Autoblog has some hints on the direction that Chrysler is going with their new Challenger. I will be very interested to see if it winds up looking anything like that artist's rendition (I doubt it. It's not round and bubbley and stupid enough.)
UPDATE: Okay, this is one of the downsides of reading my RSS feeds in oldest-to-newest order. Jalopnik sez scratch the Chrysler Challenger concept. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.
This is devoted to everyone here:
If you are offended by this, it must really suck to be you. It must especially suck to be this person, who had this to say about a woman breastfeeding her kid:
Elizabeth Rich was so busy building her body that she coundn't be inconvienced by other people including her child. This self centered woman can’t even take the time to shower before feeding her child after working out. Then, she feeds the child at the front counter as she fills out paperwork and can’t understand how anyone could be offended.For Elizabeth, it’s all about her and probably has been since birth.
There's something so truly, deeply, honestly and hilariously ironic about someone accusing a woman of being selfish for breastfeeding her child -- the very definition of the act of nurturing another human being. If you were to distill stupidity, it would look something like this. Do you know what I have to say to "franklincircus"?
Last week Brittney asked what foods we enjoyed in cold weather. One that I forgot to mention:
Tempura Soba. The perfect food to eat on a blustery fall day -- such as today! Benkay and Ichiban both have very good tempura soba.
First, let me offer a half-hearted apology to Katherine Coble, who I appear to have offended in a comment made here in which I mocked a comment made by Katherine here. I say "half-hearted" because I don't want to apologize for the motivation driving my mockery (which I'll get to), but I do want to make it clear that my mockery was not a casual "jocks' table" dismissal of Katherine entirely -- at least that wasn't my intent. It does give me occasion to talk about something I've been wanting to discuss for a while now.
One of the oft-cited reasons for going to war in Iraq is that if Iraq were to be liberated and democratized, the entire area would be pacified, and a domino-theory-in-reverse type chain reaction of flowering peace (and democracy) would result. This appealing but rather delusional bit of wishful thinking has its roots in Democratic Peace Theory -- or rather, a gross misinterpretation of it. Democratic peace theory argues that, basically, liberal democracies rarely or never go to war against one another.
The flaw in applying this theory as an argument in favor of democratizing a country or region by force is that DPT applies to established liberal democracies that have formulated their democratic institutions in an evolutionary, internal way. Emerging democracies don't really fit this bill.
There's a good review of Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, by Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder in the latest Foreign Affairs. By studying the history of emerging democracies empirically, they clarify the folly of using the democratic peace theory in this way:
Things that I bought on Buy Nothing Day:
Nathan Newman provides a dose of reality for anyone getting too complacent or overjoyed in observing the slow implosion of the Bush administration:
One of the danger signs for Democrats that a Bush collapse doesn't necessarily mean much for progressive gains in policy are the polls showing that John McCain could step up and poll almost twenty points more than either Hillary Clinton or John Kerry in 2008.
Of course, a lot of this is due to the McCain image of "moderation", but it highlights why Dems can't depend on "clean government" as their whole rhetoric, since there will be GOPers like McCain happy to grab the anti-scandal banner. So Dems need more than scandal; they need to take down the whole GOP agenda and make it clear that folks like McCain, despite his media image, is ultimately down with the whole conservative policy agenda.
I've been flummoxed by the apathetic toleration of McCain (even on the left) before. To some extent, this is a side-effect of the miserable nature of the Bush administration -- that the country as a whole has been forced to make such concessions in our political leadership. Just as you've got apologists on the right that have to resort to "our human rights violations and shadowy detention centers aren't as bad as Stalin's!", everyone else is looking at McCain and going "well, at least he doesn't openly advocate torture!".
This is good of him, of course, but it's hardly a ringing endorsement. It does, however, bode well for McCain's popularity on the right in 2008, as Republicans avert their eyes from the sinking ship of the Bush administration and try to find a viable alternative.
So, while the Bush administration may be imploding, the reality of a very strong republican McCain campaign becomes ever more likely. Progressives would do well to avoid getting too comfortable and to start highlighting the weaknesses of the positions that McCain stands for.
WHEREAS Rev is smart and yet funny
WHEREAS she seems pretty cute
WHEREAS Rev is solely responsible for my alcoholism (this is irrelevant but needs to be said)
I hereby propose that Rev + Claude LeMonde are a solid romantic match.
Be it resolved that they shall meet at my place for Martinis and maybe some videogames and sandwiches.
Cool Things