Her campaign web site is up.
Pretty impressive. If she’d run in 2010, she might have beaten Giffords, and Giffords wouldn’t have been at the Safeway that fateful day meeting constituents.
How Conservatives Suck
Bill Whittle counts the ways.
Citizens United
…and the inexcusable distortions of the case by the media. Well, Obama lied about it to at the SOTU.
NASA’s Mars Mess
Thoughts from Eric Berger. NASA is going to remain a mess until actual accomplishments in space become more important than targeted job preservation. And I don’t expect that to happen any time soon, at least with the current political leadership (and I think that Santorum is likely to be a very bad president when it comes to space policy, as will Mitt).
From Social Upheaval
…is great art made:
It is with the velocity of a giant squid and the sprawl of its erogenous arms that with water-wheels the leverage in any musculoskeletal appendage can move into positions within the time it would take the engine of filaments to accelerate the psychic mass of bodily understanding and construction for such a displacement to continue in different venues and as multiple in purpose as the simple machine of our vessel will allow toward the disappearance of a nexus like in infinite mirror games but with the ability to count each movement of the progression as it acts in mechanical, yet organic, jerking behind the dreamlike animals with their pink illusions that roll their wet bodies into our delicate systems
Yes, those college degrees were totally worth the money. Though I suspect that pharmaceuticals may have played a role.
My Cat Drives Me Crazy
She does, actually, with her willful refusal to pee in a litter box, but it may be literally true as well:
It’s almost impossible to hear about Flegr’s research without wondering whether you’re infected—especially if, like me, you’re a cat owner, favor very rare meat, and identify even a little bit with your Toxo sex stereotype. So before coming to Prague, I’d gotten tested for the parasite, but I didn’t yet know the results. It seemed a good time to see what his intuition would tell me. “Can you guess from observing someone whether they have the parasite—myself, for example?,” I ask.
“No,” he says, “the parasite’s effects on personality are very subtle.” If, as a woman, you were introverted before being infected, he says, the parasite won’t turn you into a raving extrovert. It might just make you a little less introverted. “I’m very typical of Toxoplasma males,” he continues. “But I don’t know whether my personality traits have anything to do with the infection. It’s impossible to say for any one individual. You usually need about 50 people who are infected and 50 who are not, in order to see a statistically significant difference. The vast majority of people will have no idea they’re infected.”
A long, but fascinating article.
Five Years Later
It’s been a brutal half decade.
Obama’s Amazing Energy Spin Machine
Thoughts on the administration policy mess. And the media will continue to help spin it, all the way to November.
Thoughts On The Wreckage Of The Franchise
From Lileks:
It’s unnerving to see Darth Maul’s glaring face everywhere again, as if it’s 199-whatever again and our hopes are so very high, right up until the moment we read the opening crawl, and think – tax dispute? – and then see the guys who are obviously wearing crude ASIAN ALIEN masks, and then someone has to say “I have a bad feeling about this,” and so on. From the very beginning, in other words. Realizing you’ve waited all these years, and you’re getting a kiddie movie. Robot soldiers who talk and say Roger-roger. My God. If only someone had shot a time-lapse movie from the perspective of the screen, capturing the faces of the audience as they went from rapture when the Star Wars logo crashes on the screen, and stayed with the same fixed smile gradually fading away as all hope leached from their bodies.
I guess it would have bothered me more if I’d ever been a big fan. But I’m a 2001 man.
This always fascinates me:
For the entire book I’ve been mashing together two plots, making #3 a sequel of sorts to #2. (It’s not, but they’re tied together, like they’re all tied together, by the Casablanca Bar.) The two plots would not blend. There was nothing to make them mesh, at least nothing I knew. A while ago I got the idea that the main character would meet up with one of the protagonists of the late-40s noir novel, and he’d be a spry old bird who could set a few things straight. Imagine Bogart at 80, showing up in a sequel to “The Maltese Falcon.”
Well, he got to talking, and holy. Crow. He explained it all. He wove them both together, provided the motivation I’d been missing, and provided a theme and subplot for the sequel to the 40s-noir novel, “Band Box.” It’s just a bombshell. I looked at the page, walked away, came back, looked at it again, went to bed to chew it over, woke thinking: yes. That’s it.
It’s the best part of the job: you’re not writing. You’re just taking dictation.
Once in a while, someone asks me why I don’t write fiction. It’s because no one ever dictates to me. I have no idea where one would come up with character, plots or dialog. It’s a form of creativity and genius that I simply do not possess.
The Latest Deadbeat Bailout
Thoughts on the latest insane interference in the housing market, from Charlie Gasparino and Kevin Williamson. Also this does is punish good behavior, and reward bad, with the inevitable consequences.