For the weekend.
Note that I'm gonna start off with one because I'm liking it so I won't lose it in the stream.
Note that I'm gonna start off with one because I'm liking it so I won't lose it in the stream.
1. As I said yesterday, we got Trump the same way I got Obama the same way we got Bush the same way we got Clinton: We allowed our civil society, our shared sense of civic responsibility, and our view of government as just the thing that governs rot out from beneath us.
2. You have an affirmative duty to the species to have lots of babies. You may not be able to fulfill that duty, you may discharge it in a few ways, but the duty exists because otherwise the species withers and dies and we are the only species created imago Dei.
3. Cities with few-to-no-children are existentially terrifying. I was in Berlin a few times at the start of this decade and the absence of kids on the street -- babies in strollers, kids walking with their parents, whatever -- was deeply weird and unsettling.
3. There are a few ways to divide and cross-divide energy drinks. Effective/ineffective, tasty/disgusting, fizzy/not. Only AMP Original and Venom Killer Taipan are effective, tasty, and fizzy.
Dangit that was supposed to be 4.
4. Asian table cuisine, as in get-it-in-Asia Asian table cuisine, is absolutely amazing and one of my favorite things. Asian (GIIA) street food and confection ranges from wow! to huh? to ye gods why did you boil a jock strap in vomit and serve it to me?
5. Creating the category "gamers" was stupid, but including people who primarily play mobile games is double-stupid with a thin layer of stupid, topped off with a whipped stupid topping and a John Cusack on top.
6. The little dwarf-guy who is always paired with a rotating cast of hot redheads in the in-store GameStop commercials is either banging it or is constantly on the edge of suicide.
7. Extra Ecclesiam, nulla salus, but I hope despite myself that the modern Catechism's take is more accurate.
8. A video game composed solely of wandering around a house reading a story is not a video game, it's an exercise in shared visual masturbation.
9. We have the Congress we deserve.
10. Volkswagen Beetles, especially the more modern iteration, are for girls and for rentals you take only because there's nothing else and you legitimately need a car for a while.
11. The late-stage Chevy Vega was a perfectly serviceable little car.
12. One of the worst things we and the Brits do to ourselves is adapting the other's perfectly good series or concept for our own audiences and then showing it to our own audiences as if we haven't actually committed an atrocity.
13. Most movies, like The Dark Knight, are intensely exciting to their initial audience and then boring or stupid to later ones because they are products of their times, and also badly-written and -acted. Like The Dark Knight.
14. Video game adaptations are almost invariably bad because they take a solipsistic experience in which the player lives a story that would seem banal or stupid if viewed at any remove but gains attraction by its immediacy, and then tries to share it with popcorn eaters.
15. Imagining the world would be better-run if experts ran everything is the sort of thing only experts, and not people who have to deal with the world, think.
16. The English ceased colonizing most of Ireland and just culturally conquered it instead.
17. We have done our children and our country a profound disservice by allowing primary and secondary education to become almost exclusively administered by a single sex.
18. Everyone has at least one great story to write. Most of us can't.
19. We are surrounded by so much captivating and enjoyable entertainment, we have lost the capacity to identify accurately the excellent ones.
20. Your life is not, statistically, harder than your grandparents'.
21. It's not whataboutism to call out your hypocrisy, myopia, and monomania.
22. If you've allowed a single election to alter your deeply-held principles and beliefs, they weren't deeply-held in the first place.
23. The new Battlestar Galactica was overrated and hasn't aged well.
24. The Millennials are all adults now, so it's safe to deride them for their terrible opinions and life choices, rather than blaming their parents.
25. The DC Superheroes are more compelling than most of the Marvel ones because watching gods struggle with their humanity is more compelling than watching superpowered teenagers emote at each other.
26. The measure of a man is whether he will stand to defend his faith or his family or both when there is no hope of relief and only the tiniest, and perhaps no, chance of success.
27. Humans are wretched, corrupt, greedy, nasty, selfish pieces of garbage who are capable of infrequent acts of heroism and decency so profound as to cause one to erroneously reevaluate the entire species.
