Shamus posted a challenge, which went (in part): I enjoyed the discussion the other day on the various uses and uselessness of super abilities. It is surprisingly difficult to benefit the world, even when you wield fantastic powers. Imagine if you were granted the following: Incredible strength.... You can fly.... You are functionally indestructible.... ...I’m annoyed at how useless I would be, in the big scheme of things. I couldn’t solve any of the world’s major problems.

Merit has nothing to do with America; it’s all about white male privilege. Do not be fooled by the rise of Hillary and Obama; put them together, and what do you have? White. Male. - Bleat

Oh, and what's up with this "true conservative"/"true liberal"/"true libertarian" crap? Is there anybody who uses this phrase and doesn't simply mean "truly agreeing entirely with me?" I have a sort of mental translation table I use to decode what people really mean; my classic example is "free" -> "paid for", which works pretty well. I've recently added "X is not a true Y" -> "I am an arrogant twit which can't conceive of the idea that I might not be entirely correct in my views"

Ignorance is bliss.

Therefore, political ignorance is bliss.

The Internet has brought us a high level of political coverage and punditry available at a click. With that, many more people now have detailed dossiers on every political candidate in the nomination process. And what has this knowledge brought us?

If worrying about the climate is your thing, I find this sort of thing about ten times more worrying than global warming.

Why hope Obama gets the nomination? Some good reasons right here. I don't particularly like his politics (of course), but in terms of charm and the other soft graces that can be oh-so-useful, he's the clear leader so far in both races. And if a lot of white people in this country vote Obama, it's going to rock identity politics to its core, something I think is long overdue. I think claiming the country is intrinsically and deeply racist is already unsupported by the evidence, but what will the race-mongers do when we can point at a President as "

I conservatively estimate my endorsement to count for precisely 0 votes, but I'm going to endorse Fred Thompson. This is not based on any of his particular views other than his repeated support of stronger Federalism, per my recent posts on the topic. If I had to sell Federalism to the general public, rather than discussing pragmatics, I'd point out that on average, with stronger states, "everybody wins". Or at least at the state granularity, states hardly being politically homogenous, everyone wins.

In my non-humble opinion, my Differential Equations class bordered on the useless. DiffieQ has a few very valuable lessons to learn, but they are buried in a whole lot of cruft that has little value, both from a theory perspective and from a practical perspective. One of its useful results is that certain types of systems with a certain critical amount of negative feedback inevitably result in oscillations, no matter how you try to avoid it.

I would not be at all surprised to see [Christmas spending] begin to shrink in the years ahead, or at least fall below the rate of growth. My reasoning is simple. I want people to stop giving me stuff. I’ve got too much stuff already. ...we have more clothes than we can wear, more DVDs than we can watch, more food than we can eat, and more gizmos than we can figure out how to use.

So my cat, as he does so often, hops in a box. (He's loved the moving.) My wife absentmindedly mumbles, "cat in a box.com". I'm on the computer, and I think, hmmmm. A-yup. (Note: Not porn.)