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.)
Props to Destineer for their DS release of WordJong. The reviews are not wrong to give it an 8 of 10; it's no 9.8/10 multi-million-dollar blockbuster. But it is very solidly an 8 out of 10, a very competent execution of the basic concept. The dictionary is rich, the game modes complement each other nicely, exploring the basic concept without undue repetition.
If you think you might like it based off of the descriptions in the reviews, you probably will.
And if the tune of the title doesn't immediately come to you, give it a few reads aloud. It's a little ditty my wife has put together.
I'm officially a homeowner now, to the extent that you own something the bank owns 95% of. It's nice, but it's taking forever for various reasons to put everything together. For instance, it was very nice of Mother Nature to cover my new driveway in eight inches of snow the day after the move.
I've loosely defined the value function (link) to only compare two "things", without further specifying what "things" it can take, because some things we put in there (like CloseToFamily) are fundamentally non-numeric properties. But some people have their own specializations of this value function. One that almost nobody will admit to using, but a lot of people live by, is the Money value function. This function takes just one argument and returns a single concrete number with the unit "Dollars" (or relevant local currency).