You Tell Me Mistakes

… are part of being young: [Sorry]

  • I think people who make excuses for light-to-no blogging are lame. And yet, here I am, doing just that.
    • A couple of work projects slopped into me-time;
    • I migrated to Google Reader for everyday web-surfing, which took a surprising amount of experimentation and false starts to "do right";
    • Mid-spring yard work;
    • Abducted by UFOs (Unusual Family Obligations);
    • One too many doctor visits;
    • I fell behind on my dead-trees reading;
    • I got a Kindle!
    • And so I immediately fell behind on my Kindle reading.

    I think I see things settling down, although I could simply be adjusting to a different level of chaos.

  • Here's something I don't have time for: figuring out what Newt Gingrich really thinks about health insurance mandates or entitlement reform.

    At Commentary, Peter Wehner tried. Key terms: "intellectually incoherent", "flip-flopped", "irresponsible", "unsettling". And he digs out an old quote from one of Newtie's ex-friends:

    "The important thing you have to understand about Newt Gingrich is that he is amoral. There isn't any right or wrong, there isn't any conservative or liberal. There's only what will work best for Newt Gingrich."

    Unfortunately, that rings true.

    At Cato, Michael F. Cannon is merciless.

    … Newt endorsed a "variation of the individual mandate" (tell me again why he opposes ObamaCare?) and said there is "a way to do it that make most libertarians relatively happy." He must have meant to say leftists rather than libertarians. Regardless, I invite Newt to come to the Cato Institute so he can explain to people who actually care about freedom just how happy he's going to make us.

    The surest way Newt could make me happy: "I am ending my campaign…"

  • When faced with demands to bring government finances under control, Democrats have a two-part universal solution: (a) find a convenient set of scapegoats; (b) propose raising their taxes.

    Given gasoline prices, it's not surprising to see the "big oil companies" getting flogged this time around.

    David Harsanyi performs some useful debunking. Among other things:

    How much would Harry Reid and friends save Americans by ending these tax perks? In five years, an estimated $18 billion. To put this savings in perspective (and we'll get back to how president Barack Obama would like to spend… er, "invest" this money), the federal government borrows around $28 billion every week. To make this kind of trivial savings the focus of a high-profile plan to is to engage in transparently political gotchas.

    And Ron Bailey notes that $18 billion over five years compared to…

    According to estimates by Earth Track founder, Douglas Koplow, if current laws are maintained until 2022, the biofuels industry will receive more than $60 billion per year in subsidies, more than six times the $9.5 billion in support received in 2008.

    The corporate welfare queens and their government enablers are hoping people won't notice.

  • Cracked articles are usually fun and interesting, but I thought "The 8 Most Disgusting Animal Defenses" was above average. For example, everything I know about Komodo Dragons is from the famous Bob and Ray sketch. But from Cracked:

    They're not poisonous. Their mouths are just so disgusting that they might as well be. The gingival tissue surrounding their teeth is constantly being lacerated, causing perpetual open wounds and the flow of blood. This turns their mouths into a Taco Bell-level bacterial orgy.

    Disgusting facts about seven other beasties at the link.

  • Wisdom in unexpected places, via this xkcd cartoon: the Wikipedia "List of numbers" says at the top:

    This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

    And via this post at Language Log: Wikipedia's article on toilets is similarly self-descriptive:

    This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.

  • From this collection of Twitter one-liners at Wired:

    Finding the perfect analogy is like balancing a muffin on a pencil.
    Joe Randazzo
    @Randazzoj

    I think he meant "simile", but it's still funny.


Last Modified 2012-09-26 6:12 AM EDT