Republican Pre-Primary Plan

I just talked to a guy who works for the GOP and he told me that they have a one-candidate-per-month plan for the rest of the year. According to him, they plan on having one candidate take the lead for each month until the primaries actually start. It will be:

Michelle Bachmann in September

Rick Perry in October

Heman Cain in November

Newt Gingrich in December

I don't have any idea how they plan to do it (Herman Cain?!?!), but this is how they plan on letting Mitt Romney (the candidate that they expect to actually win the primary) stay out of the spotlight and not have to take the beating that goes with front-runner status.

I'll post more if/when I get more details.

Hey it's new years. We made it all the way around again!

I'm still sitting here and again I'm trying hard to care that the year has come to an end. And this time even the decade is ending.

Nobody else seems to care about the end of this decade either. All of the "best of the decade" lists have come late, almost as an afterthought. I think that's because the decade has no name. Goodbye seventies, eighties, 20th century, ... now what? The BBC calls them "the naughties", but I think that's the disease I blamed for having caused me to steal all of the cookies (if you know what I mean) and have sex with them. No wait, I think the naughties were the villain in the pilot episode of the Teletubbies.

Anyway, I think "first ten years of the century" probably fits best. So, goodbye ftyotc. We hardly knew you.

Ross Douthat is a fat ass and a bad writer.

The President of the United States gets the Nobel Prize and that's a problem for you... whatever. But can you at least write a two-sentence summary of your stupid piece without mixing up past and present tense?

It was obvious that he wishes

Are you an idiot?

If only I'd had the forethought to buy a less fuel-efficient car

My 1994 clunker got 19 mpg when it was new. According to cars.gov. That's 1 mpg too many. If you want to conserve gas, you should convert to gallons per mile (or gallons per 100 miles) and decrease that more-relevant number. Assuming they drive the same amount, trading in a car that gets 10 miles per gallon for one that gets 12.5 miles per gallon saves the same amount of gas as going from 20 mpg to 33.3 mpg or from 40 mpg to 200 mpg:

1/10mpg = .1 gallons per mile
1/12.5mpg = .08 gallons per mile
.1gpm - .08gpm = .02 gallon savings per mile

1/20mpg = .05 gallons per mile
1/33.3mpg = .03 gallons per mile
.05gpm - .03gpm = .02 gallon savings per mile

1/40mpg = .025 gallons per mile
1/200mpg = .005 gallons per mile
.025gpm - .005gpm = .02 gallon savings per mile

I think that in order to qualify for the "cash for clunkers" your new car should pass the following 3 criteria:

1) the new car gets at least 4 more mpg than the old one.
2) the new car gets at least 20 miles per gallon
3) the new car uses at least one fewer gallons per 100 miles

This graph illustrates these three criteria and their max, whicx is my proposal:

The Central is Number 1!!

Straight-Up Propaganda Torture

After reading this article in the NYT I realized that Cheney had already won the PR war on torture. He's got people debating about whether the information we got was worth the means. Maybe yes, maybe no. Who cares? The important thing to realize is that this torture was never meant to get any information in the first place. According to the article, they were using techniques known by our military not to be effective in getting information. These techniques are known to be effective in getting propaganda confessions. They used these techniques on people who had been off of the battlefield for months -- sometimes years -- and could not possibly have any actionable intelligence.

What was Cheney trying to get them to say? Well, they were very interested at that time in convincing us that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. They may have believed that a "confession" would have helped them in this cause. Why did they fail? Maybe the Army/CIA/etc. aren't as full of toadies as Cheney thought.

51-Star American Flag

Here is my proposal for a 51-star flag. I think, at this point, the rectangle has been done. It's time for a new shape.

G-R-O Led Salad Great!

When you realized that the internet was optimized for finding song lyrics, what was the first song you looked up? Mine was Those Were the Days, the intro song for All in the Family.

Listening to this song again, I realize that we finally did get "a man like Herbert Hoover again". Thank goodness we're finally almost rid of him.

Recorded History

In the future, there will exist roughly as much information about each and every person's life as would exist in a standard memoir. This information will exist into perpetuity and be database searchable. So, if historians want to ask a specific question about what life was like, what people were thinking, etc., they can make a clever query and search the database. Studying the history of people (like us) who lived before this data exists will be like studying cave paintings and ancient scrolls. You have to make a story about people's lives based on the shreds of evidence that happen to have been written down. There's a big bias toward famous people and others (like me) who write everything down in spite of a lack of people interested in reading about them.

There's a *big* dipper too?

What if you only existed for a week at a time, once a year (say from Christmas to New Years)? And you aged normally during these weeks and lived until these one-week periods totaled a normal human lifespan? So you would live for several thousand years, one week per year. What would you do? If possible, you'd create a cult where successive generations of people could each function as your main contact, updating you on what happened over the past year. How closely could you keep up with what was going on? Would this cult try to manipulate you? You couldn't let this cult control your information too closely. Would you be exceptionally wise or just have no idea what was going on most of the time? What language(s) would you speak? I'm imagining an interaction with the public much like that of The Pope. Would your pronouncements be any more or less insightful or relevant than those of The Pope? Would you take the time to learn to drive? You could probably get pretty rich, or at least sustain yourself in high style, on antiques and compound interest.

It would be nice if you, for example, had met Jesus. But it's not that likely that you would have, given the rate at which people and information traveled back then. Also, I don't think that he was nearly as famous during his life as he is now.

Pink Floyd's "The Thin Ice" is about George W. Bush

These lyrics never made sense to me until I thought about them as a premonition of our 43rd president. The first part is about an easy and blissfully ignorant childhood (enough said there). As for the rest, couldn't you call the high-tech-but-fatally-flawed-by-lack-of-historical-consideration invasion of Iraq skating on the thin ice of modern life? And I'd say that, in doing so, he dragged behind him the silent reproach of [at least] a million tear-stained eyes. I'd also say that a pretty big crack in the ice appeared under his feet. And if anyone's ever slipped out of their depth, he has.

Momma loves her baby,
And daddy loves you, too.
And the sea may look warm to ya, babe,
And the sky may look blue.

Oooooo babe.
Oooooooo baby blue.
Oooooo ooohh babe.

If you should go skating,
On the thin ice of modern life,
Dragging behind you the silent reproach,
Of a million tear-stained eyes,
Dont be surprised when a crack in the ice,
Appears under your feet.
You slip out of your depth and out of your mind,
With your fear flowing out from behind,
You as you claw the ice.