I said, "more cowbell" NOT "more tambourine"

Don't Tase me, Rev!

In Edmund OK last summer, a parishioner was tased for playing the tambourine like Will Ferrell played the cowbell on SNL.

As usual, I am not making this up.

We take our religion very seriously here, so fair warning: conform or be tased.

According to the Oklahoma County Sheriff's department, the tase-ee "was not filled with the Holy Spirit".

Again I must stress that I'm not making this up.

Apparently in Edmund, being low on the Holy Spirit is a pepper-spray and tasing offense!

hat tip to RKG.

Happy Thanksgiving from Nassim Taleb

He sees 25 years into the future, people! And it's not good:

"The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians’ misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence. Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America’s Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold."

Yep, it's the middle ages with coffee-makers for us.

Is anybody besides me getting real tired of this guy? Yes, asset returns have too fat of tails to be correctly modeled by a normal distribution. Thanks, pal. We already know that. It doesn't make you a prophet.

Mr. Putin! Tear down that wall

I'd Like to feed the children/Find a cure for disease

Rebuild the cities/and Plant a lot of trees

I'd like to help the sick/Build factories

Give money to students/hospitals and galleries

But, I'm afraid of the Russians/I can't sleep at night

So afraid of the Russians/Afraid we've got to fight

I'd like to go to space/Clean up rivers and lakes

Put everyone to work/ whatever it takes

But, I'm afraid of the Russians/I can't sleep at night

So afraid of the Russians/Afraid we've got to fight

They've got ships at sea/They've got missiles in the air

Tanks on the border of Europe/and spies everywhere/

--Made for TV

Unsafe Deposit Box

Why does anyone live in California?

This story is remarkable.

the "it" man of Norman

Mrs. Angus and I practice yoga at a space called Pilates Plus in Norman. It houses a variety of entrepeneurs with business ranging from yoga to accupuncture to reflexology to........... intuitive touch?

Here is a photo of the sign on the side of the car of one of the business people housed there:



I especially like how Mr. it has carefully matched his headband to his pocket square!!!

Britain's got Talent??

More like Britain's got Freaks.

LeBron has a post asking why is Susan Boyle so popular? I think it's because most people haven't actually heard what classical singing is supposed to sound like so they go gaga over a crummy version of it like that offered by Boyle or Potts. Either that or it's just Eraserhead style sick voyeurism.

Tancredo

I was going to post on l'affaire Tancredo, at UNC.

But I really couldn't do better than what El General has already done, on that subject. So, read him. And I second that.

F**K the Pope

With all due apologies to NWA, I have been yelling this around the house most of the day and decided to get it off my chest.

The pontiff, setting off to Cameroon, says that rather than helping fight AIDS, condom use actually "increases the problem".

What else can you say to such mind boggling arrogance and stupidity?

Gary Marcus ups the ante

Recently I wrote about the arrogance of how the Nudge movement assumes that humans need help but that they, despite themselves being humans, not only don't need help but instead are somehow qualified to engineer choices for other humans.

Now in today's WSJ, one Gary Marcus, goes even further. His basic argument is that (A) evolution is not perfect so (B) neoclassical economics is completely invalid. Really, that is pretty much it. Check it out for your own self here.

Then he gets down to bidness:

"All this matters because endeavors like economics and social policy are all built around theories about what human beings are and how they function. We allow consumers access to credit cards, for example, because we assume (despite ample evidence to the contrary) that they will be smart enough to balance their short-term needs as consumers with their long-term capacity to maintain a fiscally sensible reality."

Yikes! People, what is up with "We allow consumers access to credit cards"? Is Mr. Marcus somehow immune to the imperfection of evolution in a way that entitles him to run other people's lives?

I guess his actual thesis is (A) evolution is imperfect for everyone but me and people who agree with me so (B) we have a clear duty to shape the world for the regular imperfect dolts that inhabit it.

Bush is a four letter word

He's going to do it. Against the votes of the Republican congressional delegation, against a majority of the opinion of the public at large, against all economic logic (people even Joe Stiglitz says bankruptcy is the way to go for the beggy 3), W is gonna give the most undeserved christmas present ever. I can't wait to see the "tough conditions" that will be attached.

While I have already noted my sympathy and support for the beggy 3 work force, those management teams simply cannot get any more support or money. They have pissed away hundreds of billions of dollars of value.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about all this was Cheney's "Herbert Hoover time" remark. People, the Bush administration is way way way down looking up at Hoover in the presidential rankings.

Hoover didn't topple a foreign leader only to let the conquered country sink into years of violent anarchy. Hoover wasn't commander in chief of troops that heaped vile abuse on prisoners in the very prison where the previous leader committed some of his atrocities. Hoover didn't push for torture. Hoover didn't sign anything nearly as sickening as the Patriot Act. Hoover didn't kill SCHIP expansion on cost grounds only to throw $15 billion into a complete and total rathole the next year (I am not saying SCHIP is a good program, I am just saying it's way more worthy that a 15 billion sop to the beggy 3).

Has any alleged free market, small government, personal liberty person ever done more to hurt the causes of free markets, small government and personal liberty?

I truly think W is one of the very worst, if not the absolute worst, president of all time.