Liar, Liar, Proust's on Fire

Via Kottke comes this list of books people lie about having read:

1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)

Interestingly, I often lie about having read 1984. I've lied about it to multiple girlfriends! It's an awful book. I never plan to read it. But I plan to continue to lie about it.

I think I might occasionally lie about 2 & 3 as well, but only in circles where I'm pretty sure other people are lying about having read them as well.

I've only read parts of A Brief History of Time, but I've read enough to lie convincingly about having read it all. And right now "The Bomber" is realizing that entire conversations that we've had (that lasted hours!) were based on my ability to lie about having read Hawking.

I've read 80-90% of The Bible over the years and I can definitively state that 24% is way too low a number. Everyone lies about reading the Bible! It's a bad book. You'd have to be some kind of sick masochist to even get through Deuteronomy. And Christians are the biggest liars in the world, so when they say that they've read it, they almost certainly haven't. I know this, because I've read a lot of it, and it's easy to tell that they haven't. But Christians hate admitting that they lie almost as much as they like lying! So we'll never know how many people lie about having read the Bible, but it's got to be over 50%. Or, rather, everyone who says they've read the whole Bible is lying.

I have actually read Dreams From My Father (when Obama was just a Senate candidate in my humble state, no less), and there's no reason it should be on this list. It's an entertaining read written in easy language. So go read the book!

And number 10, The Selfish Gene, is possibly one of my favorite books that I've ever read. I read it all the way through, and I've read parts of it again for various projects that I've worked on, so I've probably read the whole thing twice. It's phenomenal! It offers a solution to almost every metaphysical problem in Ethics! Everyone should read it! Twice!

Or at least you should learn to be able to lie about having read it. That's almost as good!

Presidential Rankings

This bit of silliness, C-Span's 2009 Presidential Rankings, is making the rounds. Not only is the concept stupid, but they are wrong. FDR belongs at the top of the list. Everyone knows that.

C-Span and all the media reports that I've read have attached some mystical significance to the fact that they asked "Historians", as if someone who specializes in Ancient Rome or Medieval China has any clue who the Presidents were, or what they did. Even if these guys are specialists in American History, they all have their biases.

Two seemingly unanswerable questions keep popping up in the media reports: Why did Grant go up ten spaces, and why did Hayes fall seven? These questions are easily answered if you regard the historians as mere mortals.

Grants reputation has been almost single-handedly rescued by this 2006 blog post by Nathan Newman. It flew across the liberal blogosphere after he posted it. It certainly affected my thinking of Grant, and I've been selling Newman's insights as my own for two and a half years now. Those mystical "Historians" are plugged into this stuff as well, and their opinions are malleable enough to raise Grant's standing by quite a lot.

And Hayes? RutherFRAUD B. Hayes stole the 1876 election. After eight years of Bush, who stole the 2000 election, that facts looks a lot more salient.

Iowa's Junior Senator

You know, I've always liked Tom Harkin.

Makes me feel better about the $25 I gave him back in '03.

Daschle

It seemed to me that their was a very good case for appointing Tom Daschle to HHS, despite his somewhat scummy history. That argument was a simple one: Daschle, better than anybody else, knows how to move things through the Senate. And since the Senate is the biggest stumbling block to achieving Universal Health Care right now, Daschle was perfect for the job.

But if the guy couldn't even move his own confirmation through the Senate, then all of the positive arguments for him absolutely collapse.

Good to see him go.

Afghanistan

The solution to our lingering occupation of Afghistan is simple: just convince the Taliban to change their name.

All the big Al Qaeda guys are hiding in Pakistan anyway. The only reason we can't just pull out and hand the country over to the Taliban, which is an alliance of Pashtun, the country's largest ethnic group, is because of the link between their name and the 9/11 attacks. But all of the Taliban higher-ups who were involved in that are dead or captured.

So change your name to "The Pashtun Anti-Terrorist Alliance" or something, and you can have the country back.

I'm totally serious about this. In fact, I'm pretty that it is what's going to happen.

Did you know?

