t tell me a hell of a lot about corn that wasn’t in Michael Pollan’s book about American food systems, but it was very well made and included an interview with Earl Butz, the former secretary of Agriculture who masterminded today’s abundance of corn derivatives. One thing that was good was that the directors were there and they said that doing the documentary had changed the way they wanted to eat, but that it hadn’t changed the way they really ate much at all. To do that, we’d have to start subsidizing fresh vegetables at the expense of corn sweeteners– we’d have to make healthy food cheaper and more convenient.

Crossposted to TTS: another US terrorist attack foiled in the nick of time… of course, since it was against a women’s health clinic, it’s not really news. Women don’t count, you know. Not in this administration. Not when politically motivated prosecutions are the norm.

Oh tempora, oh mores.

What’s the matter with Arkansas? John Fleck pointed out a letter published in an Arkansas newspaper about how daylight savings causes global warming by adding to the amount of daylight we have every day.

The writer is apparently a lawyer, but doesn’t understand the difference between time and the devices we use to measure it.

(As far as I can tell, this is not a joke.) (Update, 5PM: OK, it’s a joke. I should have known.)

There are only a few spots left in the Parker Farm farmshare. Cambridge/Somerville residents who want veggies every week all summer should act now.

Seriously, they’re good veggies. We signed up months ago.

Brilliant: Some guinea pigs might have been daunted by the prospect of four whopping meals a day, rivers of grog and hardly any fruit, vegetables or water for an entire week. But not I. I just couldn’t wait for them to Edwardian Supersize Me.