I'm a nerd

Apparently there is some big UFC thing going on today. A lot of the guys on my hall are talking about it.

Health Care Policy, anyone?
Afghanistan?
Carbon Taxes?
DADT?

Another person struggling to get a job...

...is Sarah Palin

Palin's bookers are said to be asking for $100,000 per speech, but an industry expert tells Page Six: "The big lecture buyers in the US are paralyzed with fear about booking her, basically because they think she is a blithering idiot."

I'm so heartbroken for her

phish+jay-z

Is College worth it?

Cool article on the value of a College Education

Students who got into both, say, the University of Pennsylvania and Penn State made roughly the same amount of money, regardless of which they chose. Just as you might hope, the fine-grain status distinctions that preoccupy elite high-school seniors (and more to the point, their parents) seem to be overrated.

The rest of the evidence, however, has tended to point strongly in the other direction. Several studies have found a large earnings gap between more- and less-educated identical twins.

So, stay in school, I guess.

Ohio State

My dad and his brothers are alumni of the University of Michigan, making me and most of my family Michigan football fans. This also means we are NOT fans of Ohio State.

So, my cousin, Taylor, sent me this on Facebook:

So as you know I have a friend who has the misfortune of attending Ohio State. I was talking to her earlier and she mentioned that her sorority has a tradition of traveling to the furthest Big Ten away game every year. This is the first year she can... go, they're going to Iowa and she's very excited. It's a meaningful game now that Iowa beat Penn State and she's never been to an away game (or Iowa for that matter) and she's really looking forward to it. I start wondering which weekend it is, so I look it up.

Here is Ohio State's football schedule for this year:

eptember 5 Navy

September 12 No. 3 USC

September 19 at Toledo

September 26 Illinois

October 3 at Indiana

October 10 Wisconsin

October 17 at Purdue

October 24 Minnesota

October 31 New Mexico State

November 7 at No. 15 Penn State

November 14 No. 13 Iowa

November 21 at No. 22 Michigan

Please notice that the word "at" does not appear in the bolded line.

THE Ohio State University, ladies and gentlemen!

Pretty soon you're gonna be dead

"I f***ing love you for that"

So, my new fave Jenny Slate dropped an F-Bomb Saturday Night. She said "fricken" about 78 times in the same sketch, "Biker Chick Chat"

http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/09/new-snl-cast-member-swears-during-live-telecast.html

Slate said "You frickin' just threw an ashtray full of butts at my head. You know what, you stood up for yourself and I fucking love you for that."

Apparently she won't get fired, which is excellent, because she is awesome.

This might be my worst blog post ever, but whatever, Jenny Slate is awesome. I wish she had been in the show as much as Megan Fox, who I found to be very unfunny. I think the writers did too, because the monologue was like 15 seconds long, mostly her holding up pictures of her head on someone else's naked body.

Hokies

As much as I love watching football, I really hate it.

Possibly more on this later.

hmmmm.......

fail sauce

Poetry

We started Poetry in Intro to Creative Writing today. Our assignment at the end of class was to write a ten line poem in ten minutes that included an altered cliche (in the first line) and five given words (italicized). Mine was a piece of shit, but I'll throw it up here anyway.



Hey! You! Come onto my cloud. Where
we can watch the days float away

Our mothers and fathers have done just the same
We'll stay back from the cliffs. Don't join in that game.

Isn't it wonderful eating blackberries?
We'll spend our days picking them till we are wary

There's no need to hustle, no need to run
cause there's no where to go before it is done

So stay on our cloud up above all the noise
It's you and it's me and the sound of your voice.

vandalism on campus

I'll call it art

AMERICA

"The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan,that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.
"It's that simple, if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."

-Condoleeza Rice

What I learned today

I promised that I would get back to the smarter end of the political conversation.


In this article, Kenneth Arrow argues that we should not have government health insurance (or food stamps or housing projects), and that instead we should just decide on a particular resource distribution and the market will reallocate them in the utility maximizing bundle of goods that is the Pareto optimal competitive equilibrium.

I like the idea from a libertarian-with-a-conscience/social safety net standpoint, although that theory is predicated on the notion that people will act in their rational best interest, which I do not often trust them to do. I also think that if the government is going to engage in reallocation of resources, it should have the ability to force people to spend money in ways that will not prohibit them from spending public funds on activities that will discourage future achievement.

The above diagram is from my Economics of health care class. The drawing is an Edgeworth-Bowley box.

win win win win win

Ben Folds wrote a song about Levi Johnston (Bristol Palin's baby daddy). Awesome.



