Re your final paragraph: Leftism is the bargain by which people can cease being responsible for themselves, by pretending to be responsible for everything else.

As for green grass, I put down a layer of fescue seed on my lawn several weeks ago. But as I was going, I saw that the spinner on my broadcaster wasn't turning, and the seed was just plopping out in a stream. I tried to rake the seeds around, but nevertheless I now have a narrow fairy path of bright green fescue seedlings, snaking around the yard.

I once thought that the stupidest possible hair style was middle-aged bald guys with little rattails in back. Pathetic, and so 90s. But one day I saw a style even stupider than that: A bald guy with dreadlocks. Dude looked like the monster from the Predator movies.

Happy blogoversary!

I am eternally grateful to my parents for setting me up as a child with some DRIP investments. I don't know how I managed to keep my hands off of them when I was younger, but they will be a godsend if Social Security goes TU by the time I retire.

“Tax revenue has been falling despite a sharp increase in the rate.” Despite? #Unexpectedly

Type alert: His name is Matt Welch.

Do you have family there? That helps smooth things, I've found.

As for meritocracies, what constitutes merit in, say, broadcast news? A square jaw and fab hair, and what else?

The vulgar nouveau riche have been rising, and assimilating, for far longer than Snoop Dogg's been around. But yes, it's too bad that everyone's scattered to their gated communities, suburbs and ghettos. I grew up middle class, but the neighbor across the street could have bought and sold us out of his jam jar money. I never encounter such people in daily life anymore, away from work.

It's too bad there were no viable conservative candidates this time around. I can't think of much of anything that Romney would have done differently from Obama, good or bad. Not much of a choice...It's like Aristotle said, that in public life great men come like bumper harvests, and then comes a period of barrenness.

This blog post did not make me feel all affirmed and completed inside. I'm afraid I'll have to sue you under Britain's generous libel tourism laws. Sorry David!

"Yes luv, we know: people need art. Your job is to sell us on the idea that we need your art."

Unrewarded genius and educated failures are proverbial, not a violation of the natural order of things at all. A students work for B students, and C students work for the government, as a forthcoming book asserts.

How clever!

There's nothing wrong with corporations patronizing the arts. Who under 50 nowadays remembers, or would even believe, that there used to be such a thing as the CBS Symphony Orchestra?

Time for a repeat visit from Stephen Decatur to that litterbox of a country.

If she's old enough to be sexually active, and rich enough to be in her twelfth year of college, she's old enough and rich enough not to hit up the taxpayers for the costs of her lifestyle accessories.

A fine roundup, as usual.

"That in turn raises the question of whether or not the extermination of Jews as part and parcel of the plan of the Third Reich was an ultimate goal, or an enabler, or both." Yes, it was at the very heart of the Nazi project. Resources and manpower that could have been used against the allies to stave off defeat a while longer was instead used to murder Jews, right up to the capture of the last concentration camp.

"Explaining Shakespeare is an infinite exercise; you will become exhausted long before the plays are emptied out. Allegorizing or ironizing Shakespeare by privileging cultural anthropology or theatrical history or religion or psychoanalysis or politics or Foucault or Marx or feminism works only in limited ways. You are likely, if you are shrewd, to achieve Shakespearean insights into your favorite hobbyhorse, but you are rather less likely to achieve Freudian or Marxist or feminist insight into Shakespeare. His universality will defeat you, his plays know more than you do, and your knowingness consequently will be in danger of dwindling into ignorance." --Harold Bloom, Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, 1998 "[If Shakespeare had died at the same young age as Christopher Marlowe, then] We all of us might be gamboling about, but without mature Shakespeare we would be very different, because we would think and feel and speak differently. Our ideas would be different, particularly our ideas of the human, since they were, more often than not, Shakespeare's ideas before they were ours. That is why we do not have feminist Chapman, structuralist Chapman, and environmentalist Chapman, and may yet, alas, have environmentalist Shakespeare." --Ibid

"When I hear people talk about juggling, or the sacrifices they make for their children, I look at them like they're crazy, because 'sacrifice' infers that there was something better to do than being with your children." -- Chris Rock

If we trace our ancestry back far enough, we would all probably encounter someone with a similar hardluck story. And yet here we all are, in spite of everything.

Sadly, it does seem to have been the last I heard of Lt. Prakash. Do you know what he's gone on to since those days? I kept hoping he would write a book about his Fallujah experiences, since I enjoyed Armor Geddon so much.

Gorgeous.