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Showing posts from February 2, 2020

Making the Dems competitive

I am thinking about what will make the Dems more competitive with orange turd, and in the short term, it is obvious to me: better glasses. Both Warren and Sanders are still stylin the 70s,, 80s look. Come on! I think the presidency is worth splurging a little Both of them would look much chic-er Warren might want to look at the St. Laurent cat's eye style, here:  Warren would totally rock with this look. I remember  the green party candidate who ran for the presidency in france, years ago: Eva Joly. Even those who didn't vote for her had to give her the contest on the glasses: outrageous green and red frames that said: i'm on the next level. Well, that is maybe not the message that Warren wants to send. But the St. Laurent's scream, to me: I'm confident not only that I'm going to turn that Trump into a dump, but that I might literally turn him into a toad by doing a bewitched blink. Sanders, on the other hand, needs I think something heavier. In my opini

On ACRONYM and the aristocracy of the mediocre

"And we have a situation where as a party if we are the good guys we have to be the good guys — not engaging in this,” Ganapathy told me. “There’s a reason why so many Americans think politics is an elitist plot to make a handful of people wealthier, and it’s kind of true." - see the outline article on ACRONYM and SHADOW - and weep Ideology is excreted from practice. The practice in the American political establishment, since at least the seventies, is to professionalize it - to make it a source of juicy contracts and positions, with the credentialing done by people who have made those juicy contracts - and not necessarily won an election. One fights for candidates. Is Sanders better than Warren? Is Biden acceptable? But in the political world, these are just actors in the larger movie, which is not about making the world or the country a better place, but about notches in the CV, leading to tv appearances and quotes in the newspapers, which leads to ever more money. It

On Free Lunches

I want to cull this from  page 2 of Greg Mankiw’s popular Essentials of Economics – used by hundreds of Econ 101 classes, tucked under the arms of thousands of students, who paid a hefty price for it: You may have heard the old saying, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Grammar aside, there is much truth to this adage. To get something we like, we usually have to give up something else that we also like. I like to think of them, those thousands of scions of upper class households, products all of them of years of free lunches, nodding to this crackerbarrel truism. One of the great principles of education is to blind yourself to the self-evident. It is part of one’s self-fashioning, and it is especially useful as these scions go on to get positions in the upper ranks of management, investment, etc., and can look about them and say: I earned this. By their truisms you shall catch them – this is the rhetorical ratcatcher’s faith. My faith, really. The crack in the