matthearn.com

I post this without comment, so that you can admire it and draw your own conclusions. (Blatantly stolen from Matthew Yglesias.)

Over at Andrew’s blog, his fill-ins (particularly Patrick) have been talking a lot about atheism, and posting replies from readers with their own thoughts. This one hit particularly close to home:

Maybe there is a god. Maybe there are many gods. Maybe there’s no god at all … Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter, and I’ve just got to lead the best life I can, as I see it, and if that’s not good enough in the end — if there be an end instead of a simple fading away — then as far as I’m concerned, any god that would condemn me for doing my best to be the best person I can isn’t a god I’d want to believe in, in the first place.

I completely agree. I’m not sure what I believe at this point, but I do know this: if there is a God, and He thinks homosexuals should be treated as second-class citizens or says that I can’t eat bacon, then eff that guy.

Here’s a lengthy commentary on the state of the “drug war,” why it’s always been doomed to failure, and why the administration is legally prevented from even discussing stopping it. Interesting fact:

Since 1998, the ONDCP has spent $1.4 billion on youth anti-pot ads. It also spent $43 million to study their effectiveness. When the study found that kids who’ve seen the ads are more likely to smoke pot, the ONDCP buried the evidence, choosing to spend hundreds of millions more on the counterproductive ads.

Let’s just cover everything in rapid-fire list form, ’cause that’s how I be rollin’ fo sho. (I don’t understand many of the things I just typed.)

• I’m down to 249 as of this morning, despite drinking more than I should have over the weekend; I attribute the continued weight loss to constantly working on my house and not eating much. Saturday I was 750 calories under where I should be, which is roughly the equivalent of a cheeseburger. I compensated on Sunday by sharing half a Bobbie and drinking a lot of beer.


• How about that old Tom Watson yesterday? I wish he’d made that last putt on 18. Perhaps he should borrow my new putter; I am a horrible golfer, and yet the first time I used my new clubs I was dropping 8-12 footers like what. I was an unstoppable putting deity. I’m just saying, if Tom wants some pointers, he should totally call me.


• Progress on the purchase of a new house and sale of the old one continues apace; the home inspection on the “new” 150-year-old home revealed that, in the words of the inspector, the house is “totally rockin’.” We also discovered that the radiators, which we thought had been disabled in favor of a modern heat pump, are fully functional and heated by a boiler in the basement. My new house has the same heating system as Harlan Elementary School, and in no way is this a bad thing. Apparently the boiler is just about the best one money can buy, it’ll last for 40 years, and it was installed just three years ago. Acres and acres of win.

  
  On the current home front, we’re cleaning and scrubbing and patching holes and just generally making the place look less like the family home of 4 dirty people and more like Felix Ungar lives up ins.



• Why don’t people name their kids Felix anymore? If HW and I have a third kid I’m totally pushing for that.

I haven’t updated everyone on the status of my gut, so here’s the lowdown: still fat. Lost 19 pounds in a little over 5 weeks, though, so I guess I’m doing something right (not eating; occasionally running until I throw up).

I’d like to lose about 38 more. That’s gonna be tough; even in 2004, when I was about as skinny as I’ve been since high school, I bottomed out at around 225. Getting down to 215 would make me positively hott, methinks, but it’s gonna be really, really hard. Particularly since we have a long vacation scheduled in a month or two. I’m going to try and run or ride every day while I’m beachin’, but who knows. I highly doubt I’ll be paying much attention to diet.

Annoyingly, I ha’en’t had much time to exercise, because we’ve been so busy; my usual lunch hour spent running through the woods or lifting weights hasn’t happened in nearly two weeks. You might be wondering what’s kept us so busy, and to that I reply: we bought a house. It was all very quick, mostly because we’d been admiring the house from afar for literally years, it came back on the market, and we found out somebody else had put an offer in. We overbid those folks and got it. Home inspection is tomorrow, after which I should be able to post a few photos.

Now I just have to be able to, you know, pay for it. And sell our current dive, which is really what’s keeping us busy; we’re throwing stuff into storage and doing Xtreme Kleening 2009. There’s a little bit of touch-up painting to be done, plus the basement where Veronicat (aka The Cheat) has made her litterbox, i.e. the entire basement floor. That’s the biggie; we won’t even let our realtor come look at the house until we get the basement cleaned up. But keeping the basement clean requires keeping The Cheat from peeing and pooping on it, which unfortunately for her means she becomes an outside kitty. So tonight I’m getting her vaccinations up-to-date, we’ll be getting her groomed, finding her some kind of shelter, and then her ass is on the streets, son. (Well; the fenced in backyard. I’m not letting her roam free, for heaven’s sake.)

