The Stupid Continues
Now you have politicians wanting to know why the FBI didn’t do more about the Tsarnaev brothers. How about – there wasn’t a hell of a lot any law enforcement agency can do that will discover an individual bent on havoc. How would they justify the resources needed to put an audio bug in Tamerlan’s apartment, because that’s the only way they might have found out anything? As Tsar Vladimir put it, these politicians are speaking gibberish.
Meanwhile there are no arrests, nor any prospects of arrests in the much bigger and more deadly explosion in West, Texas. I guess murder is OK if it is committed by a corporation in pursuit of profit.
Dave Johnson notes that the “Spreadsheet Error” Economists Blame “The Left” Not “Science”. Well it could have been a plot by that well known terrorist group, al Gebra. It must be true that facts have a liberal bias.
To improve your attitude, read a Terry Pratchett novel. Via Avedon, here’s the opinion of another author: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Might Be The Highest Form of Literature on the Planet. BTW, he isn’t kidding and justifies the claim.
5 comments
I must hang my head in shame that I have not yet read any Terry Pratchett. I will rectify that immediately. Thanks for the link.
Also, the miasmic gases being vented by politicians are beginning to fog up the investigation, so I appreciate your clarity about the Tsarnaev family.
The Tsarnaev family reminds me of Lev Tolstoy’s very first line in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way.” [Like Dickens, Tolstoy liked to tell people the point of his books in the first line.]
There are two sisters, Ailina and Bella, living in New Jersey who really don’t want to get involved. ‘Mommy Dearest’ is facing arrest on a felony larceny warrant if she returns to the US. The extended family is very large in Russia, which enables the father to apparently own buildings. They need to add a genealogist to the investigation to figure out who the major players are. Islam is not nearly as important as the culture of the Caucasus and the role of family.
If you add the totally lousy economy to the mix of problems, both real and imagined, that Tamerlan was dealing with, blowing something up is a Chechen solution.
Pratchett covers that kind of thing, but he throws in a lot of satire to ‘make the pill easier to swallow.’ If you want to know about the absurdity of war, read Jingo. An exploration of sexism, read Monstrous Regiment. The financial sector, Making Money.
You can read the books without a college education, but they are much funnier if you can catch all of the puns that allude to Shakespeare, popular music, the movies, politics. You know you are dealing with a master when you read a pun that refers to jazz composer and pianistThelonious Monk. Don’t skip over the footnotes, they are gems in their own right.
Jams O’Donnell, Steve Bates, Kryten, and I are all fans.
As am I, having read the majority of the Diskworld novels.
After a long vacation from (not on) Discworld, I just read Pyramids. I am reminded why I have long thought Sir Terry Pratchett is the funniest man alive, and one of the most insightful.
He sees the absurdity around us and describes it within the framework of the totally unrealistic environment that too many people actually believe exists. Making Money is one of the best introductions to fiat currency that I have ever seen, as well as a rather pointed description of the financial sector.