You're Wrong

The UVA Rolling Stone scandal appears to be at an end.  We should probably take a moment to think about some of the actual victims.

Mark Wahlberg is seeking a pardon for a crime that he committed many years ago and whose sentence he has already served.  I'm not sure I get why this is so important to him, but I understand even less why this is so important to the victims.  I thought the quote, "If you're a racist, you're always going to be a racist," from the victim was pretty troubling.

Rich Lowry discusses a worsening trend in discussing attacks by radical Islamic terrorists.

It's the end of an era.

Crock-Pots are pretty popular right now, but not without controversy.

I always liked Shirley Manson.

Cholesterol is getting its reputation back.

Responses:

1. I think I'm taking a break from the self-help genre.  Even though those books appear to have meatier ideas than what you find in the grocery store checkout line, I think my issues come down to execution rather than mindset.

2. That seems like a reasonable diet plan.  It's not flashy, and it's doable.  That said, some of the meals were a little meh, but that's true with fancier diet plans too.

3. Those are some great articles.  I liked the cookie breakdown - it reminded me of the Good Eats episode about cookies.

4. The last three paragraphs kinda undermine the entire article...

5. That's a little scary, but less so if you think that this is often how love works generally.  You get to know someone, and no terrible things happen in the interim, and the initial attraction plus knowledge and trust (which comes from revealing personal details about yourself) gets you there.  It also makes the fact of arranged marriages or marriages of economic convenience from earlier in our history a bit more palatable.

6. We've already discussed this.

R2R:

1. In Team America, Kim Jong-Il is portrayed as being killed in rather hilarious fashion.  The funny thing is that many theaters that wanted to show The Interview said that they would show Team America instead after The Interview was pulled, but they were told that they couldn't.

4. Cable companies could lower their prices and put a stop to all (or perhaps most) of this - after all, bundling plus lower prices means savings and ease for consumers.  But it's not all the fault of cable companies.  Take Disney, for example.  They own ESPN (which includes ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNNEWS, and others), Disney Channel, ABC, ABC Family, A&E, and others.  The reason the cable company includes all of these channels is less because they want to make us buy them and charge for it and more because Disney wants to make the cable company buy all those channels and turn around and sell them to us for more money.  This particular innovation (along with HBO's decision to sell HBO GO separately) means that the various TV producers can individually decide what to overcharge me for, thus allowing me to avoid the monopoly rents of the cable companies and just pay fees to the companies whose services I want.  Maybe I still end up with a channel or two I could do without (I've watched ESPN Classic maybe twice), but I'd rather pay $40/month for the ESPN Suite than $100 for 5 million channels, most of which are either dumb, made redundant by Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or feature just one show that I can buy on iTunes for $25.

My ideal scenario is to have ESPN (not yet available separately), Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, some mechanism to get network channels for sports, and iTunes for any shows I'm forgetting about.

5. PETA is the worst.

R2R2R2R2R:

2. I'd save my external hard drive (with my computer backups), my wallet and passport, my phone, and not much of anything else.  There are other things I'd like to save, but I wouldn't want to be deliberating as the fire took hold of my possessions and then possibly me.

B