perfidy

Some say the Democrats in the Senate are ruining the country with their blocking of Bush appointees to the Federal Courts.
Some say they are doing good; keeping far-right troglodyte thinkers off the bench.
Some say that Newt Ging-er-itch started it way back when.
Some say that Daschle's the villain.

Lileks says, "[L]istening to the Senate debate, if that word applies, [I was] wondering: are they always this banal? This condescending? Are bloviating prevarications the rule rather than the exception? In short: is the world’s greatest deliberative body really filled with this many dim bulbs, card sharps and overstroked dolts who confuse a leaden pause with great rhetoric? If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we’d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up."

No matter what you may think of the first four conditions I list, number five really hits the mark. The Senate has always been a magesterial clownshow, no less now than at any point before. But the current hijinks combined with the fact that ideological rivals no longer even meet socially-- Republicans and Democrats can't even be drinking buddies-- means that the nation's political landscape is more unstable now than it has been since... oh.... 1876 or so.

Kudos and all for China for getting a space program together, yeah ok, and I've congratulated them elsewhere for leaping forward to 1958.

But for all the spacefaring feats that nation may achieve, there's still mindbendingly awful systemic problems in China, like this one. China has a horrid recent history of interior management-- stealing cookware to make home steel smelters, encouraging schoolchildren to kill their teachers, starving thousands if not millions in the name of so-called progress, etc., etc., and that legacy seriously undermines any claims to outer-space glory. Worse, the nation's leaders seem not to have learned much from their past failures.

In the mid 1990's the communist party authorities in Henan encouraged poor rural farmers to sell their blood.

Mobile collection units toured rural villages. Millions of villagers took up the call. But the blood collectors ignored even the most basic standards of hygiene. Dirty equipment was used over and over. Donor blood was mixed together, the plasma removed, and then what remained pumped back into the donors blood streams.

HIV spread out of control through the whole blood collection system.

No-one for sure how many people were infected, at least 500,000, maybe more. . . . .

Having infected so many of its own people, China's communist rulers are now doing everything they can to stop the outside world from finding out.

This is interesting.

I bet the editor had fun with that headline. I will manfully and humanely refrain from comments about Frenchmen and guns.

In a disturbing development for Johno, CDs may soon be relegated to the ash heap of history. Ananova is reporting that those pesky scientists have discovered a way to make permanent data storage devices from plastic antistatic film. The new technology layers the polymer PEDOT with thin film silicon circuitry to create a new storage medium that could store in excess of a gigabyte of data in less than a cubic centimeter. This is passing dense, information wise. In addition, the new storage technology has the advantage of having no moving parts, requiring no batteries, and being fairly durable compared to traditional CDs.

So, in less than five years if the researchers are correct in their estimates, Johno will have to figure out what to do with thirty linear feet of beer coasters.

The Hon. Rudy S. Moore was removed today from his post as Chief Justice of Alabama. This is a bit of a surprise considering the flapdoodle has made him very popular in the state, but from the perspective of this Godless Yankee M----- F-----, it was the right decision to make.

Don't worry. He'll be back.

[wik] Eugene Volokh thinks it'll be the Senate. Upon reflection I think he's right. Why just drag Alabama down when you can have a run at the whole damn country?

Marc at "The Genius I Was" brings us an update on the winner of the October 2003 Perfidy Award for Inadvertant or Vertant Asshattery.

Remember next time you see him that Tom Harkin (D - An Intellectual Plane Your Puny Mind Could Never Comprehend) thinks you're stupid.

"So many people are getting suckered into the supersize choice — supersize fries, supersize burgers, supersize soft drinks," Harkin said. "We're being led to believe that bigger means better value. The harsh reality is that if you consistently choose to supersize, the odds are that soon you will be supersize."

Yes, unless this legislation passes, people never once would have considered that twice as much food may in fact be twice as much food. Now in my observations, there are only two types of people who read labels: people on a diet and people with allergies. These are generally not the people who, after reading all the nutritional data in the grocery, walk into a fast food joint unaware that the grease fountain may not be good for them. But maybe this label will finally be the one that won't be ignored by everyone else.

Looks like Senator Harkin is a frontrunner for November!. In fact, based upon his record, I would recommend the Ministry rename the Perfidy Award for Inadvertant or Vertant Asshattery in his honor. However, to do so would be to slight other deserving parties such as Berman, Coble, Hatch, Byrd, Kennedy, Santorum, Fleischer, Goldberg, Derbyshire, Bloomberg, and a supporting cast of thousands.

[wik] A Sharpton Prize for Rhetoric goes to Senator Harkin for his remark, "if you consistently choose to supersize, the odds are that soon you will be supersize." The award includes a small cash prize, a souvenir cup from the 1999 MLB All-Star game, and a partially-used box of throat lozenges.

Ah, ego. Such a thing of beauty. My challenge to the other members of this site (or anybody else with something to confess) is simple: What have you been wrong about? Pick some issues (hopefully serious ones), and explain how you were wrong about them, and what made you change your mind.

It has come to my attention that common ground can be found more easily in our errors, than in righteousness...

Now, I'm not gonna say his campaign is over, yet, but on Tuesday night John Kerry appeared on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno second billed to a hand puppet.

Truly, John Kerry is the leading candidate..... for me to... naah, too easy.

There's nothing a loyal Republican enjoys more than "reading" something like Ted Rall's essay on motivations in Iraq at a Grade 2 level, and sliding obliviously past the deeper meanings encoded in those oh-so-tricksy wordies.

"Writes like he means it". Bullshit. Go read Rall's article and find a way to read it as anything other than insight into what the enemy's possible strategy is. Makes sense to me. Now the question is, what do we do about it?

"Some people want the terrorists to win." What a crock of shit. You might find the odd nutjob out there, but by and large, the loyal opposition in this country wants an adjustment of strategy, not goal.