Indeed, any move toward extending unemployment benefits is really just inducing people to sit on their fat asses…instead of getting out there into the streets and dying.

(via Daniel Indiviglio)

Pills of the [antimony] became popular as a medicine in the 1700s, especially as a laxative, able to blast through the most compacted bowels. It was so good the chronically constipated would root through their excrement to retrieve the pill and reuse it later. Some lucky families passed down antimony laxatives from generation to generation.

Sam Kean, blogging the periodic table over at Salon. Oh what I wouldn’t give for the simpler days of yore when we really cared about families and knew what mattered. Specifically, sifting our shit for Papa’s prize poison pill. You can just taste the love.

…its members are falling away; background sounds once familiar have been silenced. The jangle of the pay phone on the wall, the click of the lighter, the snap and hiss of a match being lighted.

To those retired players in New York City bars, add the hulking workhorse in the back of the pit. It played all night: thunk, thunk, thunk, as the coins dropped into the slot, followed by the grinding crank of unseen gears as the rod was yanked out. The short solo ended modestly, like a tap on a high hat, with the whisper of a pack of smokes wrapped in plastic film sliding into the tray below.

The cigarette machine.

–Michael Wilson, bringing the poetry in an elegiac piece in the NYT about the passing of the old-school mechanical cigarette machine.

I always liked the Art-O-Mat idea: cigarette pack sized art projects you could buy out of re-purposed machines. Gumballs for adults.

[You] should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes; surely Congress has the authority, and it would be right to – if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending, and that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.

John Kyl, apparently thinking he’s making sense on FoxNEWS Sunday.
So, translating this into the Earth language known as English: spending money on people who just need to suck it up and go die in the streets is always wrong, whether or not the cost of that spending has been offset by equivalent cuts or revenue from elsewhere.
Spending money to lower tax rates, on the other hand, is always right and, in fact, that money should never be offset; or at least an offset should never be an impediment to going right ahead and spending the money.
These people could very well be running the House next January and the whole country come 2012.
(via Ezra Klein)

As I understand the structure of the argument, [Josef] Joffe ridicules me because

I have written a number of articles opposing fiscal austerity right now. This shows how foolish I am, because good economists never return to or elaborate on points they’ve made before. Milton Friedman wrote one article about the virtues of free markets, and never mentioned the subject again.

European political leaders aren’t taking my advice. This also shows how foolish I am, because politicians always make the right decisions about economic policy.

Paul Krugman politely responds.

The other side said no.
They said no to laws that we passed to stop insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. They said no to requiring women to get equal pay for equal work. They said no to extended unemployment insurance for folks who desperately needed help. They said no to holding oil companies accountable when they bring on catastrophe.

Barack Obama, speaking in Vegas.
This is all well and good, and I’m glad to (finally) hear it. But The Democrat needs to be out there, every day in front of every microphone that is switched on repeating this sort of mantra over and over again, day after day, week after week, year after year. Then and only then it might start to seep in.
They choose not to. They choose to ignore the glaring truth that the facts do not matter. They think they have the high ground of those facts which do not matter. They do not. The facts do not matter, and often don’t even enter into the calculus. This is why they fail.

here we find yet again exposed the central lie of American establishment journalism: that opinion-free “objectivity” is possible, required, and the governing rule. The exact opposite is true: very strong opinions are not only permitted but required. They just have to be the right opinions: the official, approved ones. Just look at the things that are allowed. The Washington Post lavished editorial praise on the brutal, right-wing tyrant Augusto Pinochet, and that caused no controversy. AP’s Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier got caught sending secret, supportive emails to Karl Rove, and nothing happened. Benjamin Netanyahu formally celebrates the Terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel that killed 91 civilians and nobody is stigmatized for supporting him. Erick Erickson sent around the most rancid and arguably racist tweets, only to thereafter be hired as a CNN contributor. […] Having someone who was part of the slaughter of 80 civilians in Lebanon on your Board is fine. [Having] a former AIPAC official with an obvious bias toward Israel […] is perfectly consistent with a news network’s “credibility.” But expressing sadness over the death of an Islamic cleric beloved by much of the Muslim world is not. Whatever is driving that, it has nothing to do with “objectivity.”

Glenn Greenwald, opining on the inexplicable firing of CNN’s Octavia Nasr. Read the whole thing. Your Liberal Media.

Put Kagan in the Buck

Kagan in 1989: [2 Live Crew’s album, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, banned by a federal judge because of its sexual content, isn’t obscene, because] Nasty does not physically excite anyone who hears it, much less arouse a shameful and morbid sexual response.
Luther Campbell in 2010: She is not going to let any person or group tell her what is right or wrong. Kagan will judge each case based on the law of the land. She has demonstrated she can protect the Constitution by doing the fine work she did to protect 2 Live Crew’s freedom of speech.

Jackass knowledge

bobulate:

Metafilter with well over 500 responses on wrongness:

What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you’ve been doing wrong all along?

I once cooked expertly with my rangetop stove, when I moved to the city of Kobe, something I frankly knew nothing about. The device was waiting for me in my village apartment when I arrived, so I did to it with food what it seemed wont to do, interpreting its icons as called for. Toast in one area, fish in another, mochi, and so on. I had it all worked out. I spoke of this phenomenon with pride until, abruptly, a Japanese friend pointed out I had juryrigged it beyond recognition. I was doing it all wrong. And badly.

Since 1995 — when it was sort of coined by an episode of This American Life (00:00-04:01) — it’s been fun to call out “Jackass Knowledge.” There’s a point in conversation, a point at which information begins to thin, to stretch, to bend, and you take that shred of information you read online, in the Times, or heard from a friend, and you stretch it beyond where it truly belongs. It often comes in the form of talks we get into on subjects like partially hydrogenated oil, the frontal cortex, sustainable coffee bean suppliers, and the pythagorean theorem. The trouble is when you have a little information, you can go to far. And then, you’re well, you know.

Interesting. One of the quotes that jumped out at me:

That weird Arby’s logo is stylized drawing of a cowboy hat.

I thought it was a fish jumping out of a loaf of bread until I actually went to one and discovered that there was a real dearth of fish on the menu.