- Malicious metaphor mixing?
- Church As Hospital.
- The Anchoress, catatonic, comes through anyway.
- James Howard Kunstler on the Debt Ceiling Deal.
- Infinite Jest.
- An all-too-typical Plaintiff’s Lawyer Seminar
- And Spitzer, too.
- FWIW: Debt Ceiling Deal.
- Ah! Another brief Fast!
1
Mocked by The Wall Street Journal and Sen. John McCain as the little people of the “Lord of the Rings” books, the Tea Party “Hobbits” are indeed returning to Middle Earth — to nail the coonskin to the wall.
Pat Buchanan at the American Conservative blog. I do so hope that the double entendre in the ultimate figure of speech was inadvertent and unintended. But Buchanan’s been writing professionally for a long time.
2
The Church is a hospital for the cure of souls. You wouldn’t go to a hospital and ask them to give you every medicine they have. You want the one’s that will cure what ails you. Diagnosis and prescription is part of what confession is about. So don’t feel obliged to read every book about the faith. Some won’t help you. Some may even harm you, while helping someone else.
(Very loose paraphrase of a thought heard somewhere in this series on Eastern Orthodoxy and Mysticism) It’s a relief not to feel obliged to read my whole backlog. Now: where do I find time to read some of my backlog?
3
We may have a massive deficit still ($2.4 Trillion of red ink reported between now and — what a coincidence! — Election Day 2012), but the Anchoress is plugging the deficit in G.K. Chesteron quotes.
4
Reminds me of S. I. Hayakawa quipping “This is our country. We stole it fair and square” (though he may not have been the first).
5
I tried to read Infinite Jest. Really I did. I’m sure it’s ever so important. But I couldn’t bear the thought of the hours it would take to finish it being gone forever. Many, many hours. 1104 pages worth of hours.
Does that make me a bad person?
6
If Trial Lawyers don’t want people to despise them, they should try not to be despicable:
- Hootchie-Cootchie Dancers and the
- “Reverend” Al Sharpton for a Lunch Speaker, too!
What’s Al Sharpton got to do with the Mass Tort legal practice? Well, remember Tawana Brawley? Her 15 minutes of fame were, depending on whether you’re (a) a trial lawyer or (b) a decent human being, respectively, (a1) Sharpton’s example of how to sell a lie or (b1) a Mass Tort perpetrated by Sharpton against a bunch of innocent guys.
(“Mass Torts,” by the way, is Lawyerese for evil things like producing Asbestos. Or shorthand for blessed things like suing people who produce Asbestos. Isn’t the ambiguity delicious?)
7
Speaking of despicable lawyers, Elliot Spitzer was handed his head, again, yesterday by the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, who observed that his star witnesses in a criminal case against General Reinsurance and AIG may have lied, among other problems.
Spitzer’s politically-motivated demagogic prosecutions, though, probably fit RICO better than the Mass Tort mold. I think he should resign again, from something, and this time not over his zipper malfunctions. I’ll withhold prosecution if he’ll carry hod for a living the rest of his life.
8
For what it’s worth, I’m glad the Tea Party won the Debt Ceiling crisis it precipitated.
It’s not that I exactly think taxes are too high — some may be, others not — but that we are facing systemic collapse (see item 4) and it’s time to start dismantling the gravy train before it hits a wall at 120 mph. We can neither tax nor grow our way out of this hole, and the proponents of both approaches are delusional.
I’d welcome being proven wrong, especially by some gee-whiz-new energy technology that lets us grow the economy briskly, but deus ex machina is not a viable premise for governing.
9
3-grain Organic Tempeh from Trader Joes. Looks like suet. Tastes like … something I’m not going to buy again — but maybe you’re supposed to do more than take it from the Fridge and open the package.
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 