mushinnoshin

When a customer’s order includes 3 boxes of soy burgers, you might consider whether a coupon for hot dogs is really the most useful thing you could print out.

Just sayin’.

…is the song tacky now, or a fitting obit?

Update: Try as I might, I can’t seem to find any rave anthems referencing Gerald Ford.

Heh. Well, I have no real strong opinions about the whole global warming debate, and Gore is still my favorite for ’08 — but this is funny all the same.

Well it appears that the LP has invited Bob Barr to hold a position on the national committee.

The apparent smoky-back-room tactics behind the move would be bad enough, but the fact remains that Barr is a bigot (author of the indefensible “Defense of Marriage Act”), a Drug Warrior (in 2002, the LP itself labeled him “The Worst Drug Warrior in Congress” and successfully targeted him for defeat *), and even voted for the Patriot Act!

To be sure, he’s softened some of his positions and joined the LP in the time since, and all of this should be applauded. But giving him a leadership role? Not defensible. Has he embraced the LP platform? Oh, right, I forgot, they no longer have one. How conveeeenient.

Although I’m carping and grumbling because I hate to see “libertarianism” further devalued, I’m really neither upset nor surprised. Having already given up any hope of the LP maintaining any semblance of principle, and understanding that we are consigned to a two party system without major election reform, the only remaining scenario is one in which the LP replaces a dying major party with a somewhat less evil version of itself. The LP could become the mechanism by which paleoconservatives like Barr shed the baggage of their neocon/theocon brethren, by simply letting them keep the tattered remains of the party they destroyed.

If this happens at the same time that actual libertarians are gaining foothold with the Democrats?

Bad for the ‘libertarian’ label, but good for libertarianism.

* The official press release having *cough* disappeared *cough* from lp.org

…to make any sort of “She Blinded Me With Science” pun… but the point is I just got back from seeing Thomas Dolby & BT at the Mercy Lounge — and, well, holy shit. I mean god damn.

Dolby was great, but fuck, BT just blew me away. I didn’t know anything about BT, and went into it thinking, who the fuck does he think he is, having Thomas Dolby opening for HIM?

Well, he has earned it.

I’m drunk and need to go to sleep so I can’t get too deep into this, but — the last song he played — before the encore at least — a tribute to his daughter — I was nearly in tears.

Allright. Well, good night kids.

It looks like the mud on my wall is just about dry.

Allright… all you fuckers who said I could do this home improvement stuff… you’d better be right…

On a related note… jeezus, no wonder the stud finder seemed confused…

On a somewhat related note, I’ve just realized that I haven’t seen one single telephone jack anywhere in the house. I mean I realize they’re mostly an anachronism at this point, but still, you’d think someone would have put one in sometime in the last 70 years. I have seen telephone wire running through the basement. I guess they must have just decided to seal ‘em up when they remodeled the place six years ago .. but how many people had already completely given up the land lines six years ago? And, um, what if I decide to switch to DSL? I’m trying to decide if I should go ahead & install a phone jack while I’ve got the wall open anyway, just on that off chance.

“My feeling about anarchism is that it is not a movement with an ideology. It is a tendency in the history of human thought & action which seeks to identify coercive, authoritarian, & hierarchic structures of all kinds & to challenge their legitimacy — & if they cannot justify their legitimacy, which is quite commonly the case, to work to undermine them & expand the scope of freedom.”
– Noam Chomsky

Just thought this was a nifty quote because I had described anarchism to Carter not too long ago in pretty much these same terms, without ever having heard Chomsky say it. I wasn’t nearly so eloquent of course, but the gist was the same : )