A LATE ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE FACT THAT THE LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER: Duke lost.

TSUNAMI RELIEF: If you're looking for a place to donate here's one in Japan: Second Harvest. They're set up to take credit cards with a minimum 1000 JPY donation.

COMMENTS FOUND ON OTHER PEOPLE'S BLOGS, THE CONTINUING SERIES: Davis X. Machina at Balloon Juice:

Their preferred future is the ‘Winner-take-all” model.
One guy, in a studio, ‘teaching’ all the geometry classes in the country on a network, and 6500 ‘teachers’, provided by Aramark, making $11.50 an hour taking attendance, and doing discipline, and answering the few questions they can actually answer.
Aramark makes a fortune. The one winner makes a fortune. The kids get screwed, and the ‘teachers’ are grateful for the work.

The "they" in "their" being the usual suspects who hate those no-good teachers unions, suckling at the public teat and all that. And the comment also reminds me that in many ways "efficiency" has made people's lives worse...

ADDENDUM TO PREVIOUS APHORISM: Note that there are countries where writing political fan fiction has, umm, sub-optimal consequences.

APHORISMS THAT SUDDENLY OCCUR TO ME AND ALSO CAN ONLY BE APPROPRIATELY EXPRESSED IN THIS VENUE: Blogging is political fan fiction.

...am I the first to this one, O Google? YES! (Not googling it without quotes. Can only handle so much disappointment.)

SO YOU SEE, OBAMA JUST NEEDS TO STOP SCARING THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY: "From time to time I get to meet people in what you would call the Professional Class. Lately I’ve noticed there’s a common critique of President Obama. Are you ready for it?  It goes something like “He’s alienating business. No wonder employment is suffering if he’s done a terrible job with including the business community.” I wish I could tell you I say something clever in response, or drop a neat factoid or statistics, but normally I am just concentrating on keeping my head from exploding like in that movie Scanners." --Rortybomb. Good thing Barry's listening now, and he replaced Volcker with the CEO of GE. The Professional Class had no one looking out for them!

Also: credit contraction to small businesses the work of the capital-b Banksters, not local, traditional, non-financial system destroying banking.

DEPT. OF BOOKMARKING RECIPES FOR FUTURE USE: Oh I would love a plate of suicidally spicy curry tofu right about now.

DEPT. OF LESS THAN HELPFUL GOOGLE SEARCHES: I thought someone would have tackled in an explicit way the important "hipster vs slacker" question, but no.

DEPT. OF COMMENTS FOUND ON OTHER BLOGS: I'm not the only one who does that! And so this comment was given wider circulation:

The cherry-picked anecdotes of blue-collar, self made executives used to suggest that entry into the ranks of the ultra-rich is somehow “meritocratic”, despite extensive evidence showing that the relationship between heriditary wealth, education, and socioeconomic status is strengthening; the suggestion that these elites somehow “produce wealth”, despite the clear evidence than in fact most of them do little but extract it; the absolutely laughable assertion that attending elite wank-fests like TED talks or Davos conferences somehow constitutes engagement with serious ideas; the absurdity of claiming that the handful of billionaires with significant philanthropic contributions to their pet causes shows us that the ultra-rich are legitimately attempting to better the condition of their inferiors- I’m amazed this trash got past any editor, anywhere.

This in response to that "Rise of the New Global Elite" article that's been passed around. In answer to that last line--it's The Atlantic, scaring the top half of the middle class--in this case with anecdotes about how it isn't working hard enough--is how it stays in business.

HEY--HAPPY NEW YEAR: Will start updating around here hopefully in the near future. Or at least do a NaNoWriMo postmortem (SPOILERZ: I won!)

I'M SURE THIS REFLECTS POORLY ON ME BUT: When I read about the "19 year old Oregon State student arrested for attempted terrorist bombing in Portland" my very first thought it "well I wonder how badly this poor schmuck was entrapped." Which I don't stop thinking when I learn he was carrying a fake bomb the FBI had provided him.

NANOWRIMO UPDATE AFTER TWO FULL WEEKS: Well over 30,000 words, so I am on pace for a victory. Actually winning my novel, though, may take more than 50,000 words, and another draft to get it to the point where I'd actually show it to somebody. A task that may require more strength than I can summon, though I haven't had a problem yet pumping out 2,000 words on a daily basis. When I have to worry more about the quality of those 2,000 words though, I might encounter problems.

