Charlie Pierce has lost all patience with David Brooks’ shtick. That’s an amusing rant, if you like that sort of thing (I do, and Pierce is really good at it), but I’m just going to use it as an excuse to repost part of my own David Brooks rant, explaining why his book Bobos in Paradise — which was often quite fun — led me to read everything he writes with great suspicion. Bobos, published in 2000, begins with Brooks... Read more
Doug Curlee of The Santee (Calif.) Patch brings us the story of what every manufactured-home owner fears: a sudden increase in the rent they pay on the land beneath their homes. Happily, for now, the City of Santee has a Manufactured Home Fair Practices Commission, and that commission voted to enforce fair practices. But as Curlee notes, this victory for residents is no guarantee of their future security: “Santee Mobile Home Owners Win the Rent-Control Battle — But Not the... Read more
Tribulation Force, pp. 428-430 Buck and Chloe had settled in Buck’s beautiful Fifth Avenue penthouse, but any joy normal newlyweds might have received from a place like that was lost on them. Let me first express my relief and gratitude that we readers are spared any account of the joy of normal newlyweds. Just a few pages ago, Buck Williams and Chloe Steele were both chaste virgins and now, presumably, they are not, but the less said about that the... Read more
Herman Cain: Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks — if you don’t have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself! … It is a person’s fault if they fail. Dottie Rambo: He looked beyond my faults and saw my need. It seems impossible — or at best audaciously hypocritical — to proclaim both that first statement and the second one. But I’ll give him this: The guy can sing. Read more
I’m reading W. Scott Poole’s Satan in America: The Devil We Know and have just finished his discussion of Billy Sunday, the celebrity evangelist of the early 20th century. Poole sends us to George M. Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture, in which he shares a warning attributed to Sunday in 1925: Our country is filled with a Socialistic, I.W.W., Communistic, radical, lawless, anti-American, anti-church, anti-God, anti-marriage gang, and they are laying the eggs of rebellions and unrest in labor and... Read more
Micah 3 And I said: Listen, you heads of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel! Should you not know justice?— you who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin off my people, and the flesh off their bones; who eat the flesh of my people, flay their skin off them, break their bones in pieces, and chop them up like meat in a kettle, like flesh in a cauldron. Then they will cry to... Read more
John Quiggin: “Keeping the state out of your bedroom” If you really want personal freedom, you can achieve it only by constraining property rights. Dahlia Lithwick: “Occupy the No-Spin Zone” I spent time this weekend at Occupy Wall Street and my husband spent much of last week adding his voice to the protesters there. I saw an incredible array of people that defy any simple demographic characterization and a broad range of signs that made — imagine! — more than... Read more
“Chutzpah” is classically exemplified by the man who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy on account of being an orphan. A step beyond such chutzpah is laughable absurdity. A step beyond that is self-contradiction and hypocrisy so astonishing it becomes obscene. And a step beyond that is this Republican Party fundraiser, casting the Apostle of Austerity himself, Ayn-Rand disciple Rep. Paul Ryan, as the defender of “the safety net for the poor.” That’s from Matt Yglesias, who... Read more
Jason at blip reads Peter Rollins’ Insurrection, and mostly likes it. His praise is qualified by this criticism, which I find thoughtful and thought-provoking: As much as I like Rollins’ insistence on loving the other as the way in which we love God, this is also where I disagree as well. For in his insistence on finding God in the other comes a rejection of “thin spaces” (124) where God is also experienced. Yes we see, hear, and love God... Read more
So after going through a couple of bottles of Anbesol and walking around for a week looking like Caesar Rodney, I finally gave in and made an appointment with a dentist. I’d been putting that off partly due to the financial aspect and mainly due to six very unpleasant years of orthodonture and oral surgery when I was a teenager. (Among other things, I had to have my fourth molars removed. Yes, I had fourth molars. It was bad.) But... Read more
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