So that’s what be happ’nin’. More updates on the subject to come.

People sometimes ask me, “Hey, didn’t you use to be a Libertarian? What happened with that?” (Okay, nobody asks me that. Anybody who knows I once subscribed to Libertarian principles is probably unaware I’ve changed. So I should probably say: I no longer consider myself a Libertarian, but a Liberal, albeit with certain caveats, such as the fact that I think people should still be allowed to pack heat.)

This article taking Governor Palin to task on cap-and-trade doesn’t really have much to do with Libertarianism, except for one excerpt:

My decision to drive creates traffic that imposes a cost on society. A company’s decision to fish in the ocean imposes a cost on the world’s common stock of fisheries. A banker’s decision to take on a huge amount of risk creates danger for the economy as a whole. The problem is that none of these private actors adequately bears the cost of their decisions.

(Italics mine.)

The short version of why I no longer consider myself to be Libertarian is that “Every man for himself” doesn’t seem like particularly good public policy.

New auto-tuning of the news! I am excited. Really! Feel my nipples!

Here’s something scary, for those of us who steadfastly refuse to name our children to match the current lame trends.

A study by David Kalist (also registered at IDEAS) and Daniel Lee of Shippensburg University seems to indicate that unusual or uncommon names are correlated with increases in juvenile delinquency.

Eek. I ain’t wanna be visitin’ my kids in Juvie, yo! There’s even a graph:

“Josephine” was only the 208th most popular girl name last year! I’m in trouble. Charles was 63rd; maybe he’ll keep her out of trouble.

Matthew Yglesias discusses the problem of quiet hybrid engines sneaking up on pedestrians and cyclists.

But apparently there’s some concern that hybrids are dangerously quiet and could strike people unawares… Thinking about it, it’s definitely true that as a cyclist I wouldn’t be thrilled about the idea of lots of cars silently sneaking up past me from behind.

I don’t know that it’s as big a problem as you might think. My wife’s Honda Accord isn’t a hybrid; in fact, it’s got a big horse-y V6 in it. But it’s so well muffled, like most modern cars, that unless the fan is blowing (it often isn’t on cool days) you don’t hear it unless you’re right next to it. Most of the time when you hear a moving car, you aren’t hearing the engine at all, unless the driver’s a douche and has noisy mufflers; you’re hearing tire and wind noise. You can verify this the next time you’re on the interstate at 65mph or so; inside the car, do you hear the engine? Maybe a little. But I bet you hear a lot of the tires and wind. If your car is well insulated, you might not hear much of them, but if that’s so I bet you don’t hear the engine at all, unless you routinely drive in 2nd gear.

You probably don’t rely on the sound of other cars when you’re in your own car; why would you rely on it when cycling?

Keith Olbermann is disgusted, and for good reason, frankly.

…[I]n the Bronx 70 years ago today, Lou Gehrig composed himself in such a manner, with a strength that eclipsed even what he showed on the ballfields of the ’20s and ’30s, that he could give one final measure of himself with such honesty, with such courage, with such a simple and direct connection to the human condition, that it is quoted, somewhere, every day.

But first, let’s take you out to San Diego where Manny Ramirez is just back from a 50-game suspension. For cheating. For cutting corners. For breaking rules. For lying. For deception…

Ramirez, of course, homered today in his first at bat. And some people cheered. As if he were just back from an injury, or a death in the family. As if he were a hero. As if he were an honest man. As if he were somehow worthy of sharing the meaningfulness of this day with Lou Gehrig.

Credit to Fox’s Tim McCarver – who has never gotten enough of it for this one quality he has shown, often at such great risk to his own security and even employment – for his honesty in pointing out the inappropriateness of the reaction to Ramirez’s return. He is not making a comeback. He is out on parole and it will be years – if ever – before many of us will believe he did not do something illegal, improper, or immoral, this morning.

As the increasingly unreadable Instapundit would say, read the whole thing. You can also read this response, but the author’s mostly just being a snarky dick. You could also read Keith’s reply to the response, but why bother?