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From Lifehacker:
After all, give a man an answer, and he’ll come back tomorrow asking for more. Teach a man to search Google, and you’ll have to offer tech support when he ends up downloading malware while cruising shadier purveyors of adult entertainment and file sharing software.
Dorothy posted this at 9:33 PM HKT on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 as Uncategorized
Over the last week, I’ve gotten a strangely large volume of wrong number calls. At least one a day, sometimes two. On Friday, I got a misdirected text message from a number I didn’t recognize asking me to engage in some criminal activity. Note to readers: if you’re going to request drugs via text message, make sure it’s a known number in your address book.
About 2:30 this morning, the phone rang but I didn’t get to it in time. It was an Arkansas area code. On the voice mail, a guy with a thick foreign accent and little English skill, kept calling me “James” and said that I needed to come pick up my friend at some place, but I couldn’t understand the place he named. Then in the background, some drunk guy with an Arkansas accent started explaining that he was waiting on me and he was going to get arrested for public intoxication (he called it “PI,” so I think he’s familiar with the charge) if I didn’t come pick him up.
Considering the circumstances, I called back to explain that I wasn’t James and probably wouldn’t be coming to pick that drunk guy up, but the guy with the foreign accent couldn’t understand what I was saying, and the drunk guy was just muttering incoherently and didn’t seem able to use the phone properly. Eventually I got tired of shouting “Wrong number!” and just hung up. They didn’t call back, so I presume things resolved themselves. Best of luck, drunk Arkansan.
Apollo posted this at 10:21 AM HKT on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 as Grumblin Mumblins, Ourselves
Somehow, it gets more embarassing.
P.S. Wikipedia has this to say about Keyes’s lesbian anarchist daughter:
She states she is an anarchist, and reportedly believes things such as access to health care, education, housing, food and jobs should be considered human rights.
Under what sort of anarchy does one have guaranteed access to health care and a job?
Apollo posted this at 1:40 AM HKT on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 as Buffoon Watch
Seriously, it’s 2008 and we can’t stop pirates. Not “quit stealing my intellectual property” pirates – though we can’t stop them either – but “quit stealing my oil tanker, ya scurvy ridden sea mutts” pirates.
It’s bad enough that it’s 2008 and I do not have a flying car, but also the high seas are flooded with pirates. More Jetsons, less Mad Max, please.
Apollo posted this at 12:30 AM HKT on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 as Global War on Terror, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past
Well, the economy’s bad, so not only are people turning to Spam, they’re also turning to pot pies. Thirty-dollar pot pies, that is. We’re not talking about the cheap 3-for-a-$1 Banquet stuff, but these:
Twin Hens(TM) has experienced a record 300% growth since 2005. Their delicious Pot Pies are available in Dean & Deluca, Whole Foods, Wild Oats, QFC, Rice’s Epicurean Fairway and over 300 independent stores across the country.
Twin Hens sells 4-serving chicken pot pies for $28 and 4-serving beef pot pies for $30.
Hard times, folks.
Dorothy posted this at 11:39 PM HKT on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 as Grumblin Mumblins, It's Economics - Stupid!
…are hard to come by.
(CNN) –Sources tell CNN’s Ed Henry and John King Barack Obama has chosen Eric Holder as his nominee for Attorney General.
Holder has accepted the position but must still undergo a vetting process by the Obama transition team.
If confirmed, Holder will become the first African-American to hold the position.
We have an African American President Elect. Our current Secretary of State is black, as is her predecessor. When will these ‘ground-breaking’ appointments cease to be ground-breaking? Let me rephrase that: when will reporters not feel compelled to note that person X is the first person of race Y to be nominated to position Z, as if this is still newsworthy?
Tom posted this at 4:58 PM HKT on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 as Journalism
The Atlantic’s resident expert in obstetrics has two posts up today about Sarah Palin’s last pregnancy. TWO! He just can’t seem to let anything go with this woman. Just as there is no reason I can see for people to heap such praise upon her, neither is there any reason for this dogged pursuit of nothing.
What a sad little man he has become.