28. Adultery should be a criminal offense, carrying the threat of actual jail time.
29. The single most moving panel in comics history is Reed Richards, his son Franklin poised on his lap, telling his son the story of the Saggy, Baggy Elephant, his hands taking on the shapes of the story as he does so.
30. Being the hero of your own story is an affirmatively good thing as long as you remember that the hero doesn't just win in the end, he does good the whole way through and repents of his wrongs before the denouement.
31. The most moving issue of any comic ever is "Ashes to Ashes" (Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #118).
Ok, 113 is manageable. Here we go.
32. The Enlightenment is a concerted effort to return to the barbarism of pagan times while keeping the happy-smiley parts of Christendom, and is therefore not merely doomed by its own contradiction but ultimately a project that must end in evil.
33. America is torn between a deep love of expertise and a deep distrust of experts, and always has been; the effect of having experts placed too high in government has tipped the balance toward distrust.
34. Ireland sucks. I thought this before and was too polite to do more than make jokes about Irishers, but I can now comfortably call it a little s***stain country with miserable weather, cranky people, awful food, and good riddance as they off themselves.
35. The German Romantic period was the worst mistake Germans had made to that point other than the Reformation.
36. Most American Catholics are American.
37. The New York Times is actually, over the last couple of decades, not all that great at reporting. It is very good at blanketing the globe with reporters who write things. It is reasonably good at corrections. It is very bad at relating events and ideas correctly.
38. Saying "how people are on social media is how they are in real life" is like saying "in vino, veritas." It's sometimes true and sometimes stupid. The filters and pauses we construct for ourselves are as much a part of who we are as the impulses they control.
39. Americans still talk to each other all the time. Americans are really bad at listening to each other.
40. Charles Darwin is in Hell. This is not because of his theory of evolution, which is facially more or less right, or because he published it. It is because he was a bad man. The inability to separate a man's work and his moral character is a profound and common failing.
41. I have five books half-written on my computer. None will ever be as good as my Thomas or Noah v. the Dinosaurs tweets. Of course, none will ever be published, either.
42. Expanding a bit on something above, the Romantic era was, until today's, the dumbest intellectual time ever.
43. It is self-evidently better to serve in Heaven than to reign in Hell, and people who thought a devout Arian like Milton imagined otherwise have been sniffing too much Byron cut with Shelley.
44. Holy Mother Church was in need of housecleaning when the poop-obsessed German monk got his nose in the air, but I do not believe that the cost in lives and souls was worth the cleaning that followed.
45. I am torn between feeling like I'm 12 and like I'm 83, but never actually feel like I'm 41.
46. Baldur's Gate 2 was the finest pen-and-paper AD&D simulation game ever. Only its predecessor was truly like it, and nothing since has matched what it offered.
47. However, the Neverwinter Nights games offered a chance to DM over a distance in a way I'd never imagined and which recreated the experience of loading bowls with Doritos and opening bottles of Coke and Mountain Dew better than any other.
48. Pushing Daisies was the best show on broadcast television in the last 25 years.
49. The Wheel of Time series was legitimately great until the end of the fifth book, which was roughly when Jordan realized he was beyond editorial control or input he didn't want. It became a slog, and the final books a tragedy.
50. Philip Roth was not a good writer of books. He was a great writer of phrases, of quips, of epigrams, of bons mots. His books were tedious, grinding affairs, the love of which is sustained by people who can't tell the difference between the subjects of the first two sentences.
51. The greatest artists of human history crafted art to put bread on the table, and the work was the better for it.
52. People who prefer cats to dogs as pets are people who yearn for more disrespect, contempt, and servitude in their lives, and are simply unwilling to be lawyers in their own homes.
53. The relocation of the telos of human existence to material comfort has been one of the greatest spurs to technological advance and the surest drive to damnation we've managed since Baal's altars were smashed.
54. Movies, unlike video games and books, tend to be most enjoyable when those in our sight clearly enjoyed the making of them.
55. You are not a nerd because you like to play on technology. You are a nerd if you were smarter than your classmates, rebuilt or programmed your own box, got beat up for the first and sometimes the second, and were eschewed socially in school. My culture is not your broface.
