Last night my eldest daughter called me a douchebag. I asked her if she knew what a douchebag was. She didn't. So I told her to go look it up in the dictionary. Our copy of Miriam/Webster's Unabridged Collegiate dictionary didn't make sense to her. So my wife explained how it works. Once understanding set in, I gave her a wedgie to help her learn to mind her manners.

George Packer argues for the impending death  of conservatism in the US:

Rove’s declared ambition to create a ``permanent majority'' seemed like the vision of a tactical genius. But it was built on two illusions: that the conservative era would stretch on indefinitely, and that politics matters more than governing. The first illusion defied history; the second was blown up in Iraq and drowned in New Orleans.

Over all, it's a very interesting article with a few interesting points. But I think it misses the real problem, conservatism is not a single movement but a coalition of movements that increasingly do not share common ground. In the seventies and eighties, there were two issues the conservative movement really coalesced around, abortion and the cold war. For a brief after 9/11, that coalition looked like it was going to translate into the dual memes of abortion and the war on terror. But not only did the GWB administration drop the ball on the war on terror but various wedge issues started coming up over competency, etc. And some conservatives started noticing that after decades of having a supreme court populated by Republican appointees and several years after having both the white house and congress controlled by Republicans, abortion was still legal.

I tanked up my commuter car this morning. The price of gas at the pump adjusted for inflation is almost twice what it was when GWB was sworn into office. I'm glad my dinky little car gets > 30mpg. If the real estate market wasn't presently in a downward spiral and if I wasn't uncertain as to whether or not I'm going to move come late summer, I'd sell my house and buy one within walking distance to work.

David Brooks gives a mildly interesting history of the relationship between geek and nerd. The most surprising thing to me is how recent vintage the word nerd is. Apparently it's a Seussism. (Although Geisel's use of the word may be independent of its use in spoken language. I don't think that 4 letters strung together in a Dr. Seuss rhyme necessarily implies anything at all about language usage.) The most interesting thing is the flip/flop in which one signifies someone unpopular but smart and which one signifies someone merely unpopular. His application of the terms to politics, however, is, uh, excessively nerdy.

Excellent overview of John McCain's view on war. I found the way that his view of the justness of war to stop genocide is tempered by realities on the ground to be very sophisticated. Having a commander in chief like McCain at the beginning of the present Iraq war would have been the best shot of the US to win it. By this point in time, I have doubts as to whether the war remains winnable.

And I'm off to blah, blah, blah.