just do it

everyone seems to be fawning over the troops these days. our brave and valiant young sons, daughters, friends and neighbors fighting the evil scourge, heroes, every last one of them. Well, yes and no. yes they are performing what is probably the most distasteful yet necessary task, they are the providing the blanket of freedom with which myself and every american sleeps. yes i am grateful for the fact that i am able to write this because our military has provided for the common defense. but i can"t bring myself to throw the kind of adulation others do. the reason is that these people are doing their jobs, they are doing what they are trained to do. i"ve never heard anyone saying "thank god for our boys at ratheon for the tomohawk missle". they all signed up to do this, for whatever reason, i would contend that if you queried the military personnel who are at the end of the chain, the privates, airmen and seamen, the e-1, e-2"s, they are absolutely hating life right now. I have far more adulation for our police who also put their lives at risk on a daily basis and they do not have automatic weapons, or bunker busting, precision guided missles.

Was reading Matt Yglesias and this from calpundit and the comments in Eschaton. I've some thoughts on this, need to gather them..

futzing around with the template... trying to add links and counters

So just about everyone of Asain descent on the web is all wet and hard over the movie Better Luck Tomorrow. Yes it's a good thing for all the reasons everyone says, breaking the on-screen stereo-types and all that, being Sansei (third generation Japanese-American) myself . One of the downsides of living in Hawaii (yes there are some) is that it probably won't be shown here till May. Guess I'll have to wait, or I could obtain a copy, but of course that would be wrong [lifts pinkie to corner of mouth] bwahahahaha.

logic excercise

via Matt Yglesias:
Suppose the country is forced to choose between two courses of action, A and B. A is guaranteed to result in situation A* which is of quality 2. B has a 90 percent chance of resulting in situation B* which is of quality 10, but has a 10 percent chance of resulting in situation B$ which is of quality -100. A-advocates will point out that their favored course of action has a higher expected return. B-advocates will say that the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence supports the conclusion that B will have better results. So what happens if the B-advocates win? Well, we adopt policy B and probably move to situation B*. At this point the A-advocates become discredited in the eyes of the media and the sheep-like public who dismiss them as a band of chicken littles. Then the situation iterates and we choose B again. Same result. And again, and again, etc. until soon enough we wind up in B$ where all our gains have been wiped out and then some.

quote...

here's a quote from Chris Rock that I thought was hilarious:
You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and 'Colin'. Need I say more?