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hmm. i just bought a pair with it. i don’t know. i cant tell any difference.

i ahve so many pairs of glasses now. i used to break them all the time. now they last for a decade or more.

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i just read a nice quote from a torah study book quoting the talmud sanhedrin; all rabbis should be prepared to argue that a bacon cheeseburger is kosher.

typing improves when im not drinking.

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Torah Interlude….

but seriously, chesseburgers are a bad idea, for the torah commands us, do not boil a kid in its own mothers milk.

what is basically explicitly prohibited is boiling a baby cow in the milk of its own particular mother. seems liek a very easy thing to avoid. like, no one would ever do that.

how the rabbis got from that, to don’t eat cheeseburgers, is a subject that would require a lot more time than I have to understand. I was told that rabbis draw a “wide fence around the torah”, meaning they interpret the rule as broadly as humanly possible, to avoid any possible error.

interestingly, jewish law prohibits eating insects, but makes an exception for crickets, grasshoppers and locusts, which may be eaten. crickets grasshoppers locusts are kosher, but silkworms or fried waterbugs, no.

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brutus is a reference to the betrayal he feels for having been discarded by the piggington prince.

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who wants to chip in to hire a linguistic expert to see if brutus is in fact briansd1. im pretty sure he is.

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presidential hopeful vermin supreme is running on a mandatory dental health police program, where everyone will waive their 4th amendment rights so that the dental patrol can bust in at any timeto inspect your teeth and gums.

not quite the fat police, but maybe they can check your cupboards for hydrogenated fats while they’re looking for used floss as proof you flossed as required by federal law..

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no elan. sort of a heavy step. crazy conservatives are scarier than crazy liberals.

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that spam is like in a whole class more inappropriate and icky that romney’s 47% thing. i hope it was a robot.

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public schools pretty good in temecula.

my oldest is on track to finish 45 college credits with ap classes this year.
his teachers are for the most part great. all 4’s and 5’s on the tests. im jealous. did better than i did…

the students are highly motivated.

i doubt most small scale private schools have as much access to ap classes. how many ap classes can a smaller school realistically offer and really prep the students? not sure… probably dont have enough teachers qualified to teach.

from a money perspective i really appreciate it, as he get a bit more than a third of a b.a. for almost free…assuming he goes where they credits are accepted. which he accepts he will…

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i’m pretty sure im a hypocrite, even in those cases where i can’t see it.

but given that, i could still have a point. even hypocrites can be correct…occasionally.

i wasn’t saying everyone should be equal.

just that ideally, the system ought to be designed so that wealth eventually gets spread around. regardless of what the rest of the world is doing.

Like, for instance, it would be bad, right, if one dude had 99.9% of the wealth and the rest of us split the balance, unevenly of course, according to our particular merits and efforts? even if the one dude worked hard and legally got all the wealth and was way smarter and more meritorious than the rest of us slobs….and even if the .1 % crumb we were splitting up was a decent chunk? I think we can all agree on that?

And if so, if you’d agree that one dude having all the dough would be bad, then I think you’re with me. The guiding principle is not “the best and the brightest win all the nuts” but instead, society has some obligation to spread it around…nott for free, or for no effort, but to ensure that everyone can get a piece…

I think you’d agree that excessive concentration of wealth, even if it was gotten with skill and brains and good old fashioned hard work, is not a good way to set up a society that has any chance ofbeing a decent fair, longlasting, good place tolive…

You don’t want all 99.9% ofwealth with just one, or in a nation our size, two or ten or 50 or 1000 dudes.

You want society to oeprate in a way –not where everyone gets something for nothing–but where there is plenty of oportunity to get in on the action and for everyone to do well. the base operating principle is not “cleverest guy gets to win and keep everything” but something more like “we all get a real chance to get a decent share”.

or soemthing like that

i don’t think we are forming that kind of society. I think we ought to. I have no idea what it would look like…

it might very well involve a lot less government involvement.

it’s prettyclear to me that there should be no govt involvement in student loans, for instance, and that the program itself is manifestly horrific.

but should the govt instead be involved in providing free education? hell, I don’t know. it couldnt be worse than the current scam…

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no. world wars seem more remote thanmy own small problems.

I guess I only lose sleep when something is directly happening to me or right around me.

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at this rate there is gong to be no tax advantage to owning a home, because there is going to be no interest involved.

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im wondering if we could all agree that it would be best for society if the wealth were generally spread around. I don’t mean that it should be taken from you personally but…just setting up our ideal society, from scratch, can we all agree it would be best if it tends to have wealth distributed about, and not concentrated intensely at the very top, and not with very few people in the middle, and lots and lot of very broke people?

I think most normal people would say, yeah, that would be a good form for society to take…there should be lots of people earning a decent living in the middle, right? that would be a good type of society…

not sure how to get there…and people can argue reasonably about how to get there…but is everyone in agreement that that’s a good goal? i can see reaosnable people saying, no, let the losers lose big, the winners take all, and fuck the weaklings of society. let them eat from dumpsters if they cannot figure out how to play the new game…

Sometimes I wonder whether we are starting from different perspectives of the type off orm society should take.

cause when people argue let the “free market” (or what passes for one hereabouts nowadays) move wealth where it’s gonna go…I’m betting it gets more and more concentrated at the top…

and if that’s a bad thing…

should we let the machine just keep moving inexorably int he same direction?

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everything that can potentially benefit me seems to get phased out for income right about my level.

so why no phase out on capital gains?

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it depends how you define the “country”. really, it should just include the superwealthy as countrymen. the country is going to be in excellent shape

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