Man who lost both legs denied wheelchair until council can determine if his condition is permanent. That’s quite a stumper.

(Linked to this.)

You want to run for President? Are you out of your cotton-picking fabric-creating mind?

Not only is there the burden of governing a superpower in an explosive world, but our manic media ensures that, if you’re a Republican candidate, you’ll be subject to routine, public colonoscopies, while if you’re a Democratic candidate, you receive the kind of fawning sycophancy that created the same delusions of grandeur that drove many European monarchs mad.

Any job description for the job of president in 2012 should end with the words “only megalomaniacs need apply.”

Had I written this, it might not be quite so pithy, but it also would not contain the qualifier “in 2012.”

Senator John Thune endorsed Mitt Romney for President, citing among other things Romney’s work at organizing the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, prompting this analysis from Smitty:

[H]aving led the Olympics may be the optimal pro-Mitt argument:

• The Olympics and the U.S. government both claim to be about some idealized notion of humanity, yet mercilessly exploit the youngest segment of society.
• Both organizations are ruled by a core elite that re-distributes wealth wherever they go.
• Neither outfit seems to produce anything of actual economic value.

And both tend to produce the maximum level of pomp and circumstance in even-numbered years, now that I think about it.

While others snark about how Penn State might as well rename itself “State Pen,” Jennifer tries to figure out the mindset of the students who rioted after Joe Paterno was sent packing, and comes up with this:

I of course do not approve of raping children or the coverup of same, no no no, but still think it’s a goddamned shame the school has to lose all that sweet football money and important athletic prestige just because some tattletale couldn’t keep his damned mouth shut. Not that I’m saying the rape of children is a good thing, mind you, unless a TSA agent does it for national security reasons which obviously was NOT a mitigating factor here, but there is a LOT of money at stake here, y’know, and alumni football fans to keep happy, and idealistic-purity arguments about not corrupting education or the law with the protection of athletic programs tend to be dreadfully ignorant of how the real world works, y’know?

Incidentally, the phrase “Mount Nittany” contains no verb.

Andrea Harris, noting our dependence on the movies for conceptualizing occupations other than our own, provides a handy synopsis of Every Movie About Writers, Since Ever:

[T]he old writer hasn’t written anything in years and hates himself and is coasting on his past accomplishments but who cares he’s rich and famous and people call him a Writer and he has that goddamn WASP dream house with the book-lined library and it’s probably out in the woods somewhere on one of those lakes where rich white people live. Anyway, in this movie the Young Writer comes on the scene, and he’s Troubled, but Passionate, and he does a lot of intense frowning at tiny pieces of paper he’s scribbling on in a diner, and he pays for his coffee by writing a poem for the waitress’ son who has leukemia, and he makes Passionate Love to a quirkily beautiful young woman who will be played by Minnie Driver, and he enters the life of the Old Author and Shakes It Up.

I bet we could find a couple dozen books built on this particular template without having to look beyond Brian J. Noggle’s east-facing shelf.

The lovely and talented Emily from Naked DC analyzes this whole Herman Cain kerfuffle:

This is all kinds of super lame. Unless there’s a sex toy or an intern or a cigar or, for that matter, like thirty women he’s been hanging around with privately on the campaign trail, this really isn’t going to matter. Plus, it’s not like anyone was under the impression Herman Cain was making it to the big leagues, anyway. It doesn’t really make sense to keep hammering at this story unless someone’s really trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Justin Bieber is having a better day in terms of sex scandals.

Incidentally, she’s not about to blame Democrats for this:

The lack of creativity and innovation in these accusations leads me to believe we’re definitely dealing with a GOP inside job. Liberals always get way better stuff, like that time you were trolling Chuck E. Cheese in a tiger costume holding a bottle of Maker’s Mark, not that time you got a little too close to your secretary and threatened to get all crazy.

Not to mention the fact that I’ve never had a secretary, but let’s not mention that fact.

A national biometric ID database? Bad idea, says Tam:

“Keep it from falling into the wrong hands”? It’s a government database! It’s starting out in the wrong hands! I don’t know if you were keeping track in the 20th Century, dude, but Governments out-pointed Nigerian 419 Scammers by several hundred million to zero on the big International Dead Guy Scoreboard.

It technically may not be the Mark of the Beast, but there’s no sense in giving the Beast easy access to it.

Lynn’s conclusion regarding the Occupation:

I honestly don’t think corporations are evil. They might be “Big Brother” but they make our way of life possible so I guess you could say that I do “love Big Brother.” Corporations, or the people who run them, are greedy. So am I. So are you. Greed is why we have an economy at all. And Wall Street? I really fracking hate that the entire economy is so deeply affected by the daily panic attacks of a handful of wealthy investors. But that’s just the way it is and I don’t know what can be done about it. Neither do the Occupy Wall Street protesters and that’s why they’re wasting their time. You really want to make an effective statement? Go home and write to your congressman and tell him that you’re not going to vote for him unless the unemployment rate drops below 6% by election time. And then follow through on your threat.

