My Quiet Life

OMG. Did you hear about this? There's little point in speculation on what actually happened in this "story" until all the facts are in, but the speculation, lies, and rhetoric in the post and comments are already ridiculously hilarious.

My take/guesses:

• The child is in 5th grade, so around, what, 9 years old? Have you ever seen a 9 year old biking on a road? They are like fearless psychotic demons with an inner-ear infection. It's a frightening thing.
• The cop probably took the kid home because he was genuinely afraid that the kid was gonna become a stain on the road (and he was probably right).
• No one was arrested.
• The police representative claiming that DCS should get involved is an idiot (if they did, as the mother claims).
• Anyone letting their 5th grader bike on roads in Tennessee is probably an idiot, too, but sadly, idiocy is not a dealbreaker for parenthood. (usually it's a prerequisite.)
• Bill Hobbs' phone interview (in the comments) reads like a spectacularly executed attempt to cherrypick the statements to reinforce the aforementioned idiotic DCS comment, even though they probably didn't, at all.
• Now that this has hit instapundit, we can expect the comment thread to reach epic levels of stupidity.

Yes, folks: because this poor cop tried to keep a kid from getting killed, he's "drunk with power" and needs to be fired. This is the next great battle against the police state. Not, you know, the countless daily deadly drug raids, creepy collusion between the state and media, and an ever-expanding military industrial complex. My suggestion: ignore that blog post, and this one, and move on.

Every once in a while, a political story truly bewilders me. Take this one, for example:

Many of the same Republicans who fought hammer-and-tong to keep the George W. Bush-era income tax cuts from expiring on schedule are now saying a different "temporary" tax cut should end as planned. By their own definition, that amounts to a tax increase.

...

"It's always a net positive to let taxpayers keep more of what they earn," says Rep. Jeb Hensarling, "but not all tax relief is created equal for the purposes of helping to get the economy moving again." The Texas lawmaker is on the House GOP leadership team.

...

"We don't need short-term gestures. We need long-term fundamental changes in our tax structure and our regulatory structure that people who create jobs can rely on," said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., when asked about the payroll tax matter.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., "has never believed that this type of temporary tax relief is the best way to grow the economy," said spokesman Brad Dayspring.

First, let me just point out that while the Democrats may be a bunch of hypocritical, blowhard, incompetent fools, every once in a while the Republicans remind me of why I vote for them anyway. They're not fucking evil.

But here's what's confusing me. Obama's payroll tax cut seems like a fine idea and something we should support, because it's a very progressive tax cut: it's money directly in the pockets of people that actually need and will spend it. The problem is that a payroll tax cut means a direct decrease to the funding of social security. Bleeding one to feed the other. So, this proposed payroll tax cut basically guts social security -- something Republicans have been trying to do for decades. Why aren't they going along with it? Is it really as simple as opposing anything that Obama proposes? Is this really the sad state of affairs our political situation has reached, or am I missing something? And if Obama knows it's a proposal any Republican will shoot down, why not at least make it an attractive one instead of this nonsense? If Obama was serious about a progressive change to our tax structure, he'd propose lifting the salary cap on payroll taxes along with this, or something.

So, at CentreSource, we have been playing around with turntable.fm quite a bit lately. A few observations:

• It's a lot of fun
• Nonetheless, it's still a lot like this.
• It's too resource-intensive. I like to listen to music at work -- with my friends, even -- but I don't have time to be a fulltime DJ all day long. I think a nice complement to the interactive communal DJing would be some sort of "radio/party" mode you could put it in so that if no one has anything queued up, it'd just play random stuff in a particular genre or artist-related area. Basically turntablefm + lastfm/pandora.
• The avatars are a little too creepy/furry. The competitive angle to the avatar acquisition is fun, but who wants to wear a teddybear fursuit? not this guy.