I like to think Nerds play the long game.

The really, really, long game.  The wait until you're in your 40s with a good job and then maybe you'll get a woman who's been rejected too many times on Tinder game.  What hot college girls have to worry about what kind of jobs their Tinder matches will have someday?  If they're in college, they've got someone (parents) or something (gummit) supporting them.  Might as well take advantage.  YOLO!  Whoo!

Self-esteem is not the problem here.  Free sex is the problem, unless, as Jim Ixtian notes, you're the primary beneficiary of this app, and the hookup culture.  Then there's no problem at all.

As long as your midichlorian count is high enough, the sky's the limit! 

Oh...that's myelin...never mind.

Chilling. 

The ultimate answer, I don't know, but I always enjoyed this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_music.html

Would an audience from Russia have responded the same way?

Trust me, I get why we don't want America to become exactly like Europe. But it's pretty nice, really!  The reason I was inspired to (re)start the Europe discussion was because the podcast focused so much time on bemoaning European-ness as though it would be the worst thing in the world, which I think is far from the case.  

I'm not saying it's a utopia over here, or in a general sense better than living in America.  But it ain't the worst thing in the world either.

I'm in upper Franconia, near the Bavarian border with both Hessen and Thüringen.  I have not heard of Die Achse des Guten, but I've only been here six months, I'm no expert on German politics, and even my German speaking needs a lot of work.  

I will also happily confess that my village could be an exception, that I live in a scenic and beautiful place in a calm part of the country, and when the weather cooperates it's about as idyllic as imaginable.  I also don't own any guns, I don't homeschool any children, and I have a dog that I take to restaurants with me.  So yeah, Germany's alright.

Yeah, I have read all Mark Steyn's books and I don't doubt there are problems somewhere on the horizon.  But to say that Germany lacks innovation or freedom is I think a pretty big stretch.  

But get back to the original point--what's so bad if the US becomes "more like" Western Europe?  Bearing in mind that the US is different, and has a Bill of Rights and all the rest.  That's what got me thinking about this, and thinking that this is a pretty fine place to live.

And the castles are nice, even if some are just ruins.

Ah, yeah, that was not my intent.  I was thinking more about the drug cartels and favelas...

Yeah, there's sort of the Armageddon / everyone is in the crapper scenario where obviously people would start to think about another type of politics, but I'm pretty sure that means we were too late.  

I'm thinking day-to-day activities--why would a normal person in a normal city in America have any reason to change their point of view?  Voting liberal can't hurt, and it might help (free lunch!).

I'm betting Obama will win.  Any Richocheteers in central Europe, I'll be buying viele Biere (oder etwas anderes Sie möchten) if I lose the bet.

Except for a few dedicated soccer types, no young man dreams of putting on the uniform of a sports team based outside of a league anchored in the United States.

I think Blake refuted that pretty well before, but just to pile on--the kids here in Afghanistan could care less about American sports, but are crazy for cricket.  Their desire to participate in the Cricket World Cup and various and sundry other tournaments are a better guarantor of peace than anything we're doing there.

It seems that plenty of athletes have taken advantage of sports to live a "perfectly good life."  But you must be talking about spectators, who if they could only pull themselves away from the television would be curing cancer and building cold fusion generators.  Or at least listening to Le Nozze de Figaro and discussing the contrasting merits of Ovid and Juvenal.  Ridiculous on its face.

Galway is basically the Ann Arbor of Ireland, so...not all that surprising.

In the end, I can think of nothing more appropriate than an Irish government entity memorializing a mass perpetrator of religious violence.

That, on the other hand, strikes me as a surprising and disappointing conclusion.  I know that's not really what Mr. Hemingway thinks of Ireland...is it?

If he were a violinist, he would have pitched a hissy fit.  It was because he is a violist that he could pull this stunt off.

Because the war was going great from 2001 - 2009...?  If the car was already breaking down, how can you call it sabotage when the driver bails?  

What's your alternative?  Stay the course?  Re-surge?  Both of those sound like a huge waste of money and life, given what's happened over the last ten years in Afghanistan.

I've always had the impression Ron Paul's foreign policy was dangerous (and if you listen to the Ricochet podcast there's no question about it).  But he seems to be indisputably right about Afghanistan as things stand now.