I’ve watched (most of) Gangs of New York (in little pieces) on AMC this past week or so, and it’s funny how hatred of the Irish (and German and Italians and Poles) Catholics begat hatred of African-Americans begat hatred of the Mexicans begat hatred of various ‘others’, while the Protestants are still, well, Protestants, be they Mainline, Methodist, Baptist, or what have you.
If we weren’t so dumb (or scared, anxious, or greedy), you’d think we’d have recognized the pattern by now.
The Beloit College Mindset List has become an annual tradition, listing the things that each new collegiate class has known (or will never know). You can see the list for the class of 2013 here. The class of 2020 (for those educated in Texas) is going to have some unique firsts, and may require their own separate list based on the revisions approved in accordance to far-right revisions of history by the Texas Board of Education, perhaps sourced from Conservapedia.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Jalopnik has been asserting that the rampant runaway Toyota crisis – which they tag as ‘Beige Bites Back’ – is due to the dull, isolating, appliance-like experience that the manufacturer’s products deliver. Theodore Frank in the Washington Examiner points out something else from a quick non-scientific inquiry into the demography of the drivers:
The Los Angeles Times recently did a story detailing all of the NHTSA reports of Toyota “sudden acceleration” fatalities, and, though the Times did not mention it, the ages of the drivers involved were striking.
Last spring, we replaced our leased 2006 Toyota Sienna with a new-but-left-over 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan, purchased from Family Dodge at the Philadelphia Automall.
234-years ago, Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations. While some see confirmation of Smith’s beliefs in the return of robber barons, others believe Smith did not mean what you think he meant. We see that the Adam Smith we have come to know is actually only 60-years young, and came from Chicago:
…Lost Legacy has never been slow in criticizing the ‘Chicago Adam Smith’, a person with ideas that are far from the ideas of the Adam Smith born in Kirkcaldy in 1723.
Since everything with the Catholic Church ultimately comes down to money, I’m having a hard time believing that the Church’s meddling in health care reform is due to their ideological and theological concerns over abortion and euthanasia. You’ll recall that Bart Stupak is obstructing reform over the issue of abortion, threatening procedural and parliamentarian shenanigans affected the Congressional calculus. I suspect that somehow it has more to do with the effect of reform on Catholic health care, given that it is one of the largest providers in the United States. At the very least, outlawing the funding of abortion with taxpayer dollars guarantees a level playing field with secular providers.
Let me start off by saying that Reagan is the President of my youth, the President that as a child I trusted to keep the missiles from falling, who grieved the astronauts, and who – at the time, I thought – single-handedly defeated communism. You can solidly put me down in the “not a fan” column. Yet I still think he deserves a place on our currency.
I’ve wanted to do a post on the slow motion car wreck that is the Toyota story, but I just haven’t had the time. This is a subject that satisfies several of my interests, from automobiles to politics to organizational dynamics, and I’ve followed it closely. So instead, here’s a collection of links…
