The Right Coast

The rule of the single ladies Tom Smith

Discussed with links here.  Below is the video referred to.

You may need to cleanse your palate. This may do the trick.

Go to the gym, eat a banana, think deep thoughts Tom Smith

Exercise and carbs are good for your noggin.

"The Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans" Tom Smith

Whales are people too.  I think it's entirely possible.  My older labrador is clearly smart enough to be considered some sort of person, albeit a fairly sneaky and spoiled one.  My other lab is dumb even for a dog.  His stupidity just makes him more lovable, however.  His state of constant bafflement and indignation is highly entertaining.

Double standards Tom Smith

This is interesting, not as more conservative whining, which I think is justified, but futile, but because it makes the observation of how complex signaling is in a political environment.  I think it gets it exactly right, that while both Santorum and Obama say that marriage is between a man and a woman only, everybody knows that only Santorum actually means it, and Obama is just saying so. Quite curious.

Also curious is the suggestion, which I find plausible and suspect is just flat out true, that the promotion of artifical birth control in all of its multifarious glory has actually had the consequence of increasing the prevalence of the "women's health issues" one should think they were intended to mitigate, namely catastrophically disordered family situations.  Thus recently our republic passed the evidently significant threshhold of a majority of children born in the country being born outside of what we quaintly call wedlock.  And yet, birth control has never been more widely available financially, morally, and in many restrooms at gas stations and night clubs (NTTAWWT).  It's as if the (one hopes) unintended consequences of birth control are far more powerful than the intended one of preventing unintended procreation -- obviously I'm assuming here that contraception plays some sort of important causal role in the sociological, uh, evolution that has led us to our current state of advanced liberation.  Well, I guess as long as it works out well for the lower middle upper class (B.A. Swarthmore, MPH, Harvard, $245K annual income), it's all good.  

We seem to have discovered a moral hazard that is really, really hazardous and arguably not very moral either.  It would be funny if it weren't so sad that the descendants of the people who brought us prohibition should now have done so much to create a society where the men sit around and play video games and the women work and have babies the fathers of whom are long gone (see above) in ever increasing numbers.  And the solution to this is somehow that we all should subsidize the already dirt cheap Pill (presumably because cigarettes and lottery tickets are so expensive).  And all this somehow follows from hygiene.  Very strange.  It's all as clean and sterile as a condom still in its foil wrapper and as pastel as diaphram case and yet it ends up with a 4 month old whose daiper hasn't been changed in two days.  Go figure.  But here I am being naive.  I am forgetting that the solution to failed policy is always more of the same.

malcolm x revisited Timothy Gordon

Interesting new take on "x": http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1917/article_detail.asp

Will Israel attack Iran? Tom Smith

Financial Times op-ed piece.

I agree that if Israel were in fact going to attack Iran, it would not be talking about it so much.  Such attacks are meant to be a surprise.  Thus if they were to attack, it would be most unexpected.

A moon base would be a better idea Tom Smith

Update on the multi billion dollar high speed train from Fresno to Bakersfield.

California red light cameras may be in trouble Tom Smith

A bad precedent for the ticket mills.

I was nabbed by one of these contraptions.  In addition to the three hundred dollar plus fine, the photo was deeply unflattering.

Brown ahead in Mass Senate poll Tom Smith

Very early, but still.

Cynicism Tom Smith

This is pretty good.  

It is weird how in politics (at least current politics) it is almost impossible to be cynical enough to understand what is really going on.  It not just lies and hypocrisy, but lies within lies within lies, and hypocrisies that fold over themselves as many times as the steel in a Japanese sword. I suppose this makes sense in that complex iterative games are being played out, and as in war (just politics by other means) deception plays a central part.  This is not at all to say all the cynicism is on the Democratic side; I just happen to be more attuned to it, I'm sure.  

In any event, it is beginning to look to me like the whole contraception imbroglio is a rope-a-dope strategy cooked up by somebody in the White House, I don't credit our young President as being clever enough to have thought of it on his own, to bait social conservatives into a fight that will score unmarried women votes for the Obama.  The fact that a contraception mandate really is constitutionally offensive just makes it that much more irresistable as bait. And it's perfect to drive a wedge between the bishops and Catholic women, especially those in swing states, who sure as heck don't want to get unintentionally pregnant when unemployment is pushing ten percent.  You can bet across Michigan and Ohio a lot of little Pill dispensers are being even more carefully used than usual. Not that there is any real social problem about the availability of birth control.  Is anything more univerally available, and cheap?  You can get the pill for less than most kids spend on Red Bull.  A complete non-issue and yet perfectly capable of forcing the bishops and other social conservatives into taking an unpopular stand.  And I'm sure this has been carefully polled internally.  Sick, but brilliant.  It's possible it could backfire, but I don't think it will.  It probably also activates the social conservative base, which is probably exactly what the WH wants for the GOP primaries.  They'd prefer to run against Santorum, probably.