Politics

Quote of the Day, Rathergate Edition

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Comment from Tony_Petroski, in this PowerLine Blog post that revisits the Rathergate affair and thoroughly discredits the Killian documents:

The Mapes Miasma. My what a miserable, manipulative. maddening, malignant, malodorous, mangled, maniacal, menacingly meddlesome mockery of a mendacious mockery of a misanthropic mendacious mockery it is. Her miasma has all the earmarks of Moldavian hacking.

If anyone ever gets around to writing a history of the war between peer review and open source, I hope this episode is included and Mapes lives to see it. 

“Comedian Jon Stewart says Apple asked him not to interview FTC Chair Lina Khan”

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CNBC:

Stewart asked Khan why the company might be “afraid” to have certain conversations out in public. Khan said it “shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of companies.”

An alternative explanation might be that it shows what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of government officials.

The Truthiness Is Out There

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Is the term “conspiracy theory” ever used in a nonpejorative sense, in context with the actual definition of “theory?” Whether or not that be the case, my attention is focused on two aspects of the decidedly unsound variety rooted in speculation and/or outright hoax. First is overestimating the human capacity for large-scale concealment, cooperation, competence, knowledge, and consistency, violating a set of principles which I will dub Henderson’s Laws of Organization:

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Quote of the Day

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“Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” has often struck me as the Bourbon Restoration attempted with rotgut whiskey.”

– Wretchard T. Cat, on Facebook

His earlier comment in the thread provides context: “The key to [the Greatest Generation’s]  success was that they did not try to restore the pre-WW2 system. They let the British and European colonial empires die. The world was rebuilt on first principles. Subsequent generations have done the opposite. They’ve focused on preserving the World Order.”