That ought to empty out the House (and a third of the Senate) pretty quickly.

User “Just the facts” at OKCTalk predicts that the Deep Deuce apartments will go condo within five years or so:

By then they will have made back most of the construction cost and by selling them they can escape the long-term maintenance costs. The buyers then pick up a unit with a great location at a reasonable price. This is how it works in an urban environment. The reason it doesn’t work out on Penn and 150th is because the location sucks. That is why apartments and subdivision built on the outer fringe look like bombs went off after 15 to 20 years. The whole concept of sprawl is nothing more than operation Rolling Ghetto. When you build towards the center you run out of expansion room so properties don’t fall into disrepair.

I’m not so sure about that last sentence, but nothing guarantees that a “good” neighborhood will stay that way: if you flee to Point B because Point A was going down the tubes, odds are you’ll be packing up and heading for Point C before too long. (In the context of Oklahoma City, Penn and 150th is about Point D-point-five.)

This is perhaps another manifestation of the Urban Donut Hypothesis, as discussed here a couple of years ago.

404,000 error: Jobs not found.

(Linked to this.)

Glenn Reynolds on capital punishment:

The best argument against the death penalty, of course, is what Charles Black called “the inevitability of caprice and mistake.” But that argument, taken seriously, is an indictment of the entire criminal-justice system, not just the death penalty. It may be a valid indictment, but few are willing to go that far.

The worst argument against the death penalty, of course, is that it’s somehow awful for the state to kill people. Nation-states are all about killing people. They exist solely because they’re better at that, on a large scale, than any other form of human organization. Everything else is superstructure, and if they lose that edge it will fade away.

Note that this function is independent of, and perhaps irrelevant to, so-called “good intentions.”

My name is Inyo County. You burned my acres. Prepare to die.

(Linked to this.)

Something our leftward-leaning pundits (and the politicians who court their favor) have never quite been able to grasp:

Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect … In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of “Eurosclerosis,” the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries.

From Macroeconomics, by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells (Worth Publishers, 2006). Incidentally, Krugman evidently no longer believes this, which suggests a fairly-obvious question: was he wrong then, or is he wrong now?

Woman booked after her cover was blown while ripping off literature from local libraries.

(Linked to this.

The always-thoughtful Roberta X contemplates December 7, 1951:

Undoubtedly there was a somber ceremony at Pearl Harbor, but I wonder, was there a week-long national dirge leading up to the day? We got Tojo; we got OBL. Yeah, there’s still a bunch of wretched weasels out there who hate the West, the U.S. especially, and work to do harm to persons and property; but Americans are not incompetent, and we’re no longer unaware. It might be time to take off the sackcloth and ashes.

A commenter subsequently noted that there wasn’t that much of a ceremony, inasmuch as there was work to be done, what with troops in Korea that needed support. There’s a great deal to be said for keeping busy.

Jill Filipovic at Feministe, on what seems to be a popular, um, misconception these days:

It turns out that whitening your teeth, dying your hair and using really good anti-wrinkle cream will not in fact extend your fertility. I KNOW. My biology class taught me that if you’re pretty you can have babies forever, so this really blew my mind. Super glad the Times regularly covers the “you think you’re young, ambitious, happy and responsible because you’re waiting until you’re ready to have kids, but you actually have the ovaries of a shriveled old hag so better get to procreating yesterday” beat. Without it, women who are under the impression that they can get pregnant at 86 as long as they look like they might still menstruate would probably never have the chance to be quoted in a reputable news publication.

Dorianne Gray, line two, please.

The only thing I’d criticize here is the characterization of the Times as a “reputable news publication,” though the piece linked therein does contain trace amounts of Actual Reality™, which I attribute to its being placed in Section E, a safe distance from either the front or the editorial page.

Bill Quick, on a much-despised — except by itself — demographic cohort:

Today my generation, the Baby Brats, the most pampered and immature generation in American history, has been in charge for going on three decades. Naturally the “Me Me Me” Generation regards government as mommy, daddy, nanny, and banker. But the generations coming after us don’t feel that way at all. And what we are seeing now in the political arena is just the beginning of the generational earthquake that will wipe away the influence of the Aging Brats almost entirely.

What can’t go on, won’t go on. America cannot go on under the Baby Brat notions of entitlement, so it won’t.