Someday I'll get back to posting actual comments and opinions and stories and not just the bottom barrel of political fodder, but for now, that's what you are getting.

Too Easy... but necessary

HOPE

"Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a 'jackass' for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT'S presidential," Moran said.
-huffpo

I LOVE MY PRESIDENT

How bad was Kanye??

This is even better

Is he an alien to the country or the planet?

a prayer?

I want to be her boyfriend

This is the future of SNL. I'm pumped.

One Party Democracy

Thomas Friedmann writes

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

“Just because Obama is on a path to give America the Romney health plan with McCain-style financing, does not mean the Republicans will embrace it — if it seems politically more attractive to scream ‘socialist,’ ” said Miller.

All I can say in response is....


LIAR

We can change the world

It's dying to get better.

Dietary problems???

Me: Ok, time to go to Deets and shit out half a paper.
Tyler: Wow, maybe you've been eating too much paper.

Predictions????

Prediction X: The six best teams this season will be New England, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Green Bay, the Giants ... and New Orleans. (That's right, New Orleans. You heard me.) The other six playoff teams will be Indianapolis, Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, Denver and Washington. In the Super Bowl, Green Bay will defeat Pittsburgh to cap off the first Eff You season devoted to a specific player. That player would be you, Brett Favre.

-Bill Simmons

Reactions

Guess when this happened...

113% of the deficit?

Megan McArdle writes

Ah, our old friends, waste, fraud, and abuse, the bane of politicians everywhere. Based on the number of politicians I have heard during my adult lifetime promising to generate massive savings from cutting waste, fraud, and abuse, I estimate that this diabolical trio accounts for approximately 113% of all Federal spending. The percentage may be even higher at the state and local levels.

baller

That speech thing

Interesting Speech. Mostly good. Not a terrible amount for the Right to bitch about, besides maybe Ted Kennedy (although I know they will find plenty).

I would have loved to hear the term "moral hazard." If only we all knew what that meant.

moral hazard
moral hazard

Mash-up of the century?

passiveaggressivenotes.com

This website is funny.

Terrifying

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtBIO0Yq3ApcHIYRtJNnKOTH_om7c0wFdP1x8XQXlLYV27kD8Vipy_Oy08oAkB8I65JDZWK0sMRH7-jpaS91D9UtDeazw41TDKHtvT8kmgPu-2n92bY1t8uiiJ7MY5kFdNsLiscCGvVXl3/s1600-h/det.bmp

Legitimacy

How in the world does this happen

The Daily Manab Zamin said US astronaut Neil Armstrong had shocked a news conference by saying he now knew it had been an "elaborate hoax".

Neither they nor the New Nation, which later picked up the story, realised the Onion was not a genuine news site.

The original onion article can be found here.

glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com

Almost as funny as the birthers


http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/discussion/index.php?PHPSESSID=d2b1c380896d04768ade99f3a1a61ff3&topic=21.0

A sign of a life on the right

George Will argued for an exit from Afghanistan in his WaPo column this morning.

Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country -- "control" is an elastic concept -- and " 'our' Afghans may prove no more viable than were 'our' Vietnamese, the Saigon regime." Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. The New York Times reports a Helmand official saying he has only "police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for 'vacation.' " Afghanistan's $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise's. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan's poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?

____________________________________________________________________________________

Mullen speaks of combating Afghanistan's "culture of poverty." But that took decades in just a few square miles of the South Bronx. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, thinks jobs programs and local government services might entice many "accidental guerrillas" to leave the Taliban. But before launching New Deal 2.0 in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should ask itself: If U.S. forces are there to prevent reestablishment of al-Qaeda bases -- evidently there are none now -- must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums?

I honestly don't know a whole lot about the situation in Afghanistan other than that it is a complete cluster-derogatorytermfornonconsensualsexualintercourse. I don't get what we are trying to accomplish and how we imagine that a military operation can make development happen, especially when we are using terrorist-hunting tactics that kill 20 civilians to kill one bad guy. Aside from being a bad ethical policy, I do not see that as bad military or nation building or counter-terrorism strategy.

What happens if we send the Peace Corps to Afghanistan(or transform the military into a purely nation-building, humanitarian unit)? We would put an end to ANY violence coming from our side. We go over with arms out stretched, stop killing people, and build hospitals and schools and homes and skate parks, help cultivate agriculture and education and industry, and work completely with the peaceful element of the Afghan population instead of against it. Or maybe it's time to leave. I just don't think that killing people makes a society, especially a society that is that broken, any more peaceful or prosperous in the long run, and after eight years over there, we could already be having the long run. EIGHT years. That's a long time. Second graders were not alive when U.S. Troops were not in Afghanistan.