- Okay, these small houses may not be “tiny” in Tumbleweed terms. But boy, I’d take any of ’em in a heartbeat.
- What a diaper-wetting crybaby. Using the government to ease his hurt feelings, of course.
- Upon his 85th birthday, Thomas Sowell looks back on the uneducated people who helped raise him above his roots.
- People who radically change their spending habits via radical rethinking. They’re inspiring. Entertaining. Great examples. But how come they always seem to be young urban dwellers without, you know, gigantic house remodel projects going on? Or six kids to feed? Don’t get me wrong; giving up a daily Starbucks or buying fewer cosmetics can be a big thing to a yuppie & it’s a great mind change. But the rest of us …
- Jim Bovard … theater critic??? (And critic of DC’s empty culture.)
- For those of a certain generation: the story behind Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz.”
For those who need a Joplinesque reminder:
And a bonus, from Reason TV, the TSA’s 12 signs you’re a terrorist:
I’d really like to know if that manchild was on his first trip to a flea market ever, and if not what so-called flea markets he’d been to prior that didn’t have a big supply of cheap tacky confederate flag items in addition to the most juvenile of ‘white power’ trinkets…items that look like what the edgy weird kid in everyones 9th grade class would doodle on folders, sprung to life in the form of made in china swastika belt buckles, SS letter openers and bumper stickers with the N-word and etc that you for some reason never see on anyone’s vehicles. Don’t forget the menacing technicolor butterfly knives and switchblades, forged in the orient by master weaponsmiths with the finest steel that they make office staples out of. And hit or miss homemade Jerky.
It reminds me, for those of us who have served in the military, of that one desk-bound officer who will come out to the field with the grunts for the first time ever and have an indignant fit that there’s distasteful sharpie drawings in the portajohns, as if an all male cast of over-supervised 18-24 year olds would never do such a thing.
Oh God, that voice! I haven’t heard Janis Joplin in YEARS. Not that I liked her particularly, but music is a funny thing – it can take you back even where you never were. (Dylan can do that, also, even though I like his songs better when others sing them.)
Kent State Massacre happened the year she died, too.
I read Thomas Sowell faithfully and agree with the writer (I don’t remember who) who said that Sowell is a national treasure. He makes the kind of sense only made by someone who came up the hard way with determination and lots of hard work. Of course, it helps that he is brilliant!
Flat roofs, bah! I’ll never have one again. What a headache…
“he was selling so much he can’t keep it in stock.”
Yeah, that’s what happens when the government tells Americans they shouldn’t have something. Ornery cusses, I love ’em.
On that shopping thing, “take-out coffee” never made any sense to me – and I was once the only Starbucks vendor for a hundred miles around in Cody, Wyoming (spent a lot of time fixing that damn machine, then we got smart and bailed on Starbucks). If you must have coffee, why not make it yourself?
That TSA thing is funny. Like Joel says, “…a belly laugh.”
BTW I soured on Sowell when he started writing apologia for torture. Maybe he needs to get himself waterboarded like some of those other guys on youtube, just to be sure he knows what he’s talking about.
Zoning regulations allowed for a “caretaker’s unit” in an otherwise industrial zone.
Everywhere you go, the government is so helpful. (Zoning being the major impediment to the tiny house movement.)
I’d really like to know if that manchild was on his first trip to a flea market ever…
I can’t get the article to open, but it’s just as likely he’s a regular who has passed by that table many times, ignoring it. But now he’s OMG! over anything Confederate, because the MSM told him it’s the outrage du jour.
I’ve been to a lot of gun shows up here… we don’t have many “flea markets” otherwise. Don’t remember ever seeing anything with the Confederate flag on it, or a swastika either. Just not that big a thing here, I guess. Wouldn’t bother me if I did see it, obviously. But yeah, the “outrage du jour” and people simply giddy over some new way to mind everyone else’s business, of course. We don’t have much of that either, come to think of it. 🙂
Oh, Claire, you just want that long wall of bookshelves, right? Yeah, so do I. 🙂
I would be quite comfortable in 900 sq. ft. Heck, 750 would be a big deal to me now. And a garage. Yep. that’d do it.
Setting aside specific opinions, imagine how society would change if youths looked up to men such as Sowell, Clarence Thomas, George Washington Carver, and Walter Williams, instead of, e.g. Sean Combs.
Oh, no doubt you’ve already read about the big quake that’s being predicted.
http://koin.com/2015/07/13/oregon-will-be-toast-when-big-earthquake-hits/
jed — How nice to learn from “experts” that we’re precisely 72 years overdue for the Big One. I had no idea geology operated on such a precise timetable. 😉
But thanks. The underlying New Yorker article is very good (leaving aside small matters such as the author not realizing that the old Richter scale is no longer used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale).
I definitely know the story. It’s definitely going to be bad here — incomprehensibly bad — when the Cascadia subduction zone ruptures (particularly if it’s a “full rip” from northern California to Canada). But Mr. FEMA pre-declaring everything west of I-5 to be “toast” is ridiculous. It’s not only irresponsible (sounds like a bid for more funding), but absurd.
It depends on how much of the fault ruptures. On the bedrock under any individual location. On whether the soil is original or fill. Whether there’s something slippery in the local terrain like clay or shale. So many things! “Toast” — more like balony.
There will be pockets of unthinkable devastation. Some of Washington state’s low-lying coastal communities will simply be gone if the northern end of the fault goes. Nearly everybody in them will die; there’s nowhere to run from the tsunami. Some evidence says that harmonic effects on tall buildings in Portland and Seattle could produce results looking like a bad disaster movie. Yet buildings right down the street, shorter or of different construction, could be lightly damaged. Nobody knows.
Fascinating stuff. We’re definitely not ready (who really can be?). But the Cascadia story is also a tremendous detective tale and … well, an adventure.
And now I’ve got to make another note to get those steel plates and long screws to fasten my house’s foundation posts to their beams. Wood construction is known for doing decently in quakes, but I wouldn’t trust this foundation in anything more than a moderate shakeup! I envision beams bouncing right off their posts and my house dropping to the ground. Oh, what’ll become of my big, gorgeous windows?
Hehe! Yeah, the funding aspect of it was close to the first thing that entered my head when FEMA got mentioned. Also thought about dams and bridges. Also pictured Fred Sanford clutching his chest. “I think this is the big one!”
More seriously, the numbers for the worst-case are astonishing.
Now that’s impressive. I wonder how many petajoules of energy that is.
No idea how bad the ‘toast’ factor will be.
It would be “interesting” to know what FEMA needs to buy with this year’s increased funding, to prepare for something that unpredictable and completely devastating.