evolution

It could have been my advancing age, my headache, the slow torture of my brain cells due to an actuarial exam that I’m not ready for, or the fifth bottle of Boulevard Single-Wide IPA I was finishing, but I could have sworn that that Antony and the Johnsons song was called Kiss My Wang.

Which would have made it a better song, in my opinion.

Say it with me now: Not smarter, not more informed, and not better than you. Don’t be afraid of or respect these punks. Challenge them at every turn; do not give them the assumption of good faith. They don’t deserve it.

Because I, too, hate women. They’re just… so… woman-y.

Both in the latest Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries. The first is better than the second, both in the “contains actionable material” sense and the “I agree with it” sense. They’re both good, though.

I might have more to say about all this when A) I learn my job at a higher level and B) when I can summon the mental acuity to string words together into sentences without drooling all over myself or mumbling about life insurance premium formulas. I’m really grinding the exams now.

Glad you could join the party, people.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A bloody war between Mexican drug cartels is no longer solely a south-of-the-border problem, members of Congress said Tuesday at a hearing on the issue.

The violence accompanying those battles has crept into the United States, and is believed to be largely fueled by money and guns from America, said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois.

“The drugs are coming north, and we’re sending money and guns south,” said Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs. “As a result, these cartels have gained extraordinary power.”

From the June 22, 2005 archive: Mexican terror gangs making armed runs into us across southern border.

It seems like we need some sort of security force there… like, say, along some sort of line somewhere between, say, Des Moines and Mexico City.

This was the piece on the Newsweek piece I promised, but it’s unfinished. I’m not going to finish it, because there is no point in doing so. I just needed to post something today.

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I bet you saw this Newsweek piece linked at Instapundit, or you just saw the headline in your RSS reader, and you breathed a sigh of relief. No longer, you thought, do I have to police every single word I say or write for the possibility of racism, particularly that which I’m not even aware of. You have been absolved, or so you thought, by a member in good standing of the Mainstream Media™.

The author (in this case Newsweek’s Raina Kelley) even displays a bit of good humor and common sense; there were passages that even I chuckled at.

With a few key phrases, however, Ms Kelley gives away this particular game.

Make no mistake – it is a game, for those for whom it is desired that rhetorical meaning shift as the sands of the deserts. An accusation of racism — the mere accusation of it — as Ms Kelley accurately notes, can ruin someone’s life. Racist views mark, to most people (me included), a lack of education or a type of upbringing that few today would desire.

Racism, today, is most often a weapon used by those with a will to power to silence or attempt to intimidate opposition. We have discussed many times before what type of politics most often coincide with that will.

If you do not, as I do not, share those politics, then you should know one thing: If you breathed a sigh of relief when you read this article, if you nodded your head in approval, if you said “It’s about time”, then you have formally lost this game (which, as I hope I’ll show, would not have and could not have been won).

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[UPDATE:] … and this is probably how the rest of this post would have gone, were I to have had the energy and mental acuity to finish it.

this whole post deleted for creeping me out – the mgmt.