Unqualified Offerings

By Mona
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“Hi, I’m from the FBI, and having paid low-life scum to lie about you, I intend to get myself promoted and send you to prison for 30 years.”

By Thoreau
Looks like pot smoking increases the risk of developing psychotic disorders.
Now they may have to legalize it, just so they can bring it into the open and then do a sequel to the tobacco suit. As long as it remains underground, the only suit they can bring is “The State Attorneys General vs. […]

By Mona
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Commentary’s Max Boot approvingly quoting Napoleon, my emphasis:

“In war, moral considerations account for three-quarters, the actual balance of forces only for the other quarter.” If we set a withdrawal timetable [from Iraq], the moral balance will tip against us even faster than the actual balance of forces—with deadly consequences.
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We can […]

Off to the Outer Banks with the extended fam. We’ll be in Salvo. I don’t think there’s internet in the house, but I’ll hit the wifi hotspots now and then. In the meantime you’ll have Thoreau and Mona and maybe even Neel to keep you amused and outraged.

By Thoreau
This administration is so uniquely awful that even Walter Mondale has found a way to come out of the woodwork and remind us that he looks pretty awesome by comparison:
Three decades ago we lived through another painful example of a White House exceeding its authority, lying to the American people, breaking the law and […]

By Thoreau
The latest Economist has an article on something that should have been blindingly obvious to me, and has no doubt been discussed many times before, but this is the first I’ve heard of it:
The biggest problem with wind and solar energy is that supply can fluctuate on a daily and hourly basis, but it […]

By Thoreau
I was in NYC (Manhattan, to be specific) for a few days, to discuss projects with some colleagues and see a few friends one last time before moving to California.  My wife and I did some of the usual tourist things, but what made the biggest impression on me was the subway.  Yes, it’s […]

Show some stones, Senators. A special prosecutor would take forever to report, even if you got one installed. Most testimony would be in camera before a grand jury. It would take a round of testimony under oath to produce fresh lies for a perjury indictment, assuming a special prosecutor indicts him at all. Cite him […]

Pretty interesting article about nerdism whose thesis is that nerdiness amounts to a willful “hyperwhiteness.” I find it at least half compelling. Then I remember that there was a concept of nerdiness back in rural Southwestern PA when I was growing up in the 1970s - believe me on this - and that my white […]

By Mona
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So….Texas Governor Rick Perry has appointed creationist Don McElroy to head the Texas State Board of Education. According to James Randi quoting “bad astronomer Phil Plait”:

Here is a letter McElroy sent out to his fellow State Board of Education members:
My Personal Confession
Given all the time in the world, I don’t […]

Says Anne-Marie Slaughter’s oped not the dumbest thing ever written by anyone in any venue. She gives the game away when she calls Charles Krauthammer “stupid.” Krauthammer is evil, not stupid. If you started from the question, “What would the bitterest mean man in the world believe?” and went from there, everything Krauthammer writes would […]

Two passages from Steve Chapman’s reprise of the problems with Hillary Clinton:
[Clinton] didn’t support the war because she was hoodwinked by Bush. She didn’t do it for strictly political reasons. She supported it because of her conception of America’s proper role in the world—which combines a thirst for altruistic missions with a faith in the […]

Wow.
Assuming everyone passes their drug tests anyway . . .
That was a thrilling time trial. When Levi passes Sastre I figured he had a chance at least at second. You have to admire Evans for holding up in the last 5K. Two years ago Levi was a climber with indifferent time-trial speed. Now he really […]

The only honorable thing to do is admit that Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new oped in the Washington Post beats Anne Applebaum out for the title of dumbest thing ever written by anyone in any venue. If it weren’t print, I’d expect her to break into a rendition of “Fly Away, Lesbian Seagull” like the hippie teacher […]

IOZ:
Anyway, this all falls under my own maxim: Don’t listen to what they say; look at what they do. In this case, category Say is “prevent a wider regional war” and category Do is “pour billions of dollars worth of arms into the fragile, quarrelsome, precarious neighbors of an escalating civil war ever percolating under […]

By Mona
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What can one say, when war supporter “Armed Liberal” approvingly quotes psychologist (and apparently former Army Ranger) David Grossman who glibly spews, my emphasis:

…[Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] can be a step on the path to stress inoculation and …one can be stronger when they come out the other […]

Anyone have any experience/opinion on the newish solar roof tiles?

Last time I wrote about the suits and countersuits between Blackwater USA and the survivors of the four Blackwater employees killed and displayed by that bridge in Fallujah back in 2004, people pointed out that for better or worse the men had signed contracts agreeing not to sue their employees. That’s a valid point. But […]

I got news for you Brits: You can’t do our accents worth shit either.
This episode, BTW, is pretty lame so far.

We cannot rule out, on the basis of the text itself, that this is a clever parody of of the bubble mentality of the deadender Right. It’s practical effect will be to make the pro-war position seem absurd to whoever reads, or at least skims it. (I did the latter.) What we can rule out, […]

Like fan service, but replacing titillation with world-weary cynicism. Nevertheless, this is what the official Democratic Party’s panties look like.
Via Avedon Eschatonian.

Beyond the subject of Chip Bok’s cartoon is a larger issue. One keeps reading about this or that Iraqi figure going abroad for “medical care” (including to diet clinics) or “spending much of his time in London now” or being on a “visit” to the Gulf, or Jordan, or Iran. The steady drip of stories […]

This is depressing.

The 26%er creed:
Americans may do awful things, but our job is to pretend that they don’t . . .
Criminy. Every American institution is composed, like Soylent Green, of people. PEEEEE-PULLLLL!!! That extends to the national security bureaucracy and the military and well beyond those institutions.