56. American Catholicism is best explained as a faith of timeless Truths that is ministered by men terrified of losing even more butts in the pews, which butts are attached to people who overwhelmingly believe no one is the boss of them.
57. My criticism of the direction of video games in 1997 -- that the potential for a self-created immersive experience video games provided was being sacrificed for greater graphical presentation and more homogeneity -- was right and yet how naive I was.
58. Final Fantasy > Final Fantasy III (VI for moderns) > Final Fantasy II (IV) >>>>>>>> Final Fantasy VII >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> all the rest.
59. There are little literary gems all around us, in places we would never look because they are couched in clothing we eschew. Thus, there are five or six truly good-to-great novels in the Pocket Star Trek books that are written off as genre fiction.
60. The third season of Enterprise was better than DS9 or Voyager, and was so very good that one forgot how boring and meh-at-best the first two seasons were, and wanted to rejoice at the end of the series in the fourth.
61. Your life is richer with children than it could ever be if it ends with a procession of U-Hauls dragging your gold collection to your full-size Taj Mahal replica mausoleum.
62. From its inception until about 2008-2010, Penny Arcade was the best webcomic ever.
63. Unless your doctor or spouse more or less orders you to do so, drinking skim milk is proof that you long for the sweet embrace of death but fear the pains of Hell and so won't kill yourself directly.
64. Eastenders and (sort of) Doctor Who being the exceptions that proved the rule, AAA British TV for a long time tended to be better than American TV because most of their series had a defined and achieved stopping point, and then stopped.
65. Cheese, more than fire, and perhaps only matched by the wheel, is the true mark that humans had a future beyond picking bugs off each other and running down prey.
66. Your stupid, self-destructive behavior is a middle finger aimed directly at your prehistoric forebears who undertook retrospectively stupid actions for survival or kicks and from which your other forebears learned not to do that dumb s*** ever again.
67. The Assassin's Creed games, like Chicken Little, are fun little enterprises until the aliens show up.
68. A writer can write only so much in a world of his own creation before he exhausts the spark within him that made his creation worth writing about in the first place.
69. There is a law of conservation of human cruelty, by which the alleviation of cruelty to one mass of human beings must necessarily mean its relocation to at least one other mass.
70. The open floor plan concept is one of the most insidious evils ever applied to any space in which humans congregate.
71. The sudden inclusion of political thoughts in a work not explicitly about politics or political ideas is akin to sneaking up behind a couple strolling, hand-in-hand, in a meadow, murdering the guy, and mugging the girl.
72. Hell is not other people. Hell is the realization that try as you might, you can't quite do without other people.
73. Disliking people for liking their steak cooked to a temperature other than the one you like is akin to disliking people for disliking sunlight at an angle other than the one you like.
74. There are only two reasons to be committed to environmental preservation: Because the world is a gift from God we are not to misuse, and because it's where we keep all our stuff. Each must yield to the greater imperative to preserve faith and human life.
74. Mass Effect 3 was a fall-off from Mass Effect 2 from its very inception, and only got moreso as it went.
Hell, two 74s. In my defense, this is because 4, 5, and 6 started a fight, then 6, who got straight As and 4s, came up to ask if she was getting her end-of-the-year present today and if 3 and 7 could come along to pick it out.
75. No matter which number or numbers, I am blessed with each and every one of my numerous children.
76. Nintendo remains the only video game company that remembers how to make video games for all the humans.
77. It is very hard to regain a sense of the enchantment of the world when you are disinclined to see mystery and enchantment and almost no one around you even understands the phrase.
78. Allowing index and pension funds to become significant active investors has been one of the causes of the loss of American dynamism among major corporations.
79. We are truly blessed to have Ronald Reagan as a President; because of him, we were able to elect four consecutive Baby Boomers to the Presidency without triggering the existential fear ordinarily attendant in electing four consecutive Baby Boomers to the Presidency.
80. Major actors and professional athletes are overwhelmingly the theater geeks and jocks you knew back in high school; you wouldn't have taken seriously their opinions on anything other than emoting and physical exertion then, and shouldn't know.
