For The Record

Via sources, Jonathan Chait handed Ms. McArdle her lunch (whatever that means). Let's see.

All of it:
Obamacare Is Now Beyond Rescue from Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates on FORA.tv

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.

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:

Raining

Dear John Stewart,

I appreciate the sentiment, but restorations can only be carried out on things that have already existed.

Love
Some Asshole

Undercover in the Asylum

I could find a few guys like this panhandling on Telegraph Avenue, I think. They'd be anarchists, not terrorists, though, so I guess I'm not a qualified FBI agent.

The FBI said the public was never in danger because its agents were aware of the man's activities before the alleged planning took place and monitored him throughout. Ahmed never bought any explosives and was never near carrying out a plot.

The most photographed subway stop in DC.

The Revolution Got Televised

We interrupt your obsession with celebrity to bring you an important message, delivered to you by a celebrity.

Full disclosure, I learned about this when someone I went to high school with posted it on Facebook. Apparently he helped make it.

All His Friends Were Doing It

He has accomplished more than most men...

Our Children Are Being Ravaged... Burn Down the McDonalds

It occurred to me this morning that the war on Southwest Islamistan has proven nicely that even the hippies were only acting in their own self interest.

But it's ok. Activism is still going strong. The UC students walked out this week over the tragic loss of the rugby team. They reported that they liked it outside on a nice day without class.

Almost Never... OK. Fine. Never.

Heh, I love Glenn and all, but this cracked me up:

It doesn't happen often, but sometimes, something you read is so magnificent on its own that there is nothing to say about it.

No, doesn't happen often at all. Certainly not in that post, in which he writes a full paragraph and then updates twice.

Frozen Blogger Tastes Worse Than The Fresh Stuff

I've never felt comfortable with capitalization schemes for titles. How's that for hypocrisy? Hah.

I sometimes feel like California-based foodies have produced some kind of mass hallucination around the subject of fresh vegetables. But if you poke around your local supermarket, you'll find that they have tons and tons of big freezer full of little conveniently portioned bags of vegetables. Just like pizza or egg rolls. But healthier. Is it 100 percent as tasty as farm-fresh locally grown in-season produce? No.

That's her quoting Matt-Y.

I'm glad that both her and Matt – each masters of cuisine in their own right – are the type to imagine hippies as the kind of people who'd sooner see you die of scurvy than drink orange juice from concentrate. I find this compatible with the caricature of a person as the kind that would think it's up to them to educate the masses about the existence of frozen vegetables. (Pro-Tip: They're in the frozen part of the store.)


Bonus Fun: 26 years of professional blogging experience has still not taught Megan the difference between links on the internet and links from her reader...

Bold words: followed by a semi-[Boy, can I be stupid, sometimes. ~ed.]colon and regular words.

They Got Better

Ladies and gentlemen, Ross Douthat:

The antiwar movement, for instance, seemed to effectively take over the Democratic Party in the middle years of the Bush administration.

Ross Douthat, ladies and gentlemen.

Not a Literal Connection, Dude

A lot of people are all up in arms about some anti-colonialism comment in some article written by D-Souzie. He thinks colonialism isn't something we should be against? I dunno. I've been too busy writing down anti-american names so that – when we finish up in SandNiggerstan – I'll be useful in directing our flying killer robots at home where they are still so desperately needed. Enjoy your wedding party, libtards!

I managed to get far enough into the article to find this beautiful, beautiful peace of logic:

More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?

I was confused by this at first until I realized that Dinesh meant it was strange that a professionally intellectual would argue that excessive use of oil would never lead to reckless exploitation of oil resources.

I may finish the article, in which case, updates will go below.

Update:

Yup, as predicted.

Obama's foreign [Uh, what country is New York in again? -ed.] policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.

I guess missing blatant connections is just this guy's thing...

Update II:

Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.

Uh, Dinesh, if I might... uh.. borrow some idiocy. I don't see any connection there!

Catch!

genius

Skinny Jeans Are The New Leggings

I was into Democracy back before it went all corporate.