This is one of those things that are really serious at the time, but since no one died, it’s funny later. I typically enjoy This American Life when I listen to it, but this Onion article is spot on. Finally, SuperDeluxe.com has a numerous cartoons by Brad Neely of Washington fame. His archive is here. [...]
Archive for November, 2011
Former CIA chief and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient George Tenet is doing some much belated damage control on his role in starting the war in Iraq. Tenet, if you’ll recall, made the comment that the case that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was a “slam dunk.” He now claims that he meant that [...]
Both houses of Congress have now approved an Iraq war funding bill that sets an October first deadline for the withdrawl of troops to begin. Naturally, Bush will veto this bill–even though he has seemed utterly incapable of vetoing the rest of the insane spending bills to cross his desk in the last six years. [...]
“The poorest thing that crawls on earth, contending to save itself from injustice and oppression, is an object respectable in the eyes of God and man….But I cannot conceive any existence under heaven … that is truly more odious and disgusting than an impotent, helpless creature, without civil wisdom or military skill, without a consciousness [...]
In an extremely interesting article on the evolution of humans’ remarkable distance running ability, Harvard Anthropology Professor Daniel Lieberman is quoted thusly: “Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom.” What!? Aren’t tortoises the tortoises of the animal kingdom? [...]
Can you finish a Rubik’s Cube? How about doing it while trackstanding on a bicycle in under two minutes? This guy can. (From Randall at Catallarchy.) And we’ll all live in cities on the moon! (From Marginal Revolution). Astronaut Buzz Aldrin knocks the hell out of a moon landing denier. A web short featuring Will [...]
The Economist is running a long list of common solecisms (solecism: noun, 1: an ungrammatical combination of words in a sentence; also : a minor blunder in speech–I didn’t know it either). In many case, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the proper grammatical rules used, and at some point doesn’t that mean they are [...]
This Gene Healy post draws on a number of commentators who make the imminently sensible point that we should not make policies based upon freak occurences like the Virginia Tech massacre this week–like the zero tolerance policies that followed in the wake of Colombine and other late nineties school shootings. But Healy goes on to [...]
Today, April 19th, is the 64th anniversary of Dr. Albert Hoffman’s first deliberate ingestion of LSD-25, so it’s as good a day as any to mark as acid’s 64th birthday. Also amazingly enough, Hoffman is still alive at the age of 101.
Monday, the United States witnessed the worst mass murder in its history, a mass murder that claimed 33 lives. Today in Baghdad, a series of bombings killed 171 people in a country one tenth of the size of America. The latter clearly doesn’t make the former any less tragic and damnable, but Iraqis are bascially [...]