I’m sure there are some younger folk who are inclined to spend their lives purely on the receiving end, as it were, but I expect they’ll be purged alongside the Boomerdom that was far too willing to give them that option.

Fillyjonk gently rebukes the Food Police:

I’m fine, thanks. I’m a freaking adult. I can make my own decisions. If you want someone to dominate and fill with your food anxieties, please have a child. (I’m being facetious here: we don’t need more humans being raised with screwed-up ideas about food).

I think part of the problem is we don’t understand risk levels and risk tolerance. For example: Some additive in food gives people who eat it a 2% greater risk of, I don’t know, massive kidney stones. Does that mean the additive should be banned? Does that mean everyone should be told not to buy it? What if the additive does something other that is useful, like making the food not harden up before its time or taste good? Still, that 2% risk WOULD have some people calling for banination.

(A blogger I like to read often refers to the fact that we all have a 100% chance of dying. So something like a 2% risk of kidney stones, meh)

And that’s the thing that gets to me: I don’t like being hounded. I don’t like being told that my personal choices, which I came to based on my understanding of and tolerance for risk, are BAD and WRONG and DUMB and I need to do whatever the other person is doing because it WORKED FOR THEM and therefore is the best and right and really only choice.

Or even if it didn’t work for them, but they have a wholly-imaginary mandate to force you to clean up your act.

There is only one sensible response to these people. (Well, okay, there’s a second, if you want to bring coprophagia into the conversation.) Look them in the eye, yawn, and say “When I say ‘You bore me,’ that doesn’t mean that you’re my mother.”

Judge rules that inmate has no right to matzoh or grape juice. Inmate expected to challah at his lawyer.

(Linked to this.)

Jennifer and family have had to make a few adjustments:

As you all know, my husband was laid off from the regular workforce last year. Rather than join the hordes of ambling zombies unemployed, he started his own business making the finest custom leather holsters that money can buy. That made our household budget … err … complicated for a while. So we switched to a cheap bourbon and ate a lot more chicken instead of fresh fish and steaks. We changed date night from a nice dinner out to a rented movie and take-out. It’s what normal households do when faced with a budget shortfall, you make cuts and sacrifices. We’re about to pay off our car, then 2 small credit card balances, and the loan for the sewing machine (CD secured), and then all we will be left with will be the mortgage. Rather than attempt to spend and borrow our way into prosperity, we buckled down and made some tough choices. What is so wrong with expecting our government to do the same?

It’s a concept utterly beyond their comprehension: you’d have better luck getting a couple of ducks to dance the pas de deux from La fille mal gardée.

Did the “resolution” of the “debt crisis” leave you with vague feelings of “disgruntlement” and an urge to pepper pages with “scare quotes”? Allow Robert Stacy McCain to put matters into their proper perspective:

We all got screwed over in a lousy deal.

It doesn’t matter, in this context, whether you’re a left-winger who wants to tax Donald Trump into the poorhouse, or a right-winger who wants to zero out the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts.

At a moment like this, the real division is between Chumps, who foolishly expected politicians to deliver on their promises, and Cynics, who never for a moment expected anything other than a bipartisan swindle. And in case you were in the former category — an idealistic young True Believer who hasn’t lived long enough to cultivate the cynicism necessary to understand how politics really works — isn’t it high time you grow the hell up?

Truth be told, I don’t know how the cynics manage to keep up. Whatever little BS meters they have in the back of their heads have probably been at full deflection for several years now.

Greg Gutfeld, host of the Fox News program Red Eye, on a subject near and dear to some of us:

The worst five words you can hear at a party are, “Have you read my blog?” Blogs, really, used to be called diaries, hidden under the pillows by googoo-eyed twelve-year-old girls. They were usually covered with stickers of rainbows and unicorns (and rainbow-colored unicorns). But now everyone has a diary, but they call them blogs and they’re asking all of us to read them. It’s like pulling off a Band-Aid and saying, “I made it myself!”

Blogs are one of the most disgusting, narcissistic, time-wasting developments of the last hundred years (and I’m including racewalking). Nobody read your diary in 1776, so you never did get that opium shot of having some stranger sixteen states away telling you, “You have the soul of a poet.”

From The Bible of Unspeakable Truths (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010). Gutfeld blogs at dailygut.com.

Update: Bareheaded in Burleson offers a different take.

MS-DOS turns 30 today. C:\OFFLAWN.COM

(Linked to this.)

Jennifer Abel, on the failure of the Soviet Union:

The USSR did not die merely because it ran out of money; it died because Gorbachev wasn’t willing to kill however many people it took to maintain the fiction that the country worked. One article I read about the fall of the Soviet Union specifically mentioned food; the country’s crops that year weren’t enough to feed its people, and the government did not have enough money to import grain from overseas.