Jamie posted this at 3:18 PM HKT on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 as Uncategorized
In all honesty, why do Spam sales increase during economic downturns? The New York Times makes it sound like it’s the only thing poor people can afford that “resembles meat.” I’ll grant that I don’t do much grocery shopping in New York, but here in Texas Spam is $4 a pound. Flippin’ pork tenderloin is $2.88/lb at Sam’s Club, and $4/lb at a normal grocery store. Other meats that are less no more expensive than Spam: pork chops ($2/lb), ground beef (lean ground chuck should go for $3/lb; fattier varieties go for $2/lb or less), fresh fish ($1/lb for tilapia if you know where to shop, $4/lb if you don’t), sirloin steak (regularly goes on sale for $4/lb), ham (Smithfield hams are never more than $3/lb), turkey ($.49/lb this time of year; never more than $2/lb), and chicken ($3/lb should buy you boneless, skinless breasts not on sale; everything else is cheaper, and I buy my chickens whole for no more than $1/lb, normally getting a whole chicken for less than a pound of Spam costs – a whole frickin’ chicken!).
I’m not a Spam basher; I like a Spamburger every once in a while, though I don’t get adventurous in cooking with it. But it’s not the case that Spam is cheap. Ramen is cheap. That crappy ground beef in the freezer section that sells for $.79/lb, that’s cheap. Mac and cheese and instant potatoes, the other foods mentioned in the story as increasing in sales, are both cheap.
What would explain it is if people are not just poor, but poor and some combination of lazy, bad cooks, and/or bad shoppers. If you’ve got $3 and you can either salt and pepper a pork tenderloin and cook it to the correct doneness, or you can open a can of Spam, slice is, and put it in a skillet until you feel like taking it out, the latter is somewhat easier and requires no cooking skill whatsoever. Spam also has the advantage of never going bad, unlike fresh meat. Though if people are broke and jobless and moping around without hope because it’s the worst economy since the Great Depression, maybe they could make a little time to buy fresh food regularly instead of buying 100 pounds of Spam twice per annum.
And those other meats are probably healthier (Spam is loaded with calories), reducing the amount the plebs will have to gripe about being fat and not having health insurance. And they all taste better as part of a well-rounded, healthy, and inexpensive diet.
I think we need to force high school kids to take home economics. The thought that people are turning to Spam as poor food upsets me. There’s so much better and cheaper food out there, even if Spam’s not bad from time to time.
Update: I just saw a commercial for a whole, cooked chicken from Boston Market for $1.99. Can’t say I particularly like Boston Market, but that’s cheaper than a can of Spam, and it’s significantly more food. And it’s significantly healthier.
Apollo posted this at 3:01 PM HKT on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 as Grumblin Mumblins, It's Economics - Stupid!
He finally nails down why I’m a Republican:
White resistance to supporting Democratic presidential candidates is troubling partly because much of that resistance is a lingering reaction to Johnson’s passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
I nail an effigy of LBJ to every cross I burn.
Apollo posted this at 7:19 PM HKT on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 as Race
The Palin-Doesn’t-Know-Africa-Is-A-Continent-Meme was a complete hoax, and one that — despite some reservations — I pretty much fell for. Apologies.
Tom posted this at 10:24 AM HKT on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 as Journalism
Drudge headlines this: UK Sperm Banks May Need Bailout…
Apollo posted this at 9:37 AM HKT on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 as Humor
After seeing other flailing companies get $700 billion, and the car companies asking for $25 billion just two months after getting $25 billion, can we really begrudge American Express a measly $3.5 billion? Both parties now agree that it is the job of taxpayers to save large corporations from their own stupidity. This one sounds like a bargain.
I propose a new federal department, headed by a new cabinet secretary, overseeing the transfer of wealth from taxpayers to corporations. At present, this is being done in a haphazard way where only the worst corporations get money from me. But if American Express is getting money for doing badly, how much more should Discover get for not doing badly? $35 billion? And what about the mom and pop grocery store down the street. I never stop there because the place looks like a dump, but they’re staying in business during a recession, and we should reward that sort of behavior. $3.5 million for them would probably do.
But I’m no expert on these things. Which is why we need a cabinet secretary who would know precisely how much money we should take from wealthy Americans and give to large corporations. Or perhaps how much new money we can print and give to large corporations. That might be even more fun . . .
Apollo posted this at 10:05 AM HKT on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 as It's Economics - Stupid!
