A Telling Paragraph

Stupid body. In China, I snapped awake at 4 am every morning, and nodded off during dinner--the first night I apparently gave a rather impassioned defense of American exceptionalism that I (blissfully) can't quite remember. Now I'm back in the states, I can't get to sleep before about 3:30 even with the help of Ambien. This was tolerable over the weekend, when I didn't have to get up for work. But you can imagine how chipper I was this morning.

Can we now assume that many of Megan's posts (like her "rather impassioned defense of American exceptionalism") are written under the influence of Ambien, & she has no more memory/knowledge of them than if she were to snack/drive/whatever while unconscious & even less reasoning than usual?

Maybe she should leave the car at her sister's until she gets off the stuff.

This morning I spent twenty minutes looking for my car keys, before remembering that I'd parked the car up at my sister's house while I was away.

Elements of Style:©:

4 am every morning

Not to be confused w/ four a.m. every evening, or four p.m. every morning.

Chocolate Vanilla Swirl

I often wallow, these days, in the inevitability of it all. It seems stunningly obvious to me that man will never change. War, pestilence, lying, bad movies... they are here to stay. The poor will always be with us. It's a depressing thought.

This painful realization has been offered with perhaps some qualifications here.

I don’t presently care to argue that there is never any “need” to go down any given low road. In some cases I may support some low roads for some purposes. Locking up murderers, for instance. In other cases – torture – I have a much easier time saying “Never go there.” But what we see over and over again is that we judge high-road approaches as failures unless they produce nigh-instant and complete favorable results, while we show nearly infinite patience for journeys down the low road.

Our man seems ready to accept this proposition. Why else would humanity so doggedly pursue war as a means to an end if it weren't the war itself which interested it?

But in what may be the flickering of that blogger's hope we perhapssee the reignition of this blogger's. For sandwiched around the fairly perceptive insight that people will stick with the horrible for much longer than they'll countenance the "weak" we see a naive blindness to the nature of the dark. It speaks of a persistence towards optimism just as large as the endless rush towards conflict.

What we see in the article is a familiar phenomenon that represents either a sickness in our culture or a sickness in the human species. I can’t decide which.

(...)

The open question, to me, is who “we” are in the above. American culture, or the human race? I suspect the latter, and that relative power simply gives the US a greater opportunity to take low-road approaches. But I’m not sure.

So we see a man staring into the abyss that – as he seems to grasps – extends in all directions in both space and time and yet it does not stare back; It merely winks. It taps on the shoulder. It gapes only large enough for our bebloggered friend to have the inklings of a doubt; a sneaking suspicion that maybe it's not the internet that did it. Maybe man has just always been a killer. Maybe we just likes to go to us some war. But only maybe.

As infinite as the maw is, there are just as many bridges across it, it would seem. The wonders never cease.

If Wishes Were Horses We'd All Be Eating Steak

I keep letting Mr Troll bully me back into the land of the self-centered and dum, and it hurts me. I need to stand up for myself.

I would love to hear the TSA's side of this--and see the whole video.

I'd love to see her -- from her position of mild import -- champion a cause not centered around her relatively minor inconvenience. I wonder whose wish will be granted first.

Bonus Fun: Sometimes I fantasize about violence, but I keep it awesome.

Whatever

Cats are always cool in a crisis because they just don't care about your problems.

Best Typo Ever

"In the greatest movie of all the ages it appears that GMO popcorn and high-fructose corn syrup licorice are going to be replaced by the best food ever."

That will almost certainly be a box office smash.

Horrifying Skulls Also Need Love

My latest FB friend. True Story.

Happy Nagasaki Day

Novels in dystopian futures frequently have a theme of regret. The characters look with a sad, regretful air at the decaying advertisements for the genetic code altering medicines that gave us all a transmissible taste for living flesh. But that's not really how it'll happen.

No, when American military researchers fire the first test of their neutrino rockets and a horrible chain reaction destroys most life on earth, the handful of remaining humans will not rise from the ashes with a horrified look of shame and solemnly reflect on their hubris. Instead, the president will emerge from his bunker smiling at his approval ratings as they peg the needle and he will assure the small, scraggy remains of the American public that despite this tragedy we will persevere. He will tell them that now is the time to band together. Yadda Yadda.

And then he will blame shoddy Mexican labor that had been hired at the insistence of his political opponent.

And we'll dig out pieces of rebar and boards with nails from the ruins, and march south to teach Them a lesson.

A Place Called Hope

ESPN has fired Joe Morgan. (Or to be technical not renewed his contract.)
It only took 21 years, meaning we have, what, 18 left?
*sigh*

Waaaaaaaahooooooooo

Look, a totally famous blogger put me in her random collage video, so now I'm totally famous.

Also, here's a picture of a libertarian making a sandwich.


Yum. Sandwich.

I Like The New MS Paint.

Apparently our boss is all mad cause we're not doing our jobs. Sorry about that. It's his fucking fault for giving us the internet. If he doesn't want us looking at cat pictures her shouldn't have done that.

Anyway, so Megan.

A number of my readers are claiming that the only reason Obama is running such a big deficit is that revenue has collapsed. I don't see that in the data:

Awesome. Yet again the first sentence of the first post in my first visit in months just smacks me in the face of stupid. NO ONE IS SAYING THAT. The number of readers saying that is zero. NONE.

But, hey, since we got this strawman around, let's go ahead and pour some gasoline on it:
Hrm, I guess she mistook water for gasoline. Thankfully, there's a lot of freelancers in the comments these days so I'll just hand it over to "zosima":

There's nothing to argue. Megan doesn't source her data, and it conflicts with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Data. To use a phrase of Megan's, her argument is "Garbage In Garbage Out"

To see what this plot looks like when not constructed with fictional data, follow this link:
http://tinyurl.com/373tzsd

She's making some sort of mistake, if she provided her sources/methods, we might be able to figure it out.

p.s.
Here's another plot from FRED with the Federal Series.
http://tinyurl.com/33c9ybu

p.p.s. Stimulus spending in 2009 was about $250 B and the 2009 budget was put together by Bush. So, at best, you can blame Obama for $250 B in 2009 and the change from 2009 to 2010. But wait there's more! Here's a post from the CBO which indicates that the deficit declined from 2009 to 2010: http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=1457

G.I.G.O.

Another commentor replies that those aren't the right numbers either, so, ok, fine. Let's use Megan's. But first, let's look at Megan's foray into linear regression:I never realized how fucking hilarious trendlines can be. Here, let me give it a shot:Fucking ghosts.

There's a shit ton more stupid to go around, but what the fuck is the point. I'll just leave you with this amusing exchange: