The olympics are dropping wrestling?!?!??
The pope is stepping down. I think it's wise to do it while he's still able to do the job. It's good to realize that they don't all need to go out like JPII.
Speaking of which, was Big Tobacco behind Pope Urban VII's sudden and untimely death from "malaria" (bad air)? He instituted a smoking ban during his short 13 day reign as pope. This cannot be a coincidence. It's turtles all the way down.
Politics are still politics. Somebody recently suggested Texas is an economic model for other states and a good example of Republican economics in action, but I highly doubt it. I do grant their point that California and Illinois show some downfalls of Democrat Party control of state legislatures. But TX to me looks miserable.
We watched Trial of a Time Lord and now we're on to McCoy-era Doctor Who and Ace.
We started watching Community recently and are all caught up.
Somebody recently made an interesting assertion in a facebook conversation. They said that government was invented solely for the protection of property. They also strongly implied that this was also still one of its only legitimate purposes. The man was, of course, a libertarian. I am wondering just how wrong this is in terms of anthropological history, historical political science, and whatever. It sounds like one of those things economists say that's either false or true in a "yes, but so what, that doesn't tell us anything useful" way.
I'm kind of getting tired of these students not reading directions, not remembering this week how to do what we did both of the last two weeks, not reading the solutions... At least they don't come in during office hours so I can get some work done, write some diaries...
Politics are bad right now: polling suggests that a majority of Republicans support a path to citizenship, but not when Obama's name is attached. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/02/12/what-president-obama-should-and-shouldnt-say-in-the-state-of-the-union/ Of course, conversely, a majority of Democrats approve of Obama's military ventures and torture, but not when Obama's name isn't attached. It's a double-edged sword. But, on the other hand, it is somewhat reasonable to think that, while I might be a fan of policy X, politician Y might mean something different by it and muck it up, so I'm not in favor of his implementation of X.
But, really, our addiction to cheap fossil fuel energy is stealing from our children in three ways: they will no longer have these cheap sources of fuel because we used them up, they will not have cheap alternatives because we refused to develop them, and then of course there's the unfathomable cost of climate change that we're going to saddle them with. And yet people seem to think that present expenditure on mitigating these effects is somehow robbing from our children or something because we're running a deficit. These people are funded by the oil lobby or are peasants whose opinions don't actually matter.
We watched Le quai des Orfevres this weekend on our French movie night. The ending was surprising. I think that does it for Clouzot - he has a few other films we haven't seen, but I don't have them and they aren't well rated.
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