apple juice

Yeah, I’m thinking about politics again…

“…the biggest problem in this country is…they’re big babies. I mean, people keep saying they don’t want any tax increases, but they don’t want to have their Medicare cut, they don’t want to have their Medicaid [cut] or they don’t want to have their Social Security touched an inch. Well, it’s about time someone tells them, you can’t have it, baby…You have to make a choice. And I fear that—and I always thought, you see, that that was the Conservative position. The Conservative is the Grinch who says no. And, in some ways, I think this in the long run, looking back in history, was Reagan’s greatest bad legacy, which is he tried to tell people you can have it all. We can’t have it all.”

–Andrew Sullivan on Fareed Zakaria

Let me just remind everyone that it was Clinton who last had a balanced budget and made debt payments.

If you really want to scare yourself, check out the Wikipedia entry on the United States Federal Budget

There are different ways to solve these problems. We have limited resources, and we have choices to make.

What are your priorities?

 

If you think expanding regional high-speed rail is a good thing for the country, then you may want to reconsider voting republican…

Republican Wave Could Spell Trouble for High-Speed Rail Projects from Coast to Coast

Two things totally freaking me out:

Can a municipal service like a library hold so central a place that it should be entrusted to a profit-driven contractor only as a last resort — and maybe not even then?

Anger as a Private Company Takes Over Libraries

and…

U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet

Several privacy and technology advocates argued that requiring interception capabilities would create holes that would inevitably be exploited by hackers.

Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, pointed to an episode in Greece: In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s.

“I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” he said. “If they start building in all these back doors, they will be exploited.”

Two incredibly bad ideas, in my opinion.

As quoted in daring fireball:

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Ben Franklin

Raising Minimalist Children in a Society of Excess:

“Don’t feel guilty. Modern parents are made to feel as if they are depriving their children of ‘the best’ if they don’t sign them up for every lesson, take them to every movie, or buy them every brain-enhancing toy. Advertising companies are paying billions of dollars to make you think this. It is not reality… it is a fictional version of reality they are selling. Let it go. Don’t ‘buy’ into it. You are not depriving your children; you are enhancing their mental and emotional development by letting the real world around them captivate and interest them. Do you think the Smiths’ kids are really better off because they spend all their free time in front of a television or playing with a DSI?”

Amen!

However, the temple for waisted male self-esteem is Old Navy, where I easily slid into a size 34 pair of the brand’s Dress Pant. Where no other 34s had been hospitable, Old Navy’s fit snugly. The final measurement? Five inches larger than the label. You can eat all the slow-churn ice cream and brats you want, and still consider yourself slender in these.

Sonja called me from the store today. I found an awesome pair of pants for you, do you fit in a 34? Maybe? I replied.

As it turns out, that wasn’t such a bad answer:

Are Your Pants Lying to You?

I get a fair amount of my internet oddities and goodness from kottke.org — you should check him out.

And this recent post of a post about meat eating is very interesting…

From the Guardian, a review of a book called Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie. In it, Fairlie argues that meat production isn’t actually that inefficient when done properly and veganism as an ethical response leaves something to be desired.

“But these idiocies, Fairlie shows, are not arguments against all meat eating, but arguments against the current farming model. He demonstrates that we’ve been using the wrong comparison to judge the efficiency of meat production. Instead of citing a simple conversion rate of feed into meat, we should be comparing the amount of land required to grow meat with the land needed to grow plant products of the same nutritional value to humans. The results are radically different.

If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands — food for which humans don’t compete — meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it’s a significant net gain.”

(Via kottke.org.)

i’d be concerned when guys like this are losing…

Inglis, who boasts (literally) a 93 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, received the wrath of the tea party, losing to Gowdy 71 to 29 percent. In the weeks since, Inglis has criticized Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea party-driven “demagoguery” that he believes will undermine the GOP’s long-term credibility. And he’s freely recounting his frustrating interactions with tea party types, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance.

Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty