Oh, noes! Muse, Go Back to Bed!

Gack. I just opened a folder in my documents directory entitled "Steampunk Sexbots." I'm sure it will involve cerebral musings on William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and zombies.

No, not those zombies. These zombies.

It's all James Nicoll's fault for showing me this in the same breath we were discussing the Christian response to sex with robots.

Who knew?

Someone took me to task this weekend for being excessively gleeful at the passing of Irving Kristol. It's hard for me to care, really. Kristol felt no pain at my distaste for him in life -- he apparently wallowed in his opponents' dislike of his life's work -- and he's hardly about to care in death.

But I never realized he was quite so cavalier in his evil:

Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists... This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority - so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.

In other words, it didn't matter if the country plummeted toward economic disaster, so long as in the meantime his tribe managed to buy off the "docile masses" and establish that Legendary Permanent Republican Majority.

Kristol was one of those people about whom there is an old and probably apocryphal tale of a politician and one of his constituents: "Sir, if you maintain your current policies, you'll rule over nothing but ruins."

"Yes," said the politician, "But they'll be my ruins!"

The lost decade

Take a look at Figure 2 on the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities latest report. Look closely: the highest median income for the middle class was in 2000. Don't look at 2008, look at 2007.

During the supposed high-flying Bush years, when we were "awash" with cash, when we were "flush" with money, when the country was supposedly going gangbusters (even though a lot of that money didn't "really" exist), the data show that the median income for Americans was still never as high as the last year of the Clinton presidency.

Financially, we never went anywhere as a country during the Bush era. And yet, we're all painfully aware that the rich became significantly more rich in that time.

This is not capitalism as it is classically understood. The rising tide only lifted a few, privileged boats: the rest of us sank. A lot.

And now, for something completely different!

Women with Guns. And not one pic of Veronica Zemanova about to blow her boobs off.

A Senator Whose Chief of Staff is an Idiot? You Don't Say!

Michael Schwartz, chief of staff for Senator Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), this weekend said of boys ages nine through twelve:

But it is my observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that's because they don't want to be that way. They don't want to fall into it. And that's a good instinct. ... It's not genetic. Homosexuality is inflicted on people.

Dude, you were so not in my head at that age.

I guess I should be furious: Schwartz wasn't one of those kids terrified lest his peers find out that he didn't share their animosity, but instead had a deep fascination: people do that? For fun? Can I do that? Grief, if some of the people I went to school with at that age knew what was going through my head I would probably have never survived sixth grade.

I'm burned out, though. Schwartz is just an idiot who doesn't understand kids at all. I don't think he ever was one.

Schwartz also says that all pornography is gay pornography. Apparently, his logic is something like: boys have a natural inclination. If you show them porn, they'll discover masturbation, and once they've gotten used to holding one penis in their hands, well, you know where that leads...