“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” -Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride” (movie) At this rate, Inigo Montoya is the leading candidate to win the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Sure, he’s…
Category: Politics (n.): a strife of interests masquerading
Home-Field Reporting
Yesterday’s jobs report for the last week in September was really bad. But you’d be hard pressed to find it on the major financial websites, since it was getting buried under more neutral news about mergers and GM becoming more…
The 20th Century: All About the Soviets
Part 5 in an 8-part series regressing through the Stanford 2002 APDA tournament. Last week: Round 5 (re: Native American Reparations) Today’s round features one of the best cases I ever hit in my tenure on APDA, run by a…
Why I’m Against the Current Incarnation of Health Care “Reform”
I should know better than to listen to political speeches hoping to hear anything inspiring, exciting, or new. What I get out of political speeches tends to be exemplified by my experience last night: I listened to Barack Obama outline…
Get Your Bubble On
Consider this a brief follow-up to last week’s examination of existing home sales figures… Good news! (Again.) New home sales are soaring, exceeding expectations, and signaling that despite people not having jobs, money, or much credit, everyone’s buying a home.…
Housing Recovery: Really?
Today’s headlines have been overwhelmed with dancing in the streets. No, not the dancing in Libya, though that’s there too, but the dancing over the incredible housing recovery that now has cold, hard data to back it up. Now, I…
Why “We” Fight: Palling Around with Death Panels Before We Move to Canada
Americans love hard-nosed binary conflict. Football has wholly eclipsed baseball as the nation’s pastime, replacing one contentious battle of grit and will with another more grueling, violent one. We were all raised on Disney movies that pit vile, monstrous, heartless…
The Limits of Humanity
Bonus points for those of you who read today’s title and said to themselves, quietly, “What? About five feet in front of our face?” Emily and I spent the day at the newly rebuilt Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.…
Out Here in the Fields
There is a quiet communion about the world as it is meant to be. I write this while sitting in a pasture, llamas in the distance, gentle winds overwhelming the wheaty grasses of the Central Valley of California. Not connected…
Ups and Downs
It’s been a crazy week on my home planet, one that presses the line of credibility to an extent. It seems all the books have major crises one after another, piling into one great crescendo that’s either cataclysm or triumph.…