Checking again with the old e-mail address. Functionality is fine so far. Feel free to delete these
#18: Got it in one.
All the important things that a modern military does these days are skilled operations. Pushing draftees through the whole kit and kaboodle in one or two years would be a waste of time and money on a truly pentagonic scale. And it wouldn't meet the armed services' needs either.
Large-scale drafts are ok if your strategy and tactics are soviet-style, but that's not the American way of war and never has been. A draft is so totally not happening.
#93, #104, et al.: Victor Pelevin ate their brains. Read his books and tell me I'm wrong.
(Best place to start: A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia)
Indeed, the paperback of Glasshouse has even made it to southern Germany, where it fairly leaped into my hands over the weekend and has made suitably mind-bending company on the U-Bahn this week. Presuming those tunnels are in the same hab as the rest of the city above, of course.
Also, the transition on Love from "Tomorrow Never Knows" to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is a real take-your-breath-away moment. That is all.
I follow the Grey Album links, but my Bittorrent keeps going "0 seeds in 0 peers". Am I doing something wrong here?
The sample at the top of this thread did inspire me to go out and buy Love, which money can now, apparently.
In re #25, following the sales of the books mentioned on Crooked Timber here and here might be illuminating.
On the non-fiction side, also at Crooked Timber, there's the marketing approach taken by Simon & Schuster versus the non-marketing approach taken by Oxford University Press.
Newt running in 2008? We should be so lucky ... he couldn't even win a statewide race in Georgia these days. If a miracle occurred and he got the R nomination, it would be measure the drapes Mr or Mrs Democrat.
#55: "I'd imagine all the Fed and international properties aren't subject to property taxes either, right?"
Bingo.
Smithsonian, Navy Yard, Kennedy Center, etc. Not sure what the status is of mega-nonprofits like Georgetown University or American University, but any way you slice it a hefty portion of the tax base is just immune.
Linkmeister, we do have home rule after a fashion, and have since the early 1970s.
It gets complicated fast, though, and I have been away for a few years, so details are fuzzy. In short, Congress can pass laws directly that affect the District, which the Mayor and City Council cannot overrule. (There was a push by the Rs a few years ago to roll back the District's gun-control laws. Just what the District needs, more guns.) There is a significant payment from the federal budget into the city's coffers, which Congress also likes to micromanage. The federal presence, and many other entities such as Fannie Mae and foreign embassies, are not taxable, leaving the District with a significant hole in its tax base. Also, the District has to provide many services that a state would, but without the resources of a state. (For comparison, Germany has three cities that are also states; two of the three (including Berlin) have chronic budget problems, and the third flirts with them regularly.) Anyway, there are lots of levers for Congress to pull on when it wants to meddle with the District, and unlike any other polity, it has no Members or Senators to go to bat for it. Delegate Norton is a local icon, but she has limited voting priveliges, not full voting rights. And of course there's no one in the Senate.
License plates in the District say "Taxation without Representation," but that probably isn't shown on sports broadcasts.
Letter-writing requests remind me of my other quixotic notion. Even though I live Over Here (where it's now headed toward very late indeed), for voting purposes I am still a resident of the District of Columbia. Half a million of us have no bona fide representation in the House, and none whatsoever in the Senate.
I would be deee-lighted to write letters to my freshly-elected Senators and Representative (we would only have one). Could you all help me and my fellow DC residents get some representation to go with our taxation?
PNH: "Personally, I'm inclined to let them have 'GOP'. I'd much rather focus on the falsity of their claim to be in favor of limited government, economic freedom, and personal responsibility. Everything about that claim is a complete lie."
No reason one can't focus on the falsity while disdaining the use of that abbreviation. But like I said, it's a quixotic notion, and the best I hope for now is a brief pause while one thinks about whether or not to subtly spread a Republican talking point.
Alternatively, of course, we could christen the Democrats the Best Party Ever and spread the use of BPE as a common, three-letter synonym for the Democratic Party...
"They HATE being called the GOP. Hate it."
My mileage has varied. Or I missed your sarcasm Xopher. (Bear with me, it's late Over Here.)
A quixotic notion for the word-happy folks here: Can we all stop using GOP?
Grand the Republicans are not, and their party is Old only in the sense of not as old as the Democratic party. The only word of the three being abbreviated that fits is Party. But every time headline writers or columnists or bloggers or whatever use GOP, they are repeating a Republican talking point - Grand Old Party.
Let's just stop, and let's remind other folks, in our kindly editorial way, that they can stop too.
Impeachment's not really the right way to go; investigating the hell out of everything in sight (and the many out of sight things, too) will be much better. For one, it's not all-or-nothing. For another, it's bound to bring others down, too. For another, it will last longer, keeping the misdeeds of this administration in sight over time. For another, it's suited to our distributed system of government, which will in itself be a good counter to the monarchical tendencies of the last six years. Finally, ask Gulliver about the Lilliputians.
"To Exxon, $2.9m is practically small change."
Practically?
I can't find gross sales just now, but ExxonMobil's net earnings in the second quarter of 2006 were $10.36 billion. At that rate, the cost of the campaign means about as much to Exxon as buying two gallons of gas means to someone making $50,000 a year. Obfuscation is cheap.
#65: The USSR basically did it to itself. "We have great economy! We have world's largest microchips!"
The most important things that the West did were to continue to exist, to thrive as much as possible, and to remain as true as possible to its ideals. 'Pushing' the Soviet bloc this way or that was a marginal effect at most.
And we should not discount Gorbachev's contribution of letting the empire deflate peacefully. There aren't too many examples of that in history, and it could well have gone the other way.
"Also, even thinking about Cthulhu is kind of giving me the willies right now."
www.cthul.hu shows as "under construction." Don't say you weren't warned.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 3 |
| 2007 | 3 |
| 2006 | 31 |
| 2005 | 39 |
| 2004 | 7 |
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