SO IT'S NOVEMBER: And it's National Novel Writing Month. Gonna give it the ol' incredibly expensive private university try. Follow my progress here. Posting will hopefully be light for awhile.

QUICK RALLY TO BE IRONIC RECAP: Like most gatherings of crowds of people, you definitely will have a better time following everything on television and the Internet. I don't think they were expected a couple hundred thousand people so we either needed more volume on the speakers or more speakers in general because it was really hard to follow near the back. Quite possibly they could have used some more jumbotrons near the back too, I got caught in this terrible crush between people watching the few jumbotrons they had and people trying to cross the street and it felt like the opening stage of good old fashioned panicky trampling. Luckily sanity triumphed over fear and that did not happen. Missed most of the funny signs. Saw a lady dressed like a pimp whose sign said "It's hard out here for a pimp" on one side and "Pimp my Government" on the other. Also saw GOD HATES TEA. Restaurants blocks away were completely full, I don't think they anticipated the business they got either. People were defiantly not angry, so I guess the Rally worked!

CONCERNED ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT BUT HATE AL GORE?: Become a climate hawk!

And a third thing:  I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve been at some of the cutting edge of ignoring, hand-waving and justifying away tail risk in a manner profitable to the top 0.1% of Americans and that maximized the social costs to everyone else.   So I’m also conscious of that move by elites as well.

So you see the dilemma.   Severe warming, impossible to reverse once it has happened, with serious tail risks.   But my natural reaction is to hate hippies.  What can I do?  And how can I think of myself?

And then Rortybomb linked to an article introducing climate hawks. And notes that if you have climate hawks, then you have climate doves, who are the Pollyanna-ish faith-in-human-progress types who think if we just keep investing in technology and stuff, things will work out on their own! But now that we have climate hawks they'll be taken seriously by the media because hawks are always serious people who get to go on tv and have the debate revolve around them. Yes, I'm sure this will totally work.

OBAMA AND THE BLOGGERS: Atrios is big time.

STEWART MANDEL ON BIG EAST FOOTBALL: Troof:

I've long said the Big East's highs and lows tend to be exacerbated by the league's small size. When West Virginia, Louisville and Rutgers all rose into the top 10 in 2006 and stars like Ray Rice, Pat White, Steve Slaton and Brian Brohm were pushing for the Heisman, we in the media were rightfully trumpeting the conference's rise from the ashes; but if the 12-team SEC ever had three good teams and a bunch of also-rans, we'd be ripping it. Four years later, the entire league is struggling. No Big East team is currently ranked, and that might be the case the rest of the season. Obviously, that would never happen in the Big Ten.

(Mentions how easily Big East coaches are poached.)

It's hard to maintain success with such instability, which means the Big East will inevitably have to make some changes. Some of the schools may need to start investing more heavily in their programs (no small feat in the current economy) to make it enticing for good coaches to stay. But most likely, the league will need to expand. We know the Big East has been discussing just that, with TCU in particular. Even a 10-team league provides greater assurance of having at least a couple of bell cows in any given year to help avoid debacles like this season.

Highs and lows just look worse or better when you're an 8-team league. This is still my go-to board for pointless Internet Big East expansion talk.

WE CAN REBUILD YOU--SO WHY NOT ENLIST?: Darpa wants better, more responsive prosthetics. Danger Room's had a lot of cutting edge technology updates lately, so if you want to know what our absolutely uncuttable military budget is going towards, check them out. (Not that better prosthetics should be cut, obviously. But maybe we need not squander cash on Johnny 5's lil brudda. Well, actually that's kind of cool too. Since military spending is untouchable it's the easiest way for the government to fund science. Just make up some random military application and you got your grant! And then the military application fails but we still have the science done and it leaks into "private" (heh, indeed) industry and maybe we all get to retire with robot butlers.)

GOOD THING WE'RE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN ELENA KAGAN WILL NOT FAVOR CORPORATE INTERESTS: The Roberts court hearts the Chamber of Commerce.

THE LIMITS OF "A POX ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES" IN ONE PARAGRAPH: DougJ. If I had to pick one reason why I've gradually stopped paying attention to Reason as a whole (not including individual writers that I like), it would be their fidelity to the idea that both sides are just as bad. No no, I lived through the double-Os, I remember the double-Os, and there is definitely a more destructive party, which is halfheartedly opposed by an incompetent party.