Pennsylvania Anarchoblogs

if i were a liberal, i wouldn't necessarily be rooting for santorum, and i wouldn't cross over to vote for him in michigan. true, he looks like an easier opponent. but say he gets the nomination. there's always some chance that something goes wrong: a terribly mishandled international incident; a scandal; an economic crisis. then you end up living your liberal life in a santorum admin. now i wouldn't expect a santorum admin to be as much of a crazed disaster as it seems it could be; no one's going to be banning contraception. on the other hand, i think that, except rhetorically, you wouldn't practically be able to distinguish an obama from a romney admin at all, except perhaps in terms of military spending.

sacha baron cohen rocks. great moments in this particular dimension:

Speaking with E!’s Ryan Seacrest, Baron Cohen said he was wearing John Galliano “but the socks are from K-Mart.”

Baron Cohen, in character [as Adm. General Aladeen, dictator of the Republic of Wadiya] appeared on the “Today” show to threaten “unimaginable consequences” if his tickets weren’t given back.

mark bittman: The government regulates tobacco and alcohol. Why not diet? and while we're at it, there are a lot of harmful books out there. why not? at any rate, the idea of prohibiting people from buying x, y, and z with food stamps (of course that's already in place in some respects) shows very precisely that dependency and liberty are inversely related, that a dependent population is an abject population, that a welfare state is an authoritarian state. a government that provides your food owns your body.

and speaking of my hawkish streak: i'm surprised by the naivete of the left on iran. don't be blinded by the iraq debacle; it's not the same thing. i thought the evidence the bush admin produced on wmd in iraq was pitiful, and i said so over and over again. on the other hand, don't sit there and tell me that iran isn't working on nuclear weapons. it's obvious. they're saying that even as they're denying it. and have you actually listened to ahmadinejad? it's both wacky and chilling. what to do about it is a different question, but pretending it isn't happening and isn't a big old problem is something else. i know y'all dearly love a theocracy as long as santorum isn't running it, but please.

sorry for no blogging. life has been overfull lately: moving, among other things, while, um, totaling my car etc. however, my life is less overfull than that of the citizens of homs, and i'd take the approach not of 'arming the rebels,' but of bombing the regime's emplacements outside the city, exploding their incoming tanks, etc. yes it's true then you're in a libya situation and there's no real reason you shouldn't be trying to locate the regime's leaders with the purpose of resolving them into their constituent particles.

here's a relatively typical case in which the exquisitely delicate ethnic sensitivities of the press preclude them from actually reporting the story: espn fired a staffer for an 'offensive' headline: we report the story at length, but can't actually say what the headline said. that's frigging ridiculous. we'd do our basic jobs, only we're pussies. the headline itself was only up for a half hour, and for example reading this account would make it impossible to reach an informed opinion on whether the firing was reasonable. you don't want to offend your readers, who are not at all offended for example when you report the actual facts of a murder in excruciating detail. well, lord knows this - whatever it was - was worse than murder.

New York Isn't Like Sodom and Gomorrah, Archbishop Says

really? not at all?

this mormon baptism thing is deeply weird. now let's stipulate that being baptized in absentia in the church of jesus christ of latter day saints has no effect on dead people. it can neither redeem nor damn the soul of the deceased, nor indeed create a soul where there was none before. (do jews believe in the soul? or do they believe it in anything like the way mitt presumably does?) at any rate, i say: knock yourselves out. baptize the piss out of me, somewhere deep in utah. just now, in fact, i performed an elaborate ceremony, full of solemn, highly efficacious mumbo-jumbo, to proclaim brigham young and joseph smith posthumously to be atheists, to declare that brigham young and joseph smith were material objects, members of a species of mammals who existed only in the actual world. welcome back to reality, y'all!

on the other hand, i would try again. and even though the j.geils band was my fave in the 70s (partly because they featured the harp of magic dick), i offer the following reply to crusader. dude, don't turn against valentine's!

Ok. Crusader AXE here. I guess the incredible, inscrutable, incomparable one either wanted me to occasionally put something here for the erudite masses, or he just forgot he gave me permission many years ago. Regardless, I'm glad he did. He gets a better class of reader here than we do at the Defeatists, most of whom appear to be robots. 

So, in the proper spirit of the thing.  Ok. Yesterday was our 36th anniversary. We are very fond of each other and have a reasonably complex financial life that would make disengaging difficult. We don't want to cause the other pain or even inconvenience. I rate this as a successful marriage. We don't hate each other, wish the other grevious harm, and try not to act contrary to our mutual best interests. 

That said, we got married on Friday the 13th. My thought, being a strategic thinker, was that this way I would not forget both Valentine's day or the Anniversary and hopefully, one would key my brain as to the other. Generally has worked...I see the Valentine's bullshit in the stores, and it triggers the response that I need to do something to commemorate the day so as not to violate the "first, do no harm or cause unnecessary pain" part of my ethic. It does not make me happy. This makes me happy... 

I hate Valentine's Day. It is part of the conspiracy of the consumer society that begins in pre-school to make us all ready for a life of disappointment and conspicuous consumption.