Gorbachev wasn’t willing to see millions die in a famine. Stalin engineered a famine to wipe out people he didn’t like.

Now, which of these guys more closely resembles the current American government?

I don’t think Obama — or any of the leading Republicans or Democrats in Congress — takes the Gorbachevian view “Our government should be kinder to its citizens than it used to be.” No, quite the opposite: Obama, far more than Bush/Cheney before him, actively works to make this country harsher, meaner, more punitive towards its own people, and neither Republicans nor Democrats do a damn thing to stop him. Indeed, if you do hear the word “moral” coming from a Republican, it’s only as an excuse to punish someone with a sex life he doesn’t like, and from a Democrat to criticize someone who smokes or eats too much. Our country grows meaner and less moral by the day: yes to torture, to hell with the fourth amendment, sexual assault is a precondition of modern travel, bombing civilians is perfectly fine, et cetera.

If sunlight is the best disinfectant, let us pray for solar flares.

Six GOP candidates hold a debate on Twitter. Amazingly appropriate since Twitter has 140 characters and so does the Republican presidential race.

(Linked to this.)

Addendum: Fark actually acknowledges this blurb of the week; Farker thismomentinblackhistory exclaims, “OMG clear mantle space!!”

Lynn has figured out a way to deal with our reprehensibles representatives in these trying times:

[A] mob of angry Americans barricades all the exits of the House and Senate chambers and refuses to let our lawmakers leave until they come to an agreement on the current debt problem. We not only do not allow them to leave, we do not allow them to have anything to eat nor anything to drink but tap water. Bathroom visits? Absolutely not. This shouldn’t take more than a few hours and besides, I imagine that peeing one’s pants would be a very humbling experience and nobody needs humbling more than the members of Congress.

I dunno. Some of those guys may have learned to filibuster from the likes of Strom Thurmond, who probably could have gotten into Guinness if they’d had a category for Bladder Control, Greatest.

And besides, once they realized they weren’t going anywhere, the first thing they’d do would be to kill the C-Span feed, so we couldn’t enjoy their discomfiture.

Zombie apocalypse? Nothing so exciting, predicts Tam:

Every year, the shelves of America creak louder under ever-thickening volumes of federal, state and local laws and regulations, codes and ordinances. I’m telling you, while all the worrywarts are handwringing about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, it’s gonna be some law library in New Jersey that collapses into a singularity and destroys the planet…

I figure they’ll blame Chris Christie for not taxing that black hole when he had the chance.

How do you solve a problem like urea?

(Linked to this.)

KingShamus reminds us that Mother Gaia, far from being that delicate flower of too much bad Sixties (and later) poetry, can be a Super King Kamehameha Byotch:

Tsunamis, hurricanes, outbreaks of tornados, earthquakes: Mother Nature has thrown just about every kind of weapon she has in her Arsenal of Killing The Shit Out Of Us. Yet even with all that, the enviro-dorks insist that the Earth is a delicate flower in need of constant protection, impossibly light footsteps and — most importantly — lots of freedom hating human-unfriendly big government solutions to keep Terra safe from the evil predations of Mankind.

Wrong. Earth is not a vestal virgin in need of a socialist chastity belt to keep her pure. Instead, the world is a smoking hot yet incredibly moody ex-wife on an eternal meth binge, armed with a loaded MAC-10 and just waiting for you to say something about her thighs so she has an excuse to pump a few rounds into your sorry ass. There’s nothing you can do to change her mind about your uselessness. You know that at some point she’s going to shoot you. It’s just a matter of when and what extremity she decides to hit.

On the other hand, you might want to keep those footfalls on the light side anyway, just in case she’s listening. Because, you know, she probably is.

We’re just totally bifurcated this week, so we’re nominating two pieces, one of which was short enough to be a tweet.

In the longer item, Sonic Charmer predicts the Presidential election:

I fully expect President Obama to still be President Obama in 2013 and will be surprised by any other outcome. In fact the thought of him losing re-election is almost (not quite, but almost) inconceivable to me. Why would he lose? Economy etc. aside, President Obama is doing precisely what the country elected him to do, which is to be President while being a slick, photogenic, skinny guy with a darkish skin hue. That is the only reason he was elected and therefore, empirically, that is what the country wanted him to do. And in no way shape or form has he fallen short of that mandate, nor does he threaten to any time in the foreseeable future.

And in a related issue, Dan McLaughlin, @baseballcrank, offered the following wisdom:

I do not believe today’s news changes the odds that Newt Gingrich will be the next President of the United States.

You heard it here — well, twenty-ninth or thirtieth, actually, but certainly not first.