81. Even though he was a Met, Rey Ordonez is the most amazing shortstop I've ever watched play the game, bar none, and yes, I know what an Ozzie Smith is.
82. A man is not a full grown-up until he is married with children, if even then.
83. A woman is not a full grown-up until she is married with children, if even then.
84. The idea that no adults who marry today meaningfully understand the implications of "until death do us part" is one of the most insidiously dangerous ideas that is not heretical I've ever heard a prelate utter.
85. The state of our politics now is one that naturally occurs when the consequences of one's politics pose no threat to national existence; or at least, everyone really thinks so.
86. The sorts of people who think that Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are better Batman movies than Batman are the sorts of people who think the Stars Wars prequels were better than Empire Strikes Back.
87. It is precisely because Firefly was shown out of order, in weird time slots, that its graying and dwindling fan base can reassure itself that a show that spent its first nine or so hour-long episodes on meandering-dialogue-intense exposition would have taken off otherwise.
88. The election of a Jesuit to the See of St. Peter may yet allow us to open an interfaith dialogue with the Jesuits and bring them back to Christ.
89. If you are taste-testing supermarket pizza brands and you are only taste-testing the cheese varieties, you, sir, are a madman and a rogue.
90. The appropriation of the culture of stone age savages, who lived where they did by brutally beating their predecessors, for anodyne and insipid thoughts on peace and environmentalism is one of the most racist things progressive Americans unthinkingly do.
91. The world would be a more peaceful place if more people used semicolons in their speech.
92. The Hobbits were the only rightly-ordered bunch in all of Middle Earth.
93. Conflating a human being's worth with his or her sins or proclivities to sin is one of the most profoundly un-Christian things imaginable.
94. There is nothing at all wrong with calling bad people "animals" or "monsters" so long as you remember that it is precisely their humanity which enables the behavior giving rise to your desire to call them animals or monsters.
95. Of all the American presidents, most of whom were not saints and many of whom did things we now revile, I am only completely comfortable asserting that Woodrow Wilson is in Hell.
96. Even though I think they only make the third- or fourth-best available fast food chicken sandwich, I patronize Chick-fil-A precisely because they give their employees Sundays off.
97. The Ordinary Form is of course a fully valid form of the Mass, but I could do with fewer disco balls and Segways.
98. Ceteris paribus, the party with unlimited aims by definition will win any negotiation with the party with limited aims, because each negotiation is merely a transit point to the next.
99. There will never be a Catholic President of the United States.
Note that a Catholic who procures or has procured an abortion is excommunicate and therefore not Catholic, so we still haven't had one yet.
Note that a Catholic who procures or has procured an abortion is excommunicate and therefore not Catholic, so we still haven't had one yet.
100. Human depravity has no natural reset button.
101. Best Superbowl commercial ever.
104. I prefer incompetent clowns duly elected by, and subject to the electoral whims of, the people, to incompetent or even competent clowns who will not answer to God and who are beyond the ability of the people to recall from tyranny.
105. The practice of law, like the practice of medicine, is a terrible trap for certain classes of smart people, one which we willingly bait and into which we willingly step, and from which we only rarely escape.
106. Rejecting the infallible teachings of the Catholic Magisterium but insisting you're still Catholic no matter what they say might have seemed clever when you were 15 or so, but should seem self-evidently dumb to anyone past puberty. Emotionally, a lot of Catholics aren't.
107. Discriminating on the basis of religion or lack thereof is not racism, and dumbing down an incredibly useful word to "I don't like it" is, wait for it, dumb.
108. There is no intelligent life in the universe, which is fine, because God doesn't care about our pitiful levels of intelligence.
109. No one currently affiliated with Star Wars remembers how or why Star Wars was magical; this is not least because none of them believe in magic any more.
110. The fastest way to suddenly care about one's own skin is to have hostages to fortune for whom you'd sacrifice that skin at the speed of thought or faster.
111. Video games aren't real life, but if you play GTA as a violent rapist and you play Star Wars games as a sadistic Sith, there's a decent chance I don't want you watching my kids for any length of time.
