Just so much material

Good side of the Greek Tragedy in Yawkey Way: The heat's off Bill Buckner and Grady Little. Yes, fans, it is Greek tragedy in the clearest sense, with the 2500-year-old theme of the penalty of hubris at the forefront. Let us learn from this.

Moving on to unimportant matters, as we have said here before, in the "war on terror," the gods are on the side with the fewest idiots. It is al-Qaeda's curse that it seems even better than the GOP presidential primary race at attracting idiots. The terrorist idiot du jour seems unclear on the difference between flying a remote-controlled jet about the size of a riding mower and flying a balsa-wood airplane with a rubber-band engine. He seems shaky on the idea that it is one thing to dream of blowing up the Pentagon (a building slightly larger than Rhode Island) with a few pounds of plastique, and another actually to do it. Ferdaus seems also to be one of those charmingly naive people who have made the underside of the Internet, and especially Internet commerce, all that it is today. "Oh, I'll need some explosives and technical advice. Let me just Google that and I'm sure I'll find reliable sources." Heh.

All this does begin to resemble the U.S. Communist party in the late 1950s, when FBI agents in the ranks were said to outnumber Leninists by about 50 to 1. We can but laugh.

Fish and scum

Brucie's back. Now we have the Coast Guard weighing in on this week's shark frenzy with a shark advisory. Here's a little bullshit advisory from the Uncle man. It's summer; there's salt water; there will be sharks, and some of them will be big. Just a note that in my experience, most of the big sharks you actually see on our coasts are basking sharks. They are "filter feeders" and about as dangerous as cows. I think the Coast Guard should tell its lawyers to take a Prozac and stop coming up with this crap.

I'm reading Charles P. Pierce's Idiot America. More on that when I finish it, but I was slapped in the face with one of his premises of idiocy tonight, when the PBS News Hour presented a "debate" on extending jobless benefits. One side was represented by an authentic dinosaur from—wait for it—that famous source of objective academics, the Heritage Foundation. In the course of a few minutes he managed not only to slander every unemployed worker in America (we'll all find jobs when benefits end because we're having such a great time living on them) but also their families (who are also living high off the hog on $300-$400 a week and so have no incentive to work). There was inevitably a rebuttal: this is PBS after all, not Fox...yet. But the damage was done. Putting this clown on the air as if he actually knew jack about the present recession just enables the rest of the wingnuts in the Senate in their endless refusal to come to grips with reality.

This happens to be one of Pierce's points. In idiot America, every question has two sides, and both of them must be right, or they wouldn't get on the air.

I'm all for putting Congress on the same health plan as everyone else. In addition, when Congresspeople get voted out of office, they should go on unemployment instead of getting a lifetime pension or a fat lobbying job, so they can live it up on their benefits instead of looking for a job. While we're at it, let's close down the Heritage Foundation and see if the creatures who survive now in its artificial atmosphere can contend with the real world. Hmm, maybe this has happened, and that's why the Coast Guard finds it necessary to warn us against prehistoric predators.

Coda: How is it that Canada manages to combine humanitarian social programmes with a generally ethical and conservative financial policy in public and private sector? Are they smarter than we are, or is it something in the beer? I'm drinking Moosehead this week to find out (also because it was on sale).