That the state of Illinois has established, with federal funding, a retirement home for our former Governors?

Nom Nom Nom Nom

You know, a year ago I would've been pretty entertained by a gigantic bank failure or two. But now that those are so common, it's becoming passe.

But you know what I'm really starting to get entertained by? Country failures.

Dear Switzerland, I suggest you place your head in between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.

The Netherlands and Denmark look like they've got pretty bad situations too, but both of those countries are EU members, so Nicholas "St. Nick" Sarkozy's got their back.

Smells Like Socialism

A progressive income tax, despite what the McCain campaign liked to claim, is not socialism.

But the government owning facilities, paying doctors, and coordinating the health care of individuals is, like, the definition of socialized medicine.

I present to you, Marxist Hero Bobby Jindal, Republican Governor of Louisiana.

Research

In addittion to writing, I'm also doing a lot of research these days in order to make sure that my book about TERRORISM OMG is accurate. My Greatest find thus far.

I once saw Father Phillip Berrigan speak at SLU. He was giving a talk and on one side of him was an American Flag, and on the other side was a Vatican Flag. He got up to the podium and said "Ahh, just like Jesus, hung between two theives."

John McCain beats women

Or something like that.

Politics is fun

Doesn't this ad really make you wish you could vote for Kay Hagan?

Midget Porn?

This is not, strictly speaking, the most disturbing thing I've ever seen... La Pequeña Sarah Palin

This Should Make Their Brains Explode

Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative, arranged for his daughter to have an illegal abortion.

Fucked Fucked Fuckity Fucked

Nouriel Roubini, the man who's been right about everything so far, says you're even more fucked than you realize.

He's no Lincoln

Tasteful.

Actually LOL

This, my friends, is the funniest chat log in human history.

Byron York, renowned conservative hack, chatting with Matt Taibbi.

I've been sort of amazed throughout this entire financial crisis — conservatives have literally no idea what's going on, so it's unusually difficult for them to come up with a sensible sounding lies about the situation. Conservative responses aren't wrong, they're just nonsense, literally nonsensical. It's impossible to discuss things with people when they just don't understand something and refuse to admit it.

I suppose this is true about a number of things (most notably global warming and evolution), but in those areas conservatives have had decades to conjure up sophisticated bullshit that at least makes it seem like they know what they're talking about.

Funny

Searching on the intarwebs, I searched with the keywords "Barack Obama Muslim". All the usual suspects threw up results, with the top result being Obama's smear site. The rest of the ads were political of some nature or another. Except for one: AARP.org.

How about...

a sales tax on financial transactions?

Say, like, a 2% tax every time you buy or sell someone else's stuff. That could be fun.

The Ownership Society

I had no idea that this is what the Republicans meant!

So apparently the U.S. Government will now own 80% of AIG.

And there are around 305,000,000 Americans.

So congratulations, citizen! You now own 0.0000002624% of AIG! See if they'll cut your rates.

Don't fuck with Adlai!

Sort of unbelieveably, in her Wall Street Journal, Lady de Rothschild takes a potshot at Adlai Stevenson:

Democrats Need to Shake The 'Elitist' Tag - WSJ.com: "I must face the uncomfortable truth that liberal elitism has been a weakness of the Democratic Party for more than half a century. In 1952 and 1956, for example, Adlai Stevenson emerged as the presidential candidate of the party's 'new politics' wing. But while Stevenson's stylish, articulate, high-brow manner thrilled the nation's intellectuals, he could never connect with large numbers of working-class Democrats who found him aloof and aristocratic.

The 'new politics' Democrats have found their new, improved Stevenson in Mr. Obama."

He didn't lose because he was elitist and couldn't connect with working americans. He lost because he ran against Dwight "I kicked Hilter's ass" Eisenhower. Harry Truman offered to take a demotion and run for VP again if Ike would run as a Democrat.

Now I really like Adlai (that commercial I posted yesterday was one of his). Hell, here's a commercial from 1952 and one from 1956 endorsing Civil Rights, a decade before Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, what's "elitist" about that?