112. Marvel's actual comics have become more and more garbage since Jim Shooter was shown the door.
113. Tyranny is at base both a response to the heart's call for order and a demand to pervert the order within the human heart, which is why attacks on Nature and Nature's God always seem to follow from it.
114. It's not true that there are no new stories. It's true that no one tells them to mass audiences much any more.
115. It is not clear to me that the waves of ethnic, tribal, religious, and just-for-reasons massacres that followed the end of colonialism are somehow less awful for not being perpetrated by colonial powers.
116. Orientalism as a philosophical project demands the very sin of an infantilizing worldview as it castigates, but declares it holy if performed for the right cause.
117. Pepper jack is the best kind of cheese as a stand-alone cheese.
118. The main theme to Space Harrier remains one of the best single video game compositions of all time: It captures the mood and theme of the game and is long enough that the repetition doesn't upset you.
119. We as a people did not deserve the History Channel when it was great in the mid-90s. We deserve what it is now.
120. People who, on seeing how many kids I have, ask, "Haven't you heard of cable?" either have cable from a parallel and better Earth or are doing baby-making waaaaaay wrong.
121. The Baby Boomers ruined almost everything they touched. Their kids are here to shoot the survivors.
122. Chipotle is Moe's for people who like to give away money for crappier food.
123. Judging men by standards completely alien to their worlds is the Creator's, and not our, prerogative.
124. The East Coast is a food desert and only doesn't seem that way to the inmates because they keep closing the door and making sure the warden has the key.
125. America is a fundamentally good country made up of sinners. We eventually realize and correct our sins, even at enormous cost.
126. Mary Theotokos is also Our Lady of Victory, and robbing her of that title is a slap at the miracle of Lepanto.
127. Most "hot" Asian food is only one-dimensionally hot, and isn't even that if you grew up eating chilled cayennes as a snack.
128. Ground is not holy merely for a battle being fought upon it, even if the cause and the victory were just.
129. John Brown was an insurrectionist and a rebel, and even though his cause was just, he was unrepentant and properly hanged for the men who died during his mini-rebellion.
130. The reason poetry is supposed to have meter is the same reason it has verses: It is supposed to be sung. Poetry that cannot be sung is just stilted prose.
131. Dryden's translation of the Aeneid remains the best in English.
132. You haven't truly experienced the Sacrifice of the Mass until you have a four- and a five year-old arguing comparative human anatomy around you during the Consecration.
133. Our higher education system is messed up well beyond its utility.
134. Charmander > Charizard > Charmeleon
135. The loss of Kenny Rogers Roasters is a specter that still hangs over our nation.
136. The story arc of Naruto is more or less coherent until the time skip.
137. It is hardest to be happy when you should be happiest when you always believe you are meant for better things.
138. While submitting to the authority of Holy Mother Church, I have a hard time shaking the fact that Joan of Arc was essentially canonized for helping kill a lot of English Catholics and then getting caught.
139. Common Core is an attempt to make engineering a blue collar profession; to adjust for the fact that our educational system will be unevenly applied no matter the curriculum; and to lock everyone below the upper middle class out of the upper middle class and above.
140. The extraordinary prevalence of social science and liberal arts majors in fields having nothing to do with the social sciences and liberal arts is not a testament to their utility but to @asymmetricinfo’s point that a degree is a middle class signal.
141. The collective action problem is basically a problem of self-regulation, which is a lot of why we end up with bad externally-produced regulation.
142. Ruffles is the best brand of potato chips available nationally, and if you are inclined to counter with anything involving salt and vinegar, you are clearly a commie.
143. Herman Cain is probably slightly insane and is clearly something of a grifter, but he saved Godfather’s Pizza, so he has his ticket to Heaven punched.
144. The proof that our civilization is doomed came when the last box of Carnation Breakfast Bars left the shelves, never to be replaced.
145. Requiring abstinence from meat every Friday makes fish on other days of the weak harder to handle, even when you genuinely like seafood and SOUGHT IT OUT FOR THE FIRST 34 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE.
146. Your trust of other people should be inverse to their level of agreement with you on the ideal mix of at least three pizza toppings.
