With Jake MacGregor on hiatus, what’s to read, what’s to read? Well, until Jake’s adventures re-commence (and even afterward), there’s Sandy Sandfort’s The Resurrections of Robert Heinlein. This is a Smashwords book, available in every conceivable electronic format. You can buy. But you can read the first 75 percent for free in most formats. Definitely a good read for Heinlein fans. —– For watching, here’s Jim Bovard doing his dissing of federal job-training programs on MSNBC. Jeez, Jim looks more like a surly eccentric hermit than I do. (I am neither balding nor bearded, thank the fates.) But he talks…
8 CommentsMonth: September 2011
“Chained CPI.” Whotta concept. You may have heard of this. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has apparently been tallying it for nine years, right along with CPI-U, CPI-W and all the other variations of the Consumer Price Index, including that perennial favorite, “core CPI,” which considers food, fuel, and shelter to be outside of the core costs of our lives. Anyhow, “chained CPI” isn’t a new concept. But it’s new to me. I’ve just heard of it because there’s talk of shifting to it to determine cost of living increases for social security, federal pensions, veterans programs and such. Now,…
2 Comments… to this guy. What a fantastic life he earned for himself. No wonder why these folks are slavering over him.
4 CommentsSorry for the non-posting. I’ve been taking advantage of unseasonably good weather and a break in deadlines to do a burst of late-summer projects. During breaks in yardwork and painting, I’ve watched mindlessly entertaining videos like The Human Slinky and the Bed-Sheet Cat. Occasionally even mind-activating videos like the ad for the new drug Complyacin. 🙂 Or getting my Bovard fix. He has a good take on the “effectiveness” of federal job-training programs. (I can’t believe I have friends who write for the Wall Street Journal. So respectable! And speaking of respectable, I just learned today that an old acquaintance…
20 CommentsFor a dose of strange beauty on this strange, ugly day: the most amazing photo of Saturn. The eccentric geek who gave the world the wonderful Project Gutenberg. Airport “security” from a Muslim woman’s perspective. It takes guts to say this these days: “Addiction is not a disease of the brain.” “Socioeconomic collapse and preparedness timing.” From a guy who’s been living it. Fourteen thousand rounds missing? I wonder why they even bother to report this? From what I’ve heard over the years from National Guardsmen, Army reservists, and other part-time military folk, this is just par for the course.…
9 CommentsI wasn’t going to mark today. The tragedy for the 3,000 and their families and friends is beyond unspeakable. But we have to speak of it — ceaselessly — because the horror was delivered with such drama. And with such convenience for those who crave to rule. We don’t hold week-long “all mourning all the time” media events for the 100,000 who die in the U.S. each year from the effects of prescription drugs. Or the tens of thousands killed in pointless political wars. Why are we supposed to believe that those are lesser tragedies? Did those victims somehow suffer…
13 CommentsI know a lot of people don’t give a hoot that the Swiss central bank chose this week to tie the fate of the Swiss franc to the nosediving, dying euro. To some, Switzerland’s folly is just another scrap of bad news from muzzy-headed, irresponsible foreigners (at a time when we can’t even keep up with the idiocies perpetrated by our own domestic Irresponsibilistas). To others, who might once have looked to Switzerland as an example of what a country could be, it’s just another step on on that nation’s self-chosen downward path. From gold-backed money and financial privacy to…
12 CommentsYeah. Wow. My favorite part is the when they cut the payroll tax in half. “Without negatively impacting the Social Security Trust Fund.” That’s good. I don’t even think Penn & Teller, Siegfried & Roy, David Copperfield, Doug Henning, David Blaine, and Houdini could match that achievement if they all worked together for a year. And were all alive at the time, of course. I’m impressed. Really. I need a topic category for Magical Stupidity. I really do. No, what I need is another glass of wine.
13 CommentsHeh. It’s a pretty good guess Obama won’t be touting those millions of “green jobs” in his big (nothing of a) speech tonight. Could this be the beginning of Obama’s Watergate? Project Gunwalker should have been his Watergate — and for that matter, his Waterloo. But financial and electoral corruption is a little easier for the MSM to get behind. Not that I’d wish an FBI raid on my worst enemy. But this could get interesting …
19 CommentsEvery couple of weeks, all this summer, my post office box has been graced — and the postal clerks and I entertained — by a wild array of packages. The boxes, sent by ST, a reader and frequent commentor on the blog, are so weirdly charming on the outside I’ve sometimes hesitated to open them. But when I do, they turn out to be just as weird — and entertaining — inside. I mean the insides of the boxes themselves, which are sometimes even more decorated than the exteriors. Oh yeah. And they contain … well, just what you might…
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