John Cole on why your government can't do anything at all these days

Wow. John Cole on why our country has become ungovernable. He so nails it, it gives me the chills. He talks about how Americorp is allowed to "design tutoring programs," but it's members are forbidden from tutoring or mentoring children directly. Here's what would happen if someone decided to try and change it: ( Two paras. Please go read the original. It's scarily accurate )

Read it all: This Is What Obstructionism + Nihilism + the Wurlitzer Looks Like

What Cole fails to mention (perhaps because he doesn't assume he has to), is that so much of this right wing noise machine is funded not by its own efforts, but by a conglomeration of industries interested in regulatory capture (Reason magazine, for example, gets a lot of its money from Exxon Mobil), and quasi-religious idealogues representing the Coors, Scaife, and Bradley foundations, all of which (at least in the previous generation) supported the Randian viewpoint first made explicit by Thucydides in 431BC:

You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

Observations about Trivial Pursuit, 1985 Junior Edition

Apparently, Trivial Pursuit takes too long and is too boring for your average Internet-addled child. They were getting very anxious after an hour had gone by. Yamaraashi-chan, especially, was bored with it. "You just have to memorize a whole bunch of facts," she whined. "The game makes no sense. There's no logic to it." Well, that might be true, but that's the point of the game.

Yamraashi-chan is also taking the "I'm not like my parents" game every 12-year-old goes through to a whole new level. Her response to the question, Who was the co-pilot of the Millenium Falcon was, "The what?" When we explained, her reaction was, "Dude, I last saw Star Wars when I was three." But apparently she's seen the Matrix more than once. (I've also told her, "Don't Call Me Dude.")

Oh, and in 1985, sushi was considered so exotic that this question made sense: "What do you find in a sushi restaurant: raw fish, or desserts?"