147. Your superstitious beliefs that some humans are not persons, that some humans aren’t human, and that some humans have value contingent on others’ desire for them do not rise to the level of barbarism.
148. The biggest problem of science in a democratic society is the dissemination or incomplete expertise to people wildly incapable of accessing and improving on it, which is how you get critical studies papers explaining that string theory is a good metaphor for society.
149. We have plenty of STEM majors and graduates, so many that we are driving their compensation toward the levels of the countries from whom we import STEM majors under the pretext that we don’t have enough.
150. The national government has some inherent police powers. Just not many.
151. All conservatives should be temperamentally and strategically libertarian precisely because any state we are likely to see will be at least slightly antithetical to conservatism.
152. Very few people march to war believing God/History/whatever is against or indifferent to them. This does not therefore make their struggles just or even morally neutral.
153. Every all-you-can-eat buffet from which I’ve been blacklisted for eating too much was garbage and also filthy liars.
154. We will never have a national culture again.
155. We owe the mentally ill compassion, care, and respect for their human dignity, for their sake and ours. We must not join them in their illness, for their sake and ours.
156. Michael Jordan was the greatest of all time. LeBron James is the greatest of his time.
157. It is a profound waste of the gift and responsibility of the stewardship of Creation not to cultivate, control, and preserve it.
158. A pitchers' duel is far more exciting than a home run derby.
159. Fanboys in love with sabermetrics who lament how boring baseball has become are probably just having trouble seeing the game around the I-beams in their eyes.
160. Professional sports are much less exciting when you realize that the old men on the benches are your contemporaries; college sports less so when you realize that the players are your children's.
161. Merely because the sentiment is guided by nostalgia does not make it less accurate in its final conclusion.
162. A closed-opening chess match is intensely mentally exciting to play and as boring as soccer to watch.
163. A nation of popular representation has only itself to blame for the elected servants drawn from its own citizenry.
164. The loud moments with your kids make the best photos. The quiet ones make the best memories.
165. The flesh decays. Marry one who will walk and talk beside you until one of you passes from this Vale of Tears, and who will eagerly join you when you meet again.
166. Papa John's is the best national chain pizza out there now that Godfather's is a regional gas station attachment.
167. Kirby is the greatest of Nintendo's stable of heroes.
Poyo.
Poyo.
168. Using botulinum toxin to make your face prettier is to side with the enemy in a millennia-long battle against bacteria we've only recently started to not lose.
169. The very best authors create a moment with their words into which you can briefly relocate as if you had always been there.
170. New York style pizza is pizza the same way a Totino's you buy at the grocery is pizza: Sure, it has the same form, but you're really hurting yourself in the name of unrequited love.
171. The fruit of which Eve partook was a pineapple, and had the Lord not found her and Adam cowering naked, they'd have put some on a pizza to up the ante.
172. Video games are more fun when you don't have infinite lives.
173. We are a fallen people, for we let grown men walk around in public wearing short pants without immediately bundling them off to an asylum.
174. If there was an actual Catholic parish within 30 miles that did a Latin Mass, we would be there. Unfortunately, the closest Latin Mass is performed by the Schismatics of St. Pius X, so we are stuck with Mass of Creation.
175. Bard's Tale III was an actual abomination, all of the worst things of the 80s shoveled into one of the best video game series of all time.
176. There is no place in the Roman Missal for the laity to assume the orans posture during the Our Father, SO CUT IT THE **** OUT.
177. Self-driving cars are for people who hate cars, not Americans.
178. Americans who watch professional soccer should be ashamed of themselves.
179. I suspect my innovations while doing telephonic tech support in the mid-to-late 90s are why tech support now reads off of a flowchart of screens.
180. Fried chicken and watermelon constitutes perfect picnic food; and that white Yankees thought this was black people food, and then white Southerners decided they were right WHILE EATING THE SAME FOOD is proof we're a stupid people.
181. Serenity was an incredibly meh movie.
182. White pizza isn't so much pizza as fighting words.
183. "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a good song dammit.
