No Idea

I really have no idea what this blog is, or what it will be. Hopefully something worthwhile.
This is my first post to Tumblr, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be about anything. Over the weekend I competed in a Scholars’ Bowl competition. This is where a team of nerds goes to compete in a trivia competition with other nerds. Many smart people are present, and good times are available to be had by all. Last year my team did exceedingly well. We made it to 11th in the nation (in the 2 year college divisin), but we never got a trophy. This bothered me. We did quite well, but never well enough to have our performance rewarded materially. Well, on October 19 we got our trophy. And it was glorious.

This is my first post to Tumblr, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be about anything.

Over the weekend I competed in a Scholars’ Bowl competition. This is where a team of nerds goes to compete in a trivia competition with other nerds. Many smart people are present, and good times are available to be had by all.

Last year my team did exceedingly well. We made it to 11th in the nation (in the 2 year college divisin), but we never got a trophy. This bothered me. We did quite well, but never well enough to have our performance rewarded materially.

Well, on October 19 we got our trophy. And it was glorious.

I see that Karl Rove is going after Obama on Libya…Let me put it this way. If Benghazi, an attack that killed four people, is Obama’s Watergate, what was 9-11? In the former, we have no evidence that any warnings ever came to Obama’s desk, and it seems high unlikely that we ever will. It’s not as if holes in diplomatic security, a chronically underfunded enterprise, are going to raise deep-red flags. It’s a well-known and hard to address problem. I guess this may have made it to the secretary’s desk, but the president’s? Meanwhile, we know for a fact that Bush had explicit advance warning that 9-11, an attack that killed 2,800 people, was coming. Now. If Benghazi is Watergate, what was 9-11? They’re such naked propagandists, these people. The same people who spent years making excuses for why Bush shouldn’t have taken that August 6 PDB seriously are now trying to argue that an attack that was about 1/700th as cataclysmic should be Obama’s undoing? You’ve got to be kidding me.

—Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast.

(Source: thesmithian)

erikamoen: I wish I could have little print outs of this and give them to all the dudes who feel entitled to have access to me on the bus, at cafes, and when I’m just walking/biking around and won’t leave me alone even when I pointedly will not respond to them, won’t make eye contact or switch seats to get away from them.  Eff that noise. Never miss an opportunity to make a new friend.

erikamoen:

I wish I could have little print outs of this and give them to all the dudes who feel entitled to have access to me on the bus, at cafes, and when I’m just walking/biking around and won’t leave me alone even when I pointedly will not respond to them, won’t make eye contact or switch seats to get away from them. 

Eff that noise. Never miss an opportunity to make a new friend.

(Source: pigeonbits, via kateordie)

I – like most Americans – believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms. I think we recognize the traditions of gun ownership passed on from generation to generation, that hunting and shooting are part of a cherished national heritage.

But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers and not in the hands of crooks. They belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities. […]

As we convene these conversations, let’s be clear even as we debate government’s role, we have to understand that when a child opens fire on another child, there’s a hole in that child’s heart that government alone can’t fill. It’s got to be up to us as parents, as neighbors and as teachers and as mentors to make sure our young people don’t have that void inside them. It’s up to us to spend time with them. To pay more attention to them. To show them more love and they learn to love each other and they learn to love one another and they grow up knowing what it is to walk a mile in somebody else’s shoes and to view the world in somebody else’s eyes.

emergentfutures: Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake! The iconic writer scolds the superrich (including himself—and Mitt Romney) for not giving back, and warns of a Kingsian apocalyptic scenario if inequality is not addressed in America. Full Story: The Daily Beast

emergentfutures:

Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!


The iconic writer scolds the superrich (including himself—and Mitt Romney) for not giving back, and warns of a Kingsian apocalyptic scenario if inequality is not addressed in America.

Full Story: The Daily Beast