Contra Jamie, I don’t think the conservative grassroots necessarily is revolting against elites generally. I think they’re revolting against the present cadre of elites parading under the conservative label.
Honestly, our present elites suck. They really do condescend, and their ideas are awful. Whose job should it be to persuade non-conservative intellectuals that conservative ideas are correct? That job falls to conservative elites, not the Sarah Palins and Joes the Plumber of this world. Reagan was able to do what he did because Friedman and Buckley had done what they did; politicians have a role in the system, and it ain’t as great thinkers. If educated types are trending liberal, then educated conservatives need to get on their horses and save the day, not whine that Sarah Palin can’t discuss Niebuhr.
And to the extent that some “intellectuals” voted for Obama because of their dislike of Sarah Palin, if these elites are so offended by the style of one side that they’ll vote for a substance with which they disagree, I question their intellectual bona fides. Who’s being an over-emotional identity voter at that point?
Who are the genuine intellectuals expounding genuinely conservative ideas? Newt. Sowell. That’s about all I can think of. Our newspaper columnists are either too low brow to have a conversation with David Brooks, or too heterodox to be real leaders for conservatism. I love Krauthammer, but outside of foreign affairs he’s a quirky sort of conservative, at best. George Will has been overtaken with bizarre notions of the Constitution lately and is one of the people driven so batty by Sarah Palin that he’s not making much sense.
Brooks, Kristol, and a whole swath of others are enamored with big government. If you had to pin down one thing that has broken the conservative coalition, it’s not the embrace of the religious right, it’s the abandoment of small government principles. The libertoids could put up with the fundies so long as both were voting for smaller government.
There’s no party out there preaching Reaganite freedom, which is how conservatism needs to be explained. Why shouldn’t we bail out Detroit? Because I should have the freedom not to have my money taken away and used to prop up failures. Because entrepreneurs should have the freedom to enter the market and crush crappy old companies. The free market is freedom, the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail, without which the freedom to succeed is meaningless. Where are our “elites” here? Who’s making the heady case for freedom? No one I can think of.
For all the talk of the “youth vote” this year, no one’s catering to it. We Millennials are fundamentally a libertarian generation, and to the extent Democrats are winning the Millenial vote, it’s because Republicans have been impressively lax in letting the Democrats somehow portray their big-government never-saw-a-problem-that-didn’t-need-more-regulation “solutions” as somehow not offensive to liberty. A big part of this, of course, is that our nominee, selected by non-Republicans, was himself offensive to liberty. This year Republicans were an echo of big government nannyism, not a voice for freedom.
And the part of this campaign that our “elites” felt compelled to gripe about was Sarah Palin? The Republican nominee supported a no strings attached $700 billion bailout to companies that desperately needed to fail, and Sarah Palin was the problem? The Republican nominee said that “greed” was the source of our economic problems, and Sarah Palin was the one whose intelligence needed to be questioned? The Republican nominee tried to pass himself off as a stronger regulator than the Democrat, and the only thing that could stir our “elites” to put pen to paper in complaint was Sarah Palin? The Republican nominee had absolutely no intellectual coherence to his positions, but it’s Sarah Palin who’s the thoughtless anti-intellectual?
Sarah Palin moved most of the Republican electorate to the poll. McCain failed to pull through those independents and Democrats he was supposed to get, and moved a portion of the Republican electorate to stay home.
And the elites? If they’re so damned smart, why couldn’t they get their Niebuhr-reading pals to vote Republican this year? Who among them made a strong case for conservatism this year? And who among them made a strong case against Sarah Palin? Why is the latter list longer than the former?
Sure, we need elites. But we need better elites, who will defend freedom in a way that will win over the American public. We don’t have that right now. And if the only options are bad elites or no elites, then I say it’s time to start up the guillotine.
Apollo posted this at 4:26 PM HKT on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 as Conservatism
Something weird I noticed today. I’ve become much more interested in politics now that the election is over.
Huh.
Jamie posted this at 6:58 PM HKT on Monday, November 10th, 2008 as Ourselves, Politics
From The Master.
(Post title is one of the more choice lines from the piece.)
Jamie posted this at 6:36 PM HKT on Monday, November 10th, 2008 as Age and Guile and P.J. O'Rourke, Conservatism