Monday, August 08, 2005
August shorts
Mysteries of the universe explained: why cats don't like candy.
If World War II had been an online role playing game it'd have left a chat file.
Hawaii intends to host a That '70s Show, Gas Lines Special, by imposing gasoline price controls this coming September. Even after the feds warn them not to. (Why, of course I want politicians to control ever more of the economy -- let's start by putting them in charge of my health via nationalized health care! Speaking of which...)
NY Times opinion page observation of the week:
elderly Americans actually pay more for health care as a percent of their income now than they did before Medicare was enacted: 21.7 percent in 2000, versus 19.1 percent in 1965. Paradoxically, the program is also extremely expensive and wasteful."Paradoxically"? And, paradoxically, this was a column endorsing Medicare.
New scientific research confirms what all drinkers know, consuming alcohol makes you smarter. We thus conclude that the EU bureaucrats who are trying to put the finest traditional German beer servers out of business (tip: Roland Patrick) either are teetotalers or were born too stupid to be helped. They've never heard of sun block?
A City Journal article about politics on the funny pages quotes Al Capp, creator of the famous Li’l Abner, (I'm old enough to remember both of them) on how his politics moved from left to right during the 1960s...
“What began to bother me, privately, was that, as things grew better, the empire of the needy seemed to grow larger ... Yet I remained a loyal liberal. I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of liberalism. I spoke at liberal banquets in New York, Los Angeles, Washington.
"One day a lady photographer came to my studio and showed me a collection of Boston photographs. A publisher would publish them if only I would rattle off the captions ... This one, she said, will break your heart. She showed me a picture of a city street. It was mid-afternoon, the sun was shining. Garbage cans were tipped on the sidewalk. Bottles lined the gutters. On a porch sprawled a half dozen teenagers, drinking and smoking.
"The caption, I said, should be, ‘Get up off your asses and clean the street!’ The lady stormed out. I guess that was when I began leaving what liberalism had become."