184. Every Joss Whedon show and movie is self-indulgent garbage wrapped around tiny, enjoyable diamonds of human moments.
185. Suicide Squad was a fun movie; not a good one, but a fun one. Or three. Really, it looked like three had been spliced together and no one knew how. But still fun.
186. Our poets laureate are usually really, really bad poets.
187. Original Recipe is better than Extra Crispy; but better than both was the 1980s special, Crispy Original Recipe.
188. Our ability to stretch Tech Bubble 2.0 out this far is really a testament to how badly we want to waste time and money on shiny things.
189. RedState 1.0 was the best RedState.
190. Everyone saying "[My political opponent] is going to wake up and realize how stupid he was/ deny she ever thought this" is clearly still living in 2015 if not earlier.
191. A city that voluntarily ransoms its future to have a sports team play in that city, which city doesn't promptly remove every governing official from office just to be safe, deserves that it gets.
192. The episode of Sonic Boom where Eggman is being driven mad trying to get the stuff for which he paid overnight delivery fees is the best sequence of children's programming made in the last decade and a half.
193. Ghostbusters 2 isn't as good as Ghostbusters, but it's got nearly as many great lines.
194. People who want to succeed at coalition politics but feel it very important to alienate sizable portions of the only possible coalitions that would succeed and advance their preferred outcomes don't actually want to succeed at coalition politics.
195. Politics is what we do to govern ourselves. Only psychopaths would treat it as a sport, blood- or otherwise.
196. While attempts to stamp out corruption must necessarily fail because the humans still run things, it is worth remembering Lombardi's line about perfection and excellence.
197. Teen Titans Go! is a stupid abomination but it has made some remarkable humor in its run.
198. I was not old enough to have seen Deadpool in the theater. I'm 41.
199. With declining fertility and peak populations approaching, those countries that like having thriving economies had better hope Africa gets rich, fast.
200. I'm a pretty awful human being, even by the standards of human beings.
201. I am probably going to Hell, not least for laughing so much at the early seasons of Archer.
202. Most people are at least as smart as I. They're just much worse at proving it in ways that seem clever to people who don't know better.
203. You can fool all of the people n times, where n does not equal but approaches infinity.
204. Still not sure getting old beats the alternative, but I am not in a rush to explore that alternative.
205. It is a failing, but I tend to look at Catholic families with two kids and pray that it's because of fertility problems, and then pray for the end of those.
206. My kids are trying to kill me.
207. My kids are saving my soul.
208. I'd have been happier being a college professor with elbow patches on his sports coat, up to my nose in books, except for the absence of my wife and kids, which means I'd be so much worse off.
209. I sometimes miss living in Arizona except when I remember the weather. I always miss Texas.
210. What a piece of work is Man!
211. We have fallen so far, I have seen lawyers appear in court in track suits and they made it out of the courtroom without leg irons.
212. I worry that as I shed some of my vanity in my (unworthy of vanity) physical appearance, I am more than compensating with vanity in my (unworthy of vanity) mind.
213. A shepherd who just hopes his sheep all get where they're supposed to go isn't so much a shepherd as a fellow who walks in what he hopes is the same direction as the intended goal.
213. Fwiffo is the best bit-player video game NPC of all time.
214. It was a mistake to take saved allowance money and spend it on Greed and Glory on Wall Street when it was first released.
215. Mistaking the result of a law of nature written into our hearts for the disproof of that law is the sort of mistake only humans could work themselves into making.
216. Coffee is vile.
217. I understand why people ate porridge and the equivalent when the whole species was poorer, but we aren't any more. Do better.
218. Asceticism carried too far is Gnosticism in more respectable clothing.
219. Because we are a visually- and aurally-oriented species, we judge art by it's capacity to transport us by sight and/or sound to an experience other than our own. As a friend liked to say years ago, art for art's sake is glorified masturbation.
220. Sausage is better than bacon, but bacon is still pretty good.
221. The Legend of Huma is the only legitimately really good book, cover to cover, in the Dragonlance setting, though the first two trilogies assuredly had their moments.
222. My eighth grade science teacher, who I expect has passed on to her final reward and may God rest her soul, was too dumb to understand random number generators and I should have just done an earthworm thing for the science fair.
