elfs | News and Stuff (Reply)

If I had all the time in the world:

Publius at Obsidian Wings blogs about the worst op-ed of 2007:

Clinton's rivals are contemplating history and deriving only a narrow lesson about Bush: Don't trust him when he confronts a Muslim country. But the larger, more durable lesson from Iraq is that wars can be caused by a lack of confrontation. The Iraq invasion happened partly because the world had lost the stomach to confront Saddam Hussein by other means.

I have to agree with Publius. This is maddeningly idiotic, and a perfect example of the willingness of some political wing that cannot be tied to either Republicans or Democrats, but to an underlying assumption that war is a tactic of first resort. That more than just George Bush had run out of patience with the progress in Iraq through 2000 and 2001. The bar for going to war must be set high, there must be a presumption of succes by other means. But there seems to be a large cadre who believes that military force is so generally efficacious that the burden of proof rests on those who would not go to war.

All that blood. All that economic burden placed on Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan's back. Just to feed one brutal idiot's ego.

A Rabbi and a Minister walk into a publishing house, and the results are not pretty. Minister R.T. Kendall and Rabbi David Rosen have published a book about their exchanges of letters regarding faith. Kendall spends every spare moment trying to convert Rosen; Rosen, in turn, spends considerable intellectual energy trying to teach Kendall how not to be so rude in public. Kendall actually expressed surprise that a rabbi would have "such a great spirit," so much so that he says that Rosen may be "a secret believer [of the Gospel]."

Jesus wept.

P.J. O'Rourke warns us all that the coming retirement of the Baby Boomers is bad news:

The pittance that is a current Social Security payment was intended to maintain the doddering retirees of yore in their accustomed condition of thin gruel and single-car garages. Such chump change will hardly suffice for today's vigorous sexagenarians intent on (among other things) vigorous sex, in places like Paris, St. Bart's, and Phuket...

So just give us all the money in the federal, state, and local budget. Forget spending on the military, education, and infrastructure. What with Iraq, falling SAT scores, and that bridge collapse in Minneapolis, it's not like the military, education, and infrastructure are doing very well anyway. Besides, you don't have a choice. We are 80 million strong. That's a number equal to almost two-thirds of the registered voters in the United States. Do what we say or we will ballot you into a socio-economic condition that will make North Korea look like the clubhouse at Pebble Beach.

Good man, that Mr. O'Rourke.

And if the old guy wasn't enough his young, hip replacement (yes, there's a pun there) Mark Morford warns us again that the coming generation is going to be completely clueless about how to respond to O'Rourke's generation:

My high-school teacher friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler...

What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.

Kinda reminds me of the song "Get Me Gone" by Fort Minor where mike writes:

I only do e-mail responses to print interviews
Because these people love to put a twist to your words
To infer that you said something fucking absurd

Oh, did I lose you at infer?
Not used to hearing a verse that uses over first grade vocabulary words?

See? Someone knows what's going on.