You Say You Lost Your Faith

[On
Faith]

… but that's not where it's at:

  • The White House needs a Stupidity Czar to follow President Obama around and … somehow … stop him from saying this stuff.

  • … ditto Nancy Pelosi.
    House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the House Republicans' proposed cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget would hurt biomedical research's "biblical power to cure."
    Statism is a religion, and Nancy is a high priestess.

  • Compare and contrast the latest column of the New York Times Official Food Nag, Mark Bittman:
    The oldest and most common dig against organic agriculture is that it cannot feed the world's citizens; this, however, is a supposition, not a fact.
    … with the headline off a recent Slate article from James E. McWilliams:
    Organic Crops Alone Can't Feed the World
    Bittman hangs his article on a recent report entitled "Agro-ecology and the Right to Food" developed under the auspices of the United Nations; it advocates agricultural practices that are "more environmentally sustainable and socially just."

    McWilliams, on the other hand, bases his discussion on USDA research on the actual yields from organic farms.

    You can read both and decide for yourself who's reality-based. But I'd tend to bet against the folks who slant their food production recommendations toward what's "environmentally sustainable and socially just". That sounds like a real good way to starve more people.

  • Fans of minimum wage laws will recoil in horror from this calculation:
    So, in percentage terms of the change in total employment level from 2006 to 2010, jobs affected by the federal minimum wage hikes of 2007, 2008 and 2009 account for 41.8% of the total reduction in jobs seen since 2006.
    Hey, liberals? If you want to show true compassion for the less well-off, make it legal for them to take any job they're willing to take, even if it pays less than the wage you think should be "minimum."

  • For a treat, I urge you to check out Gene Weingarten's proposed new national anthem. It summarizes the Bill of Rights, and is sung to the tune of the William Tell Overture. If you find that hard to imagine, Christine Lavin performs:

    [HTML5-unfriendly embed of the WaPo's original video replaced with Ms. Lavin's live YouTubed performance.]


Last Modified 2012-09-27 10:07 AM EDT

Mirth of A Nation

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

A bit of a departure for me, I picked up this book of short humor pieces awhile back, and finally got around to reading it. I guess I needed some cheering up?

And… well, I was slightly disappointed. It's not that there's not some funny stuff here. Dave Barry has a couple of articles. P. J. O'Rourke has one. And a few other authors made me chuckle as well. The editor, Michael J. Rosen, seems to be a pleasant enough guy; he wrote this in association with the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. Which actually has a unicorn in its garden. Although if you acknowledge its existence, they take you to the booby hatch.

But way too many of the articles were clever without being funny. Or inventively bizarre, while being too sophisticated to actually be caught telling a joke. Perhaps there were some ingenious parodies. But if so, they were unfortunately of works I'd never heard of.

But, hey, you might like it. The low price at Amazon, as I type, is $0.01, plus shipping. And 99 cents for a Kindle version. I think I get a cut of that if you order from the link!


Last Modified 2024-01-28 2:43 PM EDT