223. Harry Truman was not one of our worst presidents and was not even close. He was also not one of our best, and it's not even close.
224. Conservatives spitting on neocons are either conservatives who don't know their own history or are lying about their own conservatism.
225. Presidents, ranked:
1. Washington
2. Lincoln
3. Reagan
4-43. Almost all the others, order mostly irrelevant except to pedants
44. Carter
45. Wilson
1. Washington
2. Lincoln
3. Reagan
4-43. Almost all the others, order mostly irrelevant except to pedants
44. Carter
45. Wilson
225a. Yes, I know about Buchanan, and Carter and Wilson are exactly that bad.
226. Social scientists are not scientists; the social sciences are not sciences, no matter how much second-year calculus they try to import.
227. I really wish I could see the glass as half-full instead of wondering which of my kids stole half of my milk before I had a chance to turn around.
228. Conquest's Three Laws are written in iron.
229. Shelley was the stupid kid the other English Romantics of his time let hang around so they'd feel smarter.
230. Victorian literature is best enjoyed on at least one stimulant.
231. Literature from about 1900-1918 is most often best enjoyed in the trash.
Oh come on people it was 231 when I swore I was polishing this off.
232. All political campaigns are at least somewhat hokey in retrospect because the passion of battle has faded and reason looks askance at bad wordplay.
233. Both Acton's original meaning and the misunderstanding that is now commonplace are essentially correct.
234. Your Congressman is not special.
235. Whenever you hope conservatives are more cool-eyed than progs, remember that it was Calvin Coolidge who signed Kellogg-Briand and pushed it through the Senate.
236. Toddlers have a peculiarity of their developing brains that causes them to process orally-given instructions on a delay to their experience; this condition apparently continues into adulthood for a sizable minority.
237. It is important to think of public school teachers as government workers, because no other phylum of employees could so consistently fail badly and yet have its demands for better pay and benefits heard without laughter.
238. Humans are amazingly good at concluding that the philosophical conditions under which they currently abide are self-evidently available to humans throughout time.
239. The story of baby Hitler and the giraffe sweater is an argument in favor of the internet. washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/…
240. I am never sure if politicians campaigning for office in democracies look stupid because they are; because their electorates are; or both.
241. Overheard a segment on something called "Backpack Kid" my wife watched over the weekend and discovered that it wasn't an eloquent satire of our debauched age, so: The Warriors of Krikkit were right. It's all got to go.
242. The extent to which we implicitly assume that the Judeo-Christian views that so animate our day-to-day lives and cultures could be easily relocated to a different time and/or world without Judaism and Christianity is a testament to those faiths' power and our stupidity.
243. Modern video game journalism, with rare exceptions, is what happens when you take people who inaccurately believe they're capable of more and place them in jobs of equal parts public relations and utterly pointless, and put no limitation on their passive-aggressiveness.
244. Words often matter, but all too often, we act too much as if they matter at all.
245. 2009 was the best year in modern history for video games across every major platform. There have been a few that were almost as good.
246. Homeworld and Journey, a decade-and-a-half apart, separately convinced me that sometimes, beauty matters in a video game.
247. My admiration for the Spartan tendency to laconic speech is deeply ironic and I damned well know it.
248. Whom we elect reflects upon us as a people: Electing buffoons, con-artists, and dissemblers does us no credit. If you believe I'm speaking of a single occupant of a single office, you are part of the problem.
249. Someday, this pain really will be useful to you.
250. Pride is no less foundational a civic than a religious sin.
251. It became very hard at some point to write good science fiction, to the point at which far too many authors became obsessed with writing barely-clothed allegories that involve lasers. The art is in writing well-clothed allegories with lots of lasers.
252. Cookies and Cream, and Buttered Pecan, are the best flavors of ice cream; and Blue Bell really is the Best Ice Cream in the Country.
253. It is far more fun to DM than to play, but it can be fun to play to find out how you're doing it wrong as a DM.
254. I am not doing this again.
And that matches the current total. Fin.
And that matches the current total. Fin.
