Category: food

comment of the day

On Obsidian Wings: Everything They Touch Turns To Dross, this comment appeared:

I’ve believed since the mid 1990s that a virulent tax revolt (as in, no Republican government at any level is permitted to collect taxes) on a national scale, from the Left, would introduce a sexy new element into one of the radical Right’s long-juiced wet dreams.

Further, arming this citizen tax revolt with the guns and the lusty rhetoric about guns thrown around by the unAmerican cowardly Right like Viagra to their testosterone caucus would satisfy their other masturbatory fantasy.

Can you imagine Sean Hannity and Tom Delay and Dick Cheney and Wayne LaPierre (the dickless poodle of lock and load) and Grover Norquist and Erick Erickson and a cast of thousands huddled in the FOX studios letting the spittle fly at their last working microphone as the government they hate is destroyed by the very tools they lovingly and so determinedly demagogued for so long and by their most hated enemies.

It would be like being inside Robespierre’s head as he took that last look into the basket below.

I doubt they have enough working synapses to realize it’s the end of their movie.

are affinity-based charity campaigns a good idea?

Kottke seems skeptical:

It seems to me that if The Gap really cared about stopping HIV/AIDS in Africa, they would just donate the $7.8 million they spend on (RED) advertising to the Clinton Foundation. If Discover really cared about saving you money, they’d lower their APR to prime + 1.

I realize that the entire US economy is a house of cards kept standing by the escalation of spending and credit card debt by American consumers, but the sad fact is that to save money, you need to cut spending or increase income. And if you really want to help fight AIDS in Africa, instead of buying that (RED) Gap t-shirt for which Gap will donate 50% of its profit to The Global Fund, buy a cheaper one at American Apparel and send the $13 difference to the Global Fund yourself.

But it would be interesting to determine if people will just give money, in the same amounts, as they when they buy some tchotchke that tells everyone what a selfless person they are. I’m being unfairly critical, I know: I would rather people kept on buying (RED) items than stopped. After all, part of what The Gap is selling is an endorsement and some promotion for the campaign. And I haven’t seen the goods, but my assumption is that it says more about the campaign than about The Gap, which is the way it should be.

color me stunned

cross-posted here

Glenn Greenwald – Salon quotes law professor Glenn Reynolds:

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don’t understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs’ expat business interests out of business, etc.

Basically, stepping on the Iranians’ toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003. But as far as I can tell, we’ve done nothing along these lines.

What can you add to that? A law professor at a state-funded university is advocating the assassination of Iranian scientists.

You’d think a law professor would understand that this go against Executive Order 12333 – United States Intelligence Activities which was put in effect by a Republican president:

No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.

Amazing.

The people have spoken, the bastards

“Tens of thousands” turn out to protest Iraq escalation.:

Users Paul Library Application-Support Ecto Attachments Wp-Content Uploads 2007 01 Protest012707
“The event drew demonstrators from across the country, and many said that in addition to taking their discontent to the streets they planned to press members of Congress to oppose the war.” Nearly 70 percent of the American public opposes President Bush”s plan to send more U.S. troops to Iraq.

links for 2007-01-11

got kids and a scale?

While fascinating and depressing myself, by turns, here, I was reminded of an anomaly that those with kids might have noticed. Weight and height for kids generally tracks at one pound/inch. A 60 inch tall kid weighs about 60 pounds. Yet for adults, it looks more like one pound per centimeter — 2.54 times as much. At 183 cm my ridiculously ideal weight is close to 183 pounds. But my kids both follow a pound/inch ratio.

Do our <ahem> bones become that much more dense?

links for 2007-01-03

dunno if I woulda told that

Tag, I’m It:

I’ve have almost no knowledge whatsoever of things that would, in another time and place, be considered fundamental parts of a basic education: I’ve read almost none of the classics of English literature, I’ve never knowingly read a poem, I know very little about art history, and I’ve never opened the Bible.

Seriously, I don’t know that — at the age of 40 or thereabouts — I would admit this. It just seems like an admission of something I can’t put my finger on at the moment.