Archive for the ‘Wretched excess’ Category

January 28th, 2012

Mitt Romney usefully points out that his tax rate is more like 50% than 15%, because the corporations from which he got his capital gains paid a corporate income tax of 35%, more or less.  Good point! Anyone whose income comes from the private sector  can add 35% to his actual tax rate, and should [...]

November 24th, 2011

No this is not the RBC crew. A prize for the best caption, though.

July 2nd, 2011

Here is some new level of nuts.  It’s not what I expected to reflect on first after two weeks of exploring the soybean/corn/cattle/forest frontier in Brazil, though there are two distant links.  For some obscure bureaucratic reason, sunscreen costs about five times as much here as in the states, so I was the bearer of a bunch of [...]

May 26th, 2011

…as we depart from our normal non-partisan objectivity to point you to John Cole’s collection of titles for the Sarah Palin movie, because they are a stitch. Samples: Mooseferatu Driving Miss Crazy The Woman Who Knew Too Little The Iquitarod Citizen Vain to which I humbly add Mirth of a Nation Halfbaked Alaska

January 27th, 2011

Not the first academic to think the thought. Too bad he didn’t leave things at that.

December 22nd, 2010

Printer cartridges and safety razor blades, move over: this year’s Ramsey pricing award winner is the Nespresso coffee system…and these guys don’t even have the good grace to give you a break on the initial purchase that puts the tapeworm’s head in your wallet. Making espresso-family drinks at home has always been something of a [...]

September 30th, 2010

Jim DeMint thinks it’s so critical that you know how important he is that he doesn’t mind if a few thousand folks in Africa die over it.

November 27th, 2009

Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates on the south coast of the Persian Gulf, is a small tribe (now numbering about 300,000) of pearl fishers and date-palm cultivators who found themselves, in 1966, living on top of a small-to-medium-sized lake of oil.  They arranged to have this oil pumped out and sold as [...]

May 5th, 2009

I suggested in last week’s post on the dumb fly-over of New York Harbor that the desired photo, and lots like it, could be better made on a computer than with actual airplanes burning thousands of pounds of fossil fuel. And indeed, Will Sherman provides these nice examples of AF1 in various places including one [...]

April 28th, 2009

Let me get this straight: flying an Air Force One around lower Manhattan with a fighter plane chasing it, which scared the pants off the locals (I wonder why?) was a photo session, to get a picture of the airplane near the Statue of Liberty? Never mind the idiot who thought it would be a [...]