The International House of Bacon

You know you read too many blogs when you’re without internet access from Friday afternoon -> Sunday afternoon, and you have 580 unread posts in your Google Reader. Let’s see if we can’t knock some of them off.

* Did I post this last week? Maybe I did, but it’s worth posting again: this is awesome. A cell phone that doesn’t work via voice.

* Do ankles really exist? Doctors in Texas can’t agree. Ah, licensing squabbles…

* If Jonah Goldberg wrote as intelligently as he did in Liberal Fascism, I’d read him more often. His piece this week on the stark realities of the New Deal is one of those good pieces that will likely get overlooked. There’s no rational reason why it took me until an upper-level college history class to learn that there was even a rational alternative view on the New Deal, let alone the economic facts behind it. If we taught that sort of information in high school, it would do wonders.

* Deval Patrick made a pretty big deal about the casino legislation - one of the few things he’s been up to that I’ve thought was a good idea up to this point. Too bad he was working on his book deal in New York when the bill was being voted on. Way to push those votes, Deval. Good job.

* I learned something new today: Most United States citizens get their water from public works/governments, most United Kingdom citizens get it from private companies. Pretty backwards if you think about it - I never knew it was that widespread here, or that private there.

* Forget those White Sox frauds, read up on how the Red Sox are built for the long haul. Happy opening week!

* I love the “Al Gore riding in on a white stallion and rescuing the Democratic Party during the convention” fantasies. The reality is that he’s not going to run, and the perception is that Gore is even further left than Obama’s is.

* More about where the two Democratic candidates stand v. McCain. It’s still early when we don’t know who the Democrat is, but this is where Obama’s hurting the most following the Wright debacle - he may be able to recover the hard left (if he ever lost them to begin with), but the center is where his bread and butter was supposed to be in terms of viability, and that’s no longer a given. Regardless, a LOT can change in 6 months.

* I don’t watch Fox News. I don’t have any standard feeling as to what they stand for, whether they’re actually conservative or just further right than their cable competition. I did see Outfoxed and found it to be ridiculous. With that said, MoveOn demonstrating against Fox News? Really? Apparently, they think the mainstream media is getting its talking points from Fox, and that’s apparently bad. Isn’t the left also in favor of reinstating the fairness doctrine? How do these two things compute? I’m glad MoveOn’s relevance is continuing to disappear.

* Coming soon: WiiGuyver, where you use your Wiimote to diffuse bombs. This is actually for real - the US military is using rigged Wiimotes to help diffuse land mines. How funny is that?

* This past weekend was “Earth Hour,” where some people, groups, businesses, and even governments turned the lights out for an hour for yet another statement about climate change that only echoed amongst those who care. Google took part, turning their homepage black. The irony? It uses more energy for a monitor to display black than it does to display white. Yeah yeah, “awareness” and all that jazz, but come on.

* Barack Obama says his foriegn policy is a “return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush’s father, of John F. Kennedy, of, in some ways, Ronald Reagan…” So let me get this straight - Bush 41 made it so we had to spend 12 extra years bombing Iraq while we bent over backwards for the UN, Reagan spent a great deal of time funding contras and other undesirables in an attempt to disrupt various events, and JFK botched the Bay of Pigs so badly that it lead to a missile crisis that left the USSR in better condition defensively than it was when it started two weeks earlier. This is the type of foriegn policy he’s considering “realistic” and wants to return to, while deriding the alleged “naive ways that have caused us so much damage in our reputation around the world?” Barack Obama has said some ridiculous things on the campaign trail so far, but this takes the cake.

That’s enough for today. More tomorrow.