KN@PPSTER

... on tonight's Republican presidential debate, and that's on foreign policy, which the candidates are discussing right now. There are two possibilities: Santorum, Romney and Gingrich are just typical political gangsters who want to continue seizing as much of your money as possible and funneling it to their benefactors in the military-industrial complex and who would, as presidents, continue the fairly disastrous Bush-Obama policies, in which case it really makes no difference whether one...

So about three years ago Liam, then seven, decided he wanted to build his own PC. And he's wanted to ever since. It's just that his idea of "build a PC" was "grab the cheapest motherboard, whatever CPU that's on sale, etc., and throw them together and maybe there's some other stuff, and it will work." And when I explained to him that no, he needed to get together a parts list and make sure that the motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc. he picked would work together and so on, he'd get mad. And when I...

WTF, WaPo ? Wal-Mart pledged to help introduce Hollywood's emerging online movie locker system to its customers, many of whom have never owned anything digital in their lives. Not an MP3 download? Not a solitaire game they downloaded (even if it was from AOL in the heyday of dialup Internet access? Not a cell phone ringtone? Not an ebook? Not digital bank account access, aka a debit card? I'd be surprised if as much as 1% of Wal-Mart customers "have never owned anything digital in their...

Virtually every day, my significant other and I discuss what's for dinner. Virtually every time my significant other and I discuss what's for dinner, I mentally flash back to a short bit from an old sitcom.I finally went looking for that old bit, and it's old indeed -- it originally aired on January 6th, 1980 (and that's when I would have seen it -- I watched The Jeffersons on first airing, with my parents, and don't ever recall seeing it in rerun/syndication). It starts at about 5:33 into...

Missouri's homeschool laws dictate that each student must receive 1,000 hours of instruction per year, that 600 of those hours be in five "core subjects" (reading, math, social studies, language arts and science -- the other 400 can be things like fine arts, physical education, etc.), and that 400 of those hours occur at "the regular home school location." Which means that only 200 hours of field trips per year can count toward "core subject" stuff. Daniel and Liam got seven hours of (mostly)...

Over at The Moral Sciences Club, Will Wilkinson classifies originalism as a form of "judicial activism." While he may be correct in one way or another, here's where I come to full stop. The orginalist argument is somewhat like the argument that although men now wear baseball caps instead of fedoras, they should begin wearing fedoras because they used to wear them. Um, no.The originalist argument is that rules should be interpreted on the standard of what their framers/ratifiers intended them...

Is being poor self-reinforcing because it forces one to spend more on stuff a little bit at a time over time, as opposed to saving up and/or forking over a large sum at once, and eventually spending less? I don't consider myself "poor," but I do have a personal situation that illustrates the question:I have dental problems. That's no secret -- I've talked about it, and other people have talked about it, both to my face and behind my back (no, Sully, it's not "meth mouth" -- I'm not a...

Via MSN : Her owner died last December, and a 20-year-old will stipulated any cats the woman owned at the time of her death be euthanized. But trust officers at Fifth Third Bank in charge of, um, executing the will, couldn't bring themselves to carry out the request. So they went to court. The story is followed by a lot of feel-good reader comments, including a few of the "I would certainly do business with this bank!" variety. Really? The cat's late owner placed a good deal of trust in the...

Someone asked me the other day if I'm still sleeping in the tent. Yup! I allow myself one night per month inside, and my back always regrets it. Anyway, this last week the mummy bag (rated for either zero or ten degrees fahrenheit, not sure which) got washed, hung up to air dry, and crammed into its attached stuff stack. Most nights now are just too warm for it, even completely unzipped. Switched to a worn, reliable old summer "temperate climate" bag, with blankets still on standby in case it...

Tamara wanted to see the 3D re-release of Titanic, and did. The kids didn't want to see that, which meant that I didn't get to see it. Which was okay, since they settled on The Cabin in the Woods : I see that spoilers are already starting to circulate, but I won't do that to you. You already know you're going to see it. I'll just confirm that it's a great, fun ride from Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard and leave it at that. Problem: The Cabin in the Woods runs about an hour-and-a-half, while...

In today's Washington Post: GlaxoSmithKline Plc agreed to pay $3 billion to resolve U.S. criminal and civil investigations into whether the U.K. company marketed drugs for unapproved uses and other matters, its biggest legal settlement. Use of the terms "resolve" and "investigations into" (or, in the headline, "settlement") legitimizes things like this by treating them as if they were tort cases with real victims who will see some of that money as restitution for damages.They're not. They're just cases of bureaucrats and regulators playing at extortion and bribe-seeking. In essence: Nice company ...

One of the fun parts of any political campaign scandal is trying to figure out who leaked the thing to the press.Speculation over who leaked such details as we now know about Herman Cain's sexual harassment settlements as CEO of the National Restaurant Association seems to be centered around whether the leak came from the Romney campaign or the Perry campaign.My guess -- and I think we'll know at some point whether I'm right -- is that it came from either the Bachmann campaign or ... the Cain campaign.Here's my cui bono logic:- Romney is running neck and neck with Cain in Iowa. If he was behind ...

Fox headline: Perry Disses Ethanol in Iowa, Says Feds Shouldn't Pick Energy Winners and Losers This doesn't really seem that headline-worthy. It's not like it's a new Perry position. He's always been against subsidies for anything except Texas's cash crop, oil. He made an issue of ethanol in 2008, and he stood by his position (in at least a half-assed way) during the period around his presidential announcement and the Ames Straw Poll.But, says the Fox story, "Perry brought up ethanol during a jobs forum in Pella in response to a question about whether wind energy subsidies should continue." (emphasis ...

I've been looking forward to this movie for some time, and hearing great things about the venue for even longer (some Yelp reviews here), so this afternoon I put on my $6.97 trilby, my shit-kickin' boots and my Hunter S. Thompson tee-shirt from Literary Rags, and moseyed on down to dispatch two vultures with one rock.The Moolah is everything it's cracked up to be. It's a former Shriner temple, so naturally the architecture is magnificent: Ornate window grates, marbly floors, domed/chandeliered ceiling in the theatre proper, etc. It's worth the price of admission just to see the interior.The concession ...

I think I may have been born a baseball fan, but I haven't been to a baseball game since the Cardinals made me pay for their new stadium, which opened in 2006 (the first game I ever went to was at the old stadium in the 1970s -- nosebleed seats to watch the Cards lose to the Atlanta Braves).It was a really bad thing. The Cards' owners had an aggregate net worth of something like $15 billion, but wanted the taxpayers of St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and Missouri to pick up the stadium tab.St. Louis County voters petitioned to put a measure on the ballot forbidding the County Council to allocate ...