Per aspera

(via)

Well… the best way for them to move past this is for Manny to put Youkilis on the ticket as his VP. If he doesn’t, I’m buying a Yankees hat.

Girl Power, commenting on Boston.com’s Extra Bases blog, in reference to a story about Manny Ramirez and Kevin Youklis getting heated with each other in the dugout last night.

This would explain why I smelled smoke when I came up from the train at South Station today:

60K pounds of lobster lost in Boston fire

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) — A fire destroyed a landmark seafood business on the waterfront early Friday, snarling rush hour traffic and raising fears the building would collapse into the harbor. There were no reports of injuries.

Firefighters struggled to contain the blaze at James Hook & Co. for several hours after it broke out about 3:30 a.m. Flames burned through rooms full of corrugated cardboard boxes used for shipping seafood, fire department spokesman Steve MacDonald said.

Today’s sign of the impending apocalypse:

Monkeys control robots with their minds - CNN.com

This can lead to no good.

This is fair.

Tangentially: why are well-done imaginary dialogues so funny?  Seriously, few things are so reliably likely to make me laugh.

(via)

I don’t think I’ve ever linked to Jim Henley’s finest post:

So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War when it had a chance of doing good that I have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation’s elite media venues - collecting, I am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. Everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about Iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now. It’s a lot of pressure, so please forgive anything glib or short you read herein: between articles, interviews, think-tank panels and presentations before government agencies and policy organs I’m not permitted to mention, I’m a little frazzled.

On the bright side, and I can confirm that my experience has been similar to those of my fellow prophets, being the object of so much attention, being repeatedly quizzed by eager interlocutors on the same basic points, encourages one to distill one’s thinking to its essence. As Kenneth Pollack asked me the other day, “What the fuck was so special about you, anyway?”

“For one thing,” I said, “I am not sprawled on a sidewalk next the McPherson Square Metro Station, hoping to cadge enough quarters to enjoy the rare treat of laundering the vomit out of the only shirt I own, praying all the while that decent people do not recognize me beneath the matted beard and tangled hair.”

“But my thigh hurts!” He said.

“Shut up,” I consoled him, “or I’ll kick it again.”

Jesus Christ.

(via Unqualified Offerings)

UPDATE:  Robert Farley at LGM has a slightly longer and more thoughtful response than I:

Long story short, it’s quite likely that an invasion would cause a lot more people to die than are likely to die sans intervention.

The idea of a threat of an invasion in order to force SLORC compliance with international aid efforts is a little bit better on its face, but collapses when subjected to scrutiny. The primary interest of the regime is survival; it cares more about survival than the lives of the Burmese people. Allowing itself to be forced at gunpoint to accept international assistance strikes me as considerably more dangerous to regime survival than to simply allow the disaster to run its course. The regime, undoubtedly, also has a strong sense of the difficulties that any invasion would face, especially one with a humanitarian objective. In other words, SLORC has a) reason to believe that the international community is bluffing, and b) strong incentive for calling that bluff. Again, the threat of military intervention in the short term is likely to lead to more, not fewer, dead Burmese.

I’ve heard a disturbing number of people, all of whom I know to be otherwise sane, tell me that they think John McCain would make a good President, or even tell me that they might vote for him. This is nuts. He would be an awful President. Of course, you wouldn’t know that by watching the news or reading the paper, because the narrative of John McCain among the political press is that of the Saga of Commander Maverick of the Straight Talk Brigade. Never mind that the guy has no coherent domestic policy, nor does he seem particularly interested in one. Never mind that his foreign policy, which is supposed to be a his strength, seems to be nothing more than Bush’s “Obey, or be destroyed,” applied even more widely.

I’ve been trying to figure out how I wanted to approach building my own little counternarrative for you, my audience, because I love all eight of you, and want you to be thoughtful, skeptical consumers of political media. If along the way I can convince you that the contemporary Republican Party is a cancer on the American body politic, so much the better.

Anyway, my quandary is solved: Ezra Klein reminded me that it’s McCain week at the American Prospect. The first article, by Matt Yglesias, is called “The Militarist.” Ezra comments, in part, thus:

He was humble. Bipartisan. A nice guy, liked by partisans on both sides of the aisle. An instinctual moderate who’d constrain America’s foreign policy ambitions and ably manage our finances. He was George W. Bush, and despite what the press said, he was none of those things. Rather, the truest understanding of Bush’s candidacy came from those who had read his policy plans. The shockingly regressive tax cuts, the dismissive attitude towards international treaties, the inattention to our unraveling health care system, the denial of our energy problems — it was all there. The press assured us that those plans were just election-year pandering. Turned out they were his governing agenda.

Similarly, John McCain, we’re told, is a moderate. A nice guy. Respected on both sides of the aisle. Conscious of the limits of American power and the constraints of our fiscal situation. His plans? That hugely regressive tax cut, radical dismantling of the health care system, appetite for endless war? Oh, you know how elections go.

Bullshit.

Ezra’s own article is about McCain’s godawful health care plan.

Survival instinct.

The only thing more annoying than Joe Lieberman himself is his conceit, which many people indulge out of habit, that he is some kind of “centrist.”  Perhaps if we think of the political spectrum as a series of rings surrounding a cavernous abyss (or perhaps a pit like the Sarlaac), then Lieberman and McCain can fairly be called “centrists.”

 -Daniel Larison in The American Conservative

Entire selection bitten from Matt Yglesias.

New posts at Fafblog (which is the best blog, for those of you unfamiliar with it)!

They redesigned the site an everything, so presumably they mean to write more than just two posts.  One can only hope, as does Robert Farley, that its revivification isn’t just a cruel April Fool’s joke.

In conclusion, fuck Joe Francis.

-Ezra Klein

To which I would only add:  in the neck, with a sharp stick.

I don’t usually write about work, because that’s my real name up there, and writing about work on the web is a fantastic way to lose your job.  For that reason, I’ll try to be deliberately hazy with any identifying details.  But I must speak, for this may be my last communication with the outside world.

My immediate superiors have decided to get some machine for the reception area that pisses out fragrance into the air.  It’s basically an industrial-strength Glade plug-in, because your business is growing, and you need next-level choke-the-air-with-perfume solutions.

The miasma now looming over my desk, like the threat of devourment by an unnamable Great Old One dressed in tapered khakis and a pink Newport News twinset, is named, I’m told, “Fresh Air.”  I imagine one develops a sense of vicious irony, working for a company that makes fragrance-pissing machines.

But now my breathing grows labored, my sight grows dim, and I fear I can type no more.  Blasphemous magenta flower-print patterns dance at the edges of my vision, and beneath it all, across the nose-withering gulfs of time, I can hear the music of the insane pipers who dance endlessly around the throne of the blind idiot-god of olfactory chaos: “Potpurri-ri!  Potpurri-ri!”

My purity is based on the fact that nobody offered me much money.

Leonard Cohen

That article comes from a link in the comments to an essay about the evolution of the song “Hallelujah.”

…I should add that all of this comes via a Sidelight on Making Light.

Aw, man.  Gary Gygax died.

I bought the D & D basic set when I was, like, eight, I think.  I didn’t have anyone to play it with until I got a little older and a) thus, so did my younger brother, b) some kids around our age moved in up the street.  So I contented myself with rolling up characters,  reading the monster descriptions in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and drawing dungeon maps on graph paper.  To this day I write in all caps, having developed the habit because it made my writing more legible on graph paper, which we also used for our homemade character sheets.

Anyway, D & D was hugely influential, on me and on our culture, so I lift a flagon of mead to Gygax’s memory.