Time to retire it. Let’s do it for the women.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Colbert’s Sister
She’s kind of like the health care bill–you have to elect her to find out what’s in her.
Snow, And The Universe
It spent its fury on the southeastern part of the state, which got 15 inches of snow. All of which will melt and soak the soil and well, well, what do you know: the drought lifts. The dryness of the last few years is forgotten as the mean reasserts itself over the long run of the decade, which itself will be a wink, a blip, an inhalation to the next decades exhalation, just as the universe itself is a bang at the start and a great collapse at the end, like two flaps of a heart valve. Assuming there’s enough matter to cause the universe to contract, that is. I hope so. I hate the idea that it begins with a great gust of matter, spreads and cools and ends in silence. Because that would make the universe, in essence, a sneeze.
Geshundheit.
Health Foods
That are killing you.
Bill And Hillary
Oh, barf.
Orcs
Asking the important questions: How and what did they eat?
The Nerdprom Love Fest
Thoughts from Ann Althouse:
I really do find the shots of the audience quite sickening. Do they not realize how they look? It’s an anti-advertisement for the services they’d like to sell us. They seem utterly unprepared to confront power. I’m thinking: This is something that should be done in private, like masturbation. Then I realize: This is the public show. Imagine what they do in private.
I’m going to try not to. Apparently they have absolutely no self-awareness of how they look to those of us not so smitten.
Starships
A symposium, in San Diego. It looks interesting — I may go. Could be an opportunity for book sales and signings.
Big Bangers
Steve Hayward wonders if there could be a sitcom about think tankers.
Actually, it would be amusing to see the interactions between denizens of, say, AEI and Brookings. And imagine the snark from Cato, CEI and Reason. I’d cast Katherine Mangu-Ward as herself. But Kate Micucci might be able to do the job, too. And then there’s Jonah.
Someone needs to work up a treatment, stat.
A Disappointment For “Liberals”
West Wing (the teevee show, not the section of the White House) isn’t real:
The American President and The West Wing are not searing portrayals of effective political management. They’re drama. The first question a dramatist asks is not “Is this how it really works?” but “Is it entertaining?” And the second is “Can the audience understand this in less than thirty seconds?” Veracity is way, way down the list. If you want a clue to how realistic it all is, consider that Aaron Sorkin awarded Jed Bartlett the Nobel Prize in Economics. Then go interview some Nobel Prizewinning Economists and ask yourself whether a single one of them would have the desire, or the ability, to run for president.
Jed Bartlett doesn’t win policy debates because of his amazing tactical skills, his overpowering arguments, or the sheer persuasiveness of his granite-faced brand of urbane folksomeness. He wins them because Aaron Sorkin is a liberal and he wants Republicans to lose on the major issues. Unfortunately for liberals, Tom Coburn and John Boehner don’t have their lines faxed over from Hollywood every morning.
Their problem is, as Obama once said of himself, that they believe their own bull****.