Your diarist was a sluggard getting to church this morning and thus had to go to the Spanish language Mass in Bellingham. Very few Anglos were in attendance: the priest with his fluent but imperfect Spanish and yours truly (“no habla… what’s that other word?”) and that was about it. I have been christened an honorary Mexican by my actually Mexican cousins due to my general demeanor and my tolerance for extremely hot food, so you’d think I could do... Read more
Related to the ongoing John Allison-Ayn Rand Institute-Cato Institute controversy, my source close to ARI writes: If you want to scare your old coworkers at Cato, refer them to a big dust-up from two years ago involving John McCaskey. He is an entrepreneur-turned-academic who created the Anthem Foundation, a very successful ARI-associated program that basically buys university positions for Objectivist scholars. As an academic, he raised some very persuasive factual objections to a new theory of induction that Leonard Peikoff... Read more
To play you out for the week, here is Bob Dylan’s very funny and very true new music video for the song “Duquesne Whistle” (pronounced “dew cane” whistle). Because of a few of the lyrics (“I can hear a sweet voice gently calling / Must be the mother of our Lord”), I assume it’s meant to point us to Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, a Catholic school. But it’s Bob Dylan, so I could be wrong about that. Read more
Here are the actual subject lines of two e-mails I received from Barack Obama tonight: Before I take the stage And then after: So… Read more
While most of my friends in DC were busy watching President Obama’s speech, I thought up a whole new art form. The artist would use a gun to make a bunch of bullet holes on a canvas or template in a pattern to create an image. I call it bulletpointillism. Read more
Here is the “before” picture for my second Scotch and Science Night, held earlier this week. S&S Night was started because Evan Samsill, manager of the Lynden liquor store, is an evil genius. Evan sold me a whiskey aging kit made by White Dog Whiskey that included a barrel and two fifths of un-aged White Dog. The problem is, after you’ve aged your first batch, you’ve got to replace it with something. In other words, it’s a perpetual sales machine.... Read more
Real Clear Politics has this handy choose-your own electoral college map where you can game out the various scenarios. Just plugged in what I consider to be the most likely state-by-state outcomes. Here are the results: Obama-Biden: 264 votes Romney-Ryan: 274 votes In putting this scenario together I used two all-important assumptions to try to keep it real: 1) don’t assume anything absurd; and 2) don’t assume that Romney runs the table. RCP has designated 10 states as toss-ups. I... Read more
Yesterday, your diarist wrapped up the first draft of a 7,500-word report. This involved, among other things, getting knee deep in Mitt Romney’s political and policy shifts. Along the way, it occurred to me that Romney is the answer to the question, “What if Nixon didn’t drink?” Read more
In the 1990s, your diarist was a very serious Clinton hater. Almost everything about the man was like nails on a chalkboard. Yet with a few really awful, unforgivable exceptions (Waco, for one) he didn’t do much harm. That wasn’t for lack of trying but he managed to inject so much partisan venom into DC that not a lot of permanent damage could be done. And so, about every six months, I start to think better of the man. I... Read more
Here is Olu Dara doing a very long live multilingual version of “Your Lips (Are Juicy).” It’s not in any wise bad but he did a much shorter, better English version that I cannot find online. Anybody have a line on that? Read more
Jeremy Lott's Diary
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