I happen to have a Jeopardy! header for the blog right now, because of Larissa Kelly’s big return for the Tournament of Champions, and by happenstance today’s Doonesbury refers to Jeopardy!
Category: Politics, Religion & Money
Does Dick Cheney have Mad Cow Disease?
Dick Cheney once again is saying that he thinks Obama is making the country less safe from terrorists.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090315/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cheney
In reference to the way the Bush administration interrogated detainees, which greatly increased anti-American sentiment not only in the Muslim world but in Europe, Cheney says,
“I think that’s a great success story. It was done legally. It was done in accordance with our constitutional practices and principles,” he said.
Yeah, and wiretaps without warrants were a swell idea too. Does this guy have any credibility at all? I think Cheney isn’t all there. Maybe his decades of heart trouble, and all of those times I assume he’s been on a heart-lung machine during surgery, have left his brain oxygen deprived.
Feeling Rand-y
I’ve had my fun knocking the silly pseudo-philosophy of romance novelist Ayn Rand, and last night Stephen Colbert spent six minutes taking on the Rand Illusion.
Legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man and creator of Dr. Strange, has been a follower of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism for over forty years. This drawing is from a story he drew last year. The woman bears an unmistakable resemblance to Ayn Rand, which is ironic because the character is a villain.
Picture This
Newspapers and magazines are laying off staff, and those that remain are writing articles on how to survive a layoff. Print media is in big trouble, and was long before the recession. As I highlighted over two years ago, the writing was on the virtual wall as far back as 1972.
One of the things that keeps me reading the printed page are the pictures that don’t make it to the online version of articles. One example is this photo by Jonatham Kantor for a recent Newsweek article, using a Peanuts Band-Aid to illustrate the claim that vaccinations have led to an increase in autism in children.
It’s a clever idea, but do you see the medical mistake?
What was good for GM was bad for America
People who have known me for a long time know that for many years I’ve said General Motors is doomed. I based that conclusion on having rented many nearly-new GM cars at airports during my past years of business travel. They were uniformly awful. The Chevy Lumina was a particularly loathsome vehicle. The times I got a Toyota Corolla or Camry, the difference was striking. Year after year the American cars didn’t get any better, and even if they did, the improvements were lost on me in comparison to the Japanese cars I rented.
I think quite a few men my age have always owned American cars solely because their WWII veteran fathers would have had a fit if any son of theirs bought a “Jap car.” But we’re in our 50’s now, and if that prohibition still applies to any of us, it certainly doesn’t apply to our kids.
My father’s ’65 Falcon was rusted out by the time I started driving it in 1972. His ’69 Galaxy was junk by 1977. In those days, you were pushing your luck keeping a car more than six years. Odometers only went to 99999 miles before lapping back to 00000.
The first warning shot that U.S. auto makers had, telling them that the Japanese were making planned obsolescence obsolete, was 30 years ago. Chrysler was in crisis, and Lee Iacocca had to beg to get a loan guarantee from the federal government. Who was President then? Oh, right. Democrat Jimmy Carter.
Michael Moore is as despised by the Right as Rush Limbaugh is by the Left, but 20 years ago, in Roger & Me, Moore tried to raise awareness that something was rotten at GM. It seems he wasn’t wrong, and the day of GM’s demise appears to be at hand. Part of me would like to say good riddance, because it was so inevitable for so long, but the fallout from GM’s failure could tip the scales in turning a clearly defined economic Recession into a less identifiable Depression.
Man does not live by blog alone…
Daniel Lyons, the professional writer and editor who, for a time, was the blogging Fake Steve Jobs, has a column in Newsweek for everybody who ever thought they could make a living by blogging.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/183666
DogRat is a hobby. I’m not selling anything, there’s no advertising, and I have absolutely no expectation of the blog being anything more than an expense and time waster. For that matter, I don’t focus on any one thing, like the popular weblogs devoted to mining every minute bit of detail about a single subject. For me, DogRat is purely a vanity outlet.
Besides the single-subject blogs, I think the single-author blogs that work the best are the ones used to promote whatever it is the author really does for a living — cartoonists Jimmy Johnson and Scott Adams, and writers Mark Evanier and Brian Sibley, for example. Beyond those, the really big blogs, as Lyons says, “aren’t really blogs — they’re media companies that happen to feature, among other things, the work of some bloggers.”