There are certain questions that guys can answer honestly at only great peril. The most famous example of this is when your girlfriend or wife asks, “Honey, does this dress make me look fat?” That is not a question, it is a trap and you had better lie and lie convincingly if you prefer your ankle intact. A former colleague told me he’d found a way to spring the trap. He called it the “like a whale” exception. He explained,... Read more
Two letters from the Obama campaign have made their way into my e-mail inbox today. The first, from President Obama, has the subject line “In the clutch.” The second, from Joe Biden: “Midnight, your time.” Uh guys, you do realize that fund raising letters aren’t supposed to creep people out, right? Read more
Analysts are throwing around all kinds of reasons for Facebook’s ongoing stock troubles. Here is what I think and hope will turn out to be a major reason for founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s heartburn: Timeline. Most Facebook readers who have experienced it just do not like this way of organizing our profiles and our data. It’s ugly and it isn’t nearly as functional as the template it replaced. Zuckerberg has in the past ruthlessly ignored Facebook users’ input about... Read more
Many years ago when I worked at the Cato Institute (more on that later) I managed to so offend friend and foreign policy guy Justin Logan that he backed slowly out of the lunchroom. You may wonder, what bigmouthed thing had I said? That America was right to invade Iraq? That torture is A-OK? That I was thinking of getting a Woodrow Wilson tat? None of the above. We had been discussing a poll finding that something like a majority... Read more
One of the hazards of being a daily editor/aggregator is, you come unstuck in time. Not the hands of the clock, mind you. I have a great sense of what they have to say to me. I can convert quickly from Lynden time to Chicago time to DC time without effort and to London and other time zones with only a little effort. But I have a hell of a time knowing what day it is, because I’m always shifting... Read more
Friday is National Donut Day. I saw this advertised at the local supermarket Food Pavilion and assumed it was just a tasty ruse to get more customers through the door by bribing them with free donuts and coffee. But it turns out, no, National Donut day is a real thing. It even has a website, with a countdown clock to lend it scientific credibility. The site tells us National Donut Day was “created by the Salvation Army in 1938 to... Read more
The first response to this Real Clear Policy column by Jim Antle was a mix of about equal parts smug, wrong, and stupid. It reminded me again a) why I tend not to write about gay marriage, and b) why I established this blog’s restrictive comments policy. The commenter attempts to summarize Antle’s arguments against gay marriage back to him thus, “‘It’s gross, mostly because they can’t have kids, and childless/infertile couples are too insignificant to matter and should get... Read more
Then put this guy on the ballot. Read more
The logo for Jeremy Lott’s Diary is modeled on the logo for a stand-alone blog that I once owned and sort of operated. I say “sort of” because, at my request, a friend named Sean Higgins took it over. He did all of the posting there for years. This created problems for Sean. People were constantly asking him, “Wait, why are you blogging on JeremyLott.net? Is that a pen name or something?” We eventually had to include a picture of... Read more
Today: I woke absurdly early this morning in Lynden, Washington and decided to go for a walk and get breakfast at Dutch Treat. There was a slight chill in the air at 6:20, it had rained recently and the sun was still fighting with the cloud cover. In all likelihood, it would rain again. Did I reconsider or go grab a jacket or an umbrella? No. It did rain on and off on the way to the restaurant, but I... Read more
Jeremy Lott's Diary
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