Cool Facts About T-Bone Open Thread

Cory Booker's imaginary pal T-Bone once crushed a lump of coal in his hand, and transformed in into a Dove.

Some other stuff:

From Instapundit, a mattress designed for better snuggling. Okay, so I clicked. My thought: That's stupid. So, so stupid.

But actually...

You can stick your hand underneath,
then pop it up and grab her boob,
like you're a Ghost!!!

A friend of mine talked about the 3 Arms of Comfort limitation. If two people lie together, one of the four arms must be very uncomfortable. (He was an engineer so he worked out the calculus.) Well, this would fix that. Though it does look weird.

Women probably don't even know about the 3 Arms of Comfort limitation. Yeah, that's because dudes have to take that hit.

An independent National Journal analysis finds, surprise, ObamaCare, like private school, is ruining everything.

Republicans have long blamed President Obama's signature health care initiative for increasing insurance costs, dubbing it the "Unaffordable Care Act."

Turns out, they might be right.

For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they're currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers' monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.

Health law proponents have excused the rate hikes by saying the prices in the exchange won't apply to the millions receiving coverage from their employers. But that's only if employers continue to offer that coverage--something that's looking increasingly uncertain.

Wonderful.

Free Beacon offered a parody of that Slate article: If you use private transportation, you're a horrible, horrible person.

Meghan McArdle took the article seriously, and wrote a very interesting post about it. Trust me, it's interesting.

Popehat said this:

I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I'm not a big-L Libertarian, although I have small-l libertarian leanings. If you asked me to summarize my domestic political outlook, you could do worse than this: I want to minimize the ability of people like Alison Benedikt, who tend to encrust government, to tell me how to raise my family or live my life. I believe in free expression, free worship, free conscience, personal responsibility, the rule of law, strictly limited government (and the strict limitation of people with clipboards and people with guns and badges, thank you very much), and that the best society is one in which free people make free choices, not one in which you allow the Alison Benedikts of the world to make the best interests of your children subservient to the best interests of a collective imagined by a smug self-appointed elite.

Now that I realize Cook and Benedikt have kids, I think I understand the reason for their anger on this issue. Were I to guess, I would say that they feel that their own kids may be disadvantaged by not going to private school, and hence seek to do what parents tend to do: Level the playing field for their kids. In this case, it involves taking an advantage away from other kids.

But this is part of what Popehat's mention of people who "encrust government" sort of means: People who "encrust government" use government, fundamentally, as a mechanism for rewarding themselves and disadvantaging others. Businesses attempt to hedge out competition; people making $60,000 per year want to tax the crap out of people making $85,000 per year.

Government is not holy. Government is a civil mechanism for coercing and disadvantaging other people in order to advantage yourself.

It is necessary, but it is a necessary evil, and it must be limited, so that people don't go looking for all possible ways to knock other people down (so that they are not "lower" by comparison).

John McWhorter on, yeah, Racist Miley Cyrus:

Many of the people clutching their pearls over Miley Cyrus’s gluteal gyrations at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday don’t want the America they claim to want.

Cyrus’s sin was to engage in the dance move known as twerking....

And a white girl twerking on television is merely a symptom of what Leon Wynter, in a sadly underacknowledged book a while ago, called the “browning” of American culture....

That charge–that she is making fun of black people in the guise of entertainment–is, among other things, reductive. How do we know Cyrus isn’t sincere when she says she loves “hood” culture? Because she’s white? I’m afraid that’s a little 1955.

...

But then, black writings are replete with complaints that mainstream America doesn’t appreciate black women’s fuller figures. Cyrus gets up and does exactly that and she’s a recap of a slave seller? How exactly are we to celebrate black women’s bodies–in a sonnet? “It’s just a clumsy white appropriation of black culture,” says Salamishah Tillet at the University of Pennsylvania. Right–but let’s see how it would go if we decided blacks can’t “appropriate” white culture. Wait, it’s not the same thing because whites are the oppressors? But in which human culture, ever in the history of our species, have groups living together not borrowed one another's cultural traits? What is the point in decreeing that whites must suspend this natural urge regarding the specific case of descendants of African slaves in the United States, other than to have an endless source of underdog grievance?

Um, it's much simpler than that. It's a childish impulse to say "This is MINE, this is MINE, and my friends'. It belongs to MY tribe, not yours."

It's the same kind of racial grumbling that whites get castigated for, and it's time we stopped condescending to blacks on this point and castigated them for tribal, us vs. them, this is OUR sh*t racial grumbling too.

You know how people's eyebrows go up if Sarah Palin says "This is our country?" And they start saying "what do you think she really meant by that? Hmmmm?"

Well that is attempting to insert a stupid Dog Whistle narrative into the statement and claim that what she really means is "White people made this country, we originated it, it's ours."

And this is a bad thing, right?

So tell me how on earth it's a good thing when the typical racialists gather 'round to claim, "oh, Twerking? That's a black thing. Black people made twerking, we originated it, it's ours."

By the way, this particular thing? It is very sad to claim ownership of this like it's the ckufing Space Shuttle.

No, Miley Cyrus is not racist. She's crazy. But not racist.

And at some point the people who yell the loudest about setting aside racial bigotries, tribal loyalties, and genetic hatreds really ought to see about doing so themselves.

There's no such thing as "Collective Racial Ownership" of an idea or an advance. I hate to be racist here, but if we're going to play that game, personally, I'm claiming The Wonder of Electricity for my Tribe. Westinghouse, Maxwell, Tesla, Edison: Yeah, "White Culture."

Now shuddup already with the unending racial grumbling disguised as something elevated. It's not elevated. It's base. It reversion to pack animal instincts.

Get over it.

Oh, Sorry: Dave's college football thread below.

More on T-Bone: Per an old video, Booker reports that his mysterious friend "T-Bone" "just disappeared into the streets" after their adventure together, to never be seen again.

Yeah that sounds very familiar to me.

posted by Ace at 08:06 PM

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