Yet another good article on how stupid we are. Snarky is called for here.

How Lethally Stupid Can One Country Be?

Keith Olbermann's going to have an anyurism one of these days...but it'll be for a good cause, I'm sure.

Worst Person in the World

But if needed another reason to never shop at Wal-Mart...this is it.

Yeah, Baby!!!

This is actually going to take some reading, but I think you can handle it. This is what's really going down in Iraq.

No...no impeachment or brining up on War Crimes here.

Maybe we should stop wishing we would go back to the Bill Clinton era.

Check this out.

I KNEW IT!!!

Why gorgeous girls are happier with plain guys

I need to get this laminated.

Just for Erick:

Wow. I was going to post my two cents about the Elliot Spitzer stupidity. I had the gist swirling 'round my head. But then this article from Lauren Berlant was in The Nation and it said everything in my head better than it was in my head. So there.

Less than forty-eight hours after revelations that he had hired a prostitute emerged, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer announced his resignation. Whatever happens to him now--the ultimate force of the story is not, once again, why big men do stupid sexual things. It's not about how righteous moralists always create noise to distract us from paying attention to a dark secret they have.

It's not really even a good opportunity for dancing in the streets because one more powerful person has come tumbling down. After all, some powerful people are better than others, and when powerful people fall from the mighty, naughty force of their appetites, nothing about power is changed at all--quite the contrary. The law, the family, marriage--exit polls suggest that all of these will be the winner here, after being horribly maligned by a man who forgot his oaths to honor them.

Instead, what stories like this really do is to damage the reputation of sex.

Read the whole thing.

I don't own a business, but if I did I would probably do shit like this.

Which is one of the reasons I don't own a business.

Thanks to Violet Blue for the heads up.

But then there's the not funny. Seriously, this fucker needs to be in jail. He's out of his fucking mind. Assuming one of the democrats wins the presidential elections, it'll be interesting to see how much they're willing to fix the damage that's been done.

f-ing delusional.

Oh yeah...and by the way...as I've been saying...THERE IS NO LINK BETWEEN SADAAM HUSSEIN AND 9/11!!!! How funny that the government is trying to stop this report from the pentagon.

Oh, and hey Dems...still think your people are anti-war. Well some of your leaders seem to think that the purpose of war is peace. Like fucking for abstinence.

Look...if you want comedy...solid comedy...week after week...I still say that there's nothing like Hot Chicks With Douchebags.

I actually do go there for the articles!

OK, things have been nuts lately. I have my Spitzer take and all that coming soon - and it won't cost you 4k either. But to tide you over:

First of all, if you've been having trouble finding the site via whitee.com - sorry about that. I'm in the process of doing something with the site and that's going to be down for a little while. Hopefully not too long. But you can get here via the oocities.com/smegmarecords address for now. This little blip will be a good thing soon enough.

So, here's a weird thing that happened...kinda rocked my intellectual socks off a bit. I just finished reading the book Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. It's a neat little book using jokes to explain philosophy. In it, the authors mention this article by Garrett Mattingly (I have no idea if there's any relation to Don) called The Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?

We all learned about The Prince in high school and/or college. And to everyone it seems pretty standard...do whatever it takes to get and keep power. But Mattingly looked into Machiavelli's other writings and his life in general and The Prince is the only thing in this guy's life that would suggest this attitude about politics. Machiavelli did a lot of other political and social work and none of it points to this POV. So Mattingly concludes that The Prince is satire.

Why did this take so long? We've all been good little bobbleheads just accepting what's been spoken. Now, I don't have the time to do the research myself on Machiavelli, but it's another example of just how lazy as a species we can be. There are a huge number of scholars who have been alive since this work was written. It's taken hundreds of years for this to come up. I think that's pretty remarkable. Maybe not sexy, but remarkable.