If you eat the salad and it disappoints you,” Mark Canlis told me, “the dressing lacks lemon or the salad lacks mint.” There is no other possibility.
Wonklife
Momma said wonk you out
Lessig Blog, v2: Prosecutor as bully
(Some will say this is not the time. I disagree. This is the time when every mixed emotion needs to find voice.)
Since his arresting the early morning of January 11, 2011 — two years to the day before Aaron Swartz ended his life — I have known more about the events that began this…
This is how Joe Biden greets babies.
In case you missed this! It is amazing!
Middle-class students get the sense the institution will respond to them,” Professor Lareau said. “Working-class and poor students don’t experience that. It makes them more vulnerable.
Keynesian stimulus used to be uncontroversial in Washington; every 2008 presidential candidate had a stimulus plan, and Mitt Romney’s was the largest. But in early 2009, when Obama began pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan, the GOP began describing stimulus as an assault on free enterprise—even though House Republicans (including Paul Ryan) voted for a $715 billion stimulus alternative that was virtually indistinguishable from Obama’s socialist version. The current Republican position seems to be that the fiscal cliff’s instant austerity would destroy the economy, which is odd after four years of Republican clamoring for austerity, and that the cliff’s military spending cuts in particular would kill jobs, which is even odder after four years of Republican insistence that government spending can’t create jobs.
In that sense, Lincoln lets its audience off too easy. It’s comforting to feel that we can always find great wisdom in the middle. For the slight cost of waving away those who carry radicalism in their very blood, it reaffirms our great faith in democracy. It’s much more terrifying to consider how democratic compromise can be disastrous and how zealotry can be perceptive. Lincoln should have been harder on us. And I still loved it. And it still left me weepy. And you should still see it.
Seriously, red states? I’m supposed to believe you’ll reject this deal? Pff. I give it five years. If that.
(via Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion will cost $808 billion. The price tag for states? $8 billion.)
“When I was informed that I had been name People’s Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year—Mustache Edition, I steeled my jaw and slowly exhaled through my flared nostrils into the very lip-thicket that had gotten me into this mess in the first place.” -Nick Offerman
“This news pleased me little. I crushed the iPhone in my hand into dust, this despite the hardy White Oak case I had painstakingly carved for it. Why can no one see what a nightmare these whiskers make of my life? Soon after I learned of this “honor,” my doorbell rang. Mr. Tom Selleck had sent over an enormous congratulatory yak, smoking a cigar. Impressive, Tom, but misguided. Sam Eliott sent me a text that read, “I reckon you et the bar this time, pard,” whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. And Burt Reynolds sent me a Corvette with the words, ”All you, Baby!” painted on the trunk. You son a of bitch. Pardon me, as I count to 10…8.9.10. All right. Look. I can’t begin to describe my frustration at receiving accolades for this facial bane. My mustache! You think it’s a good time, seeing a woman countenance my visage and swoon, only to fall beneath the crushing wheels of a Sunset Strip Hummer? Wrong. When I’m standing in line at the bank, and it’s held up by six men with clown masks and AK-47s, do you think it’s a fun chuckle when everyone turns expectantly to me, assuming somehow that my insanely lush mustache will kickass all of us to safety? It’s not a chuckle, People, not by a long shot. Those dead clowns are most certainly not chuckling. When a press junket for Parks and Recreation took me overseas to Valhalla, this royal Norsemen, Odin, said he wanted to reward me for the power of my facial bear. Okay, fine. He handed me some crappy, little sledgehammer and said, “Wield it justly.” His kid Thor (of course his name was Thor) comes over and starts crying at my feet, mewling something over and over that sounded like “mjolnir, my mjolnir…” I picked him up and lightly bludgeoned him with the hammer and he completely lost it. Full-on tantrum. It was a tiny, little tap, seriously, he was being a total baby. Odin said, “My son fills me with shame. I have only ever wanted him to display facial hairs half as magnificent as those upon your mouth, but, alas, he remains practically clean-shaven. Why, he’s no more man than Hawkeye,” whom I’m assuming is a Norwegian musician, like ABBA? It was mighty awkward is what it was. They certainly do things differently in Europe. Anyway. My point is, simply, that I appreciate the gesture, but this mustache does not strike me as “sexy” in anyway. It strikes me as a pain in my hairy ass. Where’s my trophy for that? And finally, Tom Selleck, I thank you for the yak. It is robust, and I will consume it.”
(Source: princebaratheon, via rantsofagiantsquid)
If she’s as beautiful as you claim, Marlowe, and if you are the man you claim, then you dream of her rolling you over on your back. It’s not up to you.
The power of cognitive capture is that it is fully internalized. Critics, especially on the left, sometimes like to think of the super-elite in Orwellian terms, as masters of Doublethink who heartlessly pursue their own self-interest in full knowledge that the underclass will suffer as a consequence. The reality is much less nefarious: most super-elites genuinely are convinced that the policies that happen to serve their own interests, or those of their firm, or of their industry, are also right for everyone else.
