Back in Business
Unfinished Tolkien work to be published in ‘07
My name is Kevin, and I’m a Lord of the Rings geek.
Audience: Hi, Kevin.
Yeah, yeah, make fun all you want; at least *my* literary obsessions are post-pubescent (I’m looking at you, HP fans).
Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq
I was initially going to title this post “Incompetence 101″, but having re-read the article I’m convinced that the antics described here are more like the graduate seminar of cluelessness and malfeasance.
Why have career professionals when you can have political hacks?
Why ask about relevant experience (finance, public health, law enforcement) when you can ask about Roe v. Wade? (After all, Iraq would surely crumble if the rate of abortion exceeded infant mortality or fatalities from suicide bombings…)
To wit:
To recruit the people he wanted, O’Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.
Smith said O’Beirne once pointed to a young man’s résumé and pronounced him “an ideal candidate.” His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000.
Nigerian candidates in graft con
Oh, Nigeria.
A number of Nigerian politicians have been conned out of thousands of dollars by people selling papers purporting to certify them as “corruption-free”.
The following is best read with a Jeff Foxworthy inflection: your country might be a cesspool of sketchiness if…
…conmen are selling “corruption-free” certificates (and politicians are buying them!)
Left veteran just wants to retire
That’s awesome… the politburo won’t let this guy retire!
(I do want to point out how hard the BBC fights for a joke - they had to use “nyet”, despite the fact that we’re talking about India…)
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Perhaps someone can solve the following mystery.
Last weekend at Costco, I saw a box of 100 first-class $0.39 stamps for $38.75. For those of you keeping track, that’s a savings of (a whole!) quarter.
For almost any other product, I wouldn’t think twice about a discount for bulk purchases - particularly a discount that small. Stamps, however - well, stamps are special. For some reason (and unfortunately I can’t seem to find any official documentation to back this up), I thought stamps were never, ever sold for under face value. Indeed, you can buy a coil of TEN THOUSAND (10,000) first-class stamps - a whopping $3,900.00 worth of postage and it’ll still cost you exactly $0.39 per stamp.
I suppose that the Costco stamps could be a loss leader, but this situation doesn’t conform to the usual criteria: the stamps are easily accessible (they were near the check-out), they last pretty much forever, they’re undifferentiated, and they don’t really lead to sales of anything else.
So, I’m curious if anyone has a clue - does Costco get some sort of super-special deal on stamps? Are they selling them as a loss leader in some sort of bizarre bet that a .65% (that’s a little over half a percent, not 65 percent) discount on stamps will get people to shell out the $50 membership fee? Or is there another reason that I’m just not seeing?
Harvard to Drop Early Admissions
As many admissions officials quoted in the article point out, yes, Harvard has a special advantage in that they can drop early admissions without really sacrificing the quality of their admitted class. So what? Dropping Early Decision/Action is still a Good Thing for them to do, for all the usual reasons: ED/EA adds unnecessary pressure to an already stressful time, exacerbates class differences, and introduces yet more strategy into a process that (ideally) ought to be far less strategic.
So, yeah, not everyone can afford to do what Harvard’s doing, but that doesn’t make them any less deserving of approbation for taking this stand - especially considering that the few other elite schools who could also afford to take a similar stand, chose not to.
As Homework Grows, So Do Arguments Against It
Let’s review… homework, particularly at the lower grades, is rarely useful. Often, it’s actively harmful. Many, if not most, teachers recognize this. So, why does the total amount of homework keep growing?
But teacher knowledge is often trumped by school system policies, created by school boards whose members are often not educators, teachers have said.
Right-o.
Worried CIA Officers Buy Legal Insurance
Well, that inspires me with confidence… CIA officers buying legal expense and liability insurance in case they get sued for torture and whatnot.
To be fair, from reading the article I don’t understand why everyone at the CIA counterterrorism unit wouldn’t buy this insurance, since apparently their premiums are 100% reimbursable (which is great in its own right - at least the Justice Department is marginally honest about the risks CIA operatives incur by performing activites “authorizing” by the DOJ).
Look, I’m all for insuring against all possible ills… I’m just saying that this signals just a wee bit less certainty by the government about the actual legality of the things they’ve asked the CIA to do than the “oh no, our lawyers say it’s fine” rhetoric coming out of the WH/DOJ would suggest.
[via Wonkette]
Two interesting articles on religion in today’s WashPost:
* Religious Affliation Underestimated in U.S., Study Shows
* Evangelical Author Puts Progressive Spin On Traditional Faith
I don’t know what’s weirder - the people who put down “no religion” and yet have a “place of worship”, or the fact that demographers failed to notice this earlier.
Of course, let’s talk about the obvious:
“What is most associated with ‘no religion’ from a political point of view is independence,” said Barry Kosmin, principal investigator of a telephone survey that queried tens of thousands of Americans. His American Religious Identification Survey found that the number of “no religion” Americans jumped from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001. “If you don’t belong religiously, you don’t belong politically.”
Gee, I wonder why people who don’t subscribe to any religion tend to think of themselves as independent… Oh, right - maybe it’s that shaking off one of the most deeply established social norms frees you to think critically about other assumptions and “default” group memberships? Consider a common alternate term for people who question religion: “freethinkers”.
More on the “less-free-thinkers”, however:
The researchers separated God’s attributes into four categories: angry, judgmental, benevolent or distant. Researchers found that the largest category of people –31 percent — was made up of people who believe God both wrathful and highly involved in human affairs.
Seriously, folks? Not that this is news, but it’s telling nonetheless. I don’t know; I’m not a religious person, so I suppose I can’t speak with any sort of personal authority, but the idea of basing your faith, your basic worldview, on an onmipotent, angry, vengeful God seems so thoroughly depressing that I don’t really get how people who subscribe to that view make it through their daily lives.
At least the progressive evangelicals profiled in the second article seem more positive and less fire-and-brimstone than the 31 percent referenced above. I wonder if that helps going against the current…
Yes, finally, after almost 3 months of inactivity, GrinBlog is back.
I apologize profusely for the absence, and for the delay in getting things back up and running. I may detail the reasons in a later post, but basically it comes down to the fact that I was busy as fuck.
That said, I’ve got a few things in the hopper, so expect some quality blogging over the next few weeks!