A core value of American liberals is the importance of redistributing wealth from the prosperous to others, through highly progressive taxes and transfer payments. Which leads to a question: If redistributing wealth is a good idea for workers, companies, individuals, and families, then intellectual consistency suggests it should be equally valid for institutions like colleges and universities. Right?
. . . the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a ‘controversy’ to teach.
My son is standing in the kitchen like he’s about to make an announcement. Suddenly . . .
“Ah-CHOO!”
“Geez, man,” I say, “you just sneeze like that without making any effort to lift your hand up and block it?”
“Did the people in New Orleans make an effort to block Hurricane Katrina?” he asks in a loud voice. “NO! They just let it happen and blamed President Bush!”
The job ads on the right were dropped into a business article I was reading last weekend. Evidently the job titles get truncated after 24 characters, which is probably a bad idea, given the unintended consequences . . .
If poetry is reduced to an algebraic equation with one meaning, and only a teacher has the meaning, and you can’t figure it out without the teacher, it’s no fun. And when you become an adult, when you see a poem in The New Yorker, you’ll turn the page and look for a cartoon. You’ll say, ‘I don’t have to work for a good grade anymore.’
I don’t know where my 12-year-old kid learned the concept of micromanagement, but he’s launched into a speech on the topic:
“This is beyond micromanagement!” he says. “This is proton-level management! No, wait, it’s negative, so it’s electron management!”
This is occasioned by the fact that we’ve asked him to stop playing video games and take a shower . . .
According to a U.S. Census report released yesterday, the nation’s poverty rate rose in 2004 for the fourth straight year.
They [Islamist radicals or, as Hitchens calls them, Islamo-fascists] gave us no peace and we shouldn’t give them any. We can’t live on the same planet as them and I’m glad because I don’t want to. I don’t want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murderers and rapists and torturers and child abusers. Its them or me. I’m very happy about this because I know it will be them. It’s a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it’s also a pleasure. I don’t regard it as a grim task at all.
. . . we don’t need some great lurch to the right or lurch to the left or redefinition of the Democratic Party.
The NCAA has put together a list of colleges with “hostile and abusive” team nicknames, including the Illinois Fighting Illini, the Utah Utes and the North Dakota Fighting Sioux.
Remind me again why Fighting Illini, Utes and Fighting Sioux are hostile and abusive, but Fighting Irish, with a dopey guy prancing around in a leprechaun suit, is okay?
I want to say to the meek: Once we finally get rid of the death tax, you’re not inheriting anything.
An open letter to the Kansas School Board on an alternative theory of Intelligent Design, i.e., that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
A Democratic shift to the right risks inflaming the party’s Angry Left base, while a shift to the left would surely cost the party whatever support it has left from normal people.
The guy in the next cubicle is spending the afternoon looking at animal cams on the web.
“Look at this whale cam,” he says. “It’s underwater!”
I’m reminded of this line from the movie The Red Shoes: “Life rushes by, time rushes by, but the Red Shoes go on dancing forever.” All of that applies to me, except for the red shoes part.
There’s a company in Chicago that will make “a certified, high-quality diamond” from the carbon of your deceased loved one.
“Send me the link to that,” my wife says.
I don’t know if a web page is legally binding, but I am stating right here that I do not want to be crushed into a gemstone upon my demise.
As time goes on, we will naturally start to forget what happened on September 11, 2001 . . .
Did you know that the pope has an email address? I wonder if he has a blog too?
If my son were to send a greeting to the Holy Father, I imagine it would look something this:
$71!! $(4r3d 70 (h4!!3ng3 m3 w17h l337 4? w3!! 1 93$$ U j5$7 dun 907 17 1n y4 y0, unl1|{3 m3, wh0 h4$ 907 d4 m4d $|{1!!$ n3d4%, n371m3! U d5n 907 n0 $|{1!! y0, 5 4 $71ff, 4 w4nn4b3, 7h0. u (4n7 (0n741n m3 n3d4y, n0 r34$0n n0 w4y. 1 907 d4 p0w3r, 1m (0n73n7 1n my 4(710n$… 1 907 n0 7r0ubl3 1n $|{00L1n u 4nd n0 7r0ubL3 w17 fr4(710n$. 1f U ju$7 L1$73n 70 m3 4nd j5$7 4lr43dy 91v3 17 up… 1 d4 L337 m4$74 d00d, 1 d4 f47h4. 1m d4 b19 D099, u d4 PUP!
lol, lmbo, rotfl, hahahahahaha!!! i rok…
From Ned Batchelder:
Le Viaduc de Millau is the tallest bridge in the world, as measured to the top of the tallest pylon.
Well, monsieur, we’ve got some tall bridges in America too! Leave it to the French, though, to build one over land . . .
