Santorum has a good point and the Republicans would do well to get some populism into its message.  The left has for years been the champion of the working-stiff-class, and for good reason for a while.  But now, when the unions have manifestly become bagmen for the Democratic Party, the Republicans can bump back and take the white working class vote (which, if I recall correctly, Reagan was the last Republican to win).

I'd have to disagree with the sentiment in this thread that the lower rungs on the ladder aren't just as important as the higher ones.  The manager needs workers, and the workers need a manager, and the owner needs both and all the rest.  Good help is hard to find, and there is every reason to embrace their obviously necessary contribution to prosperity.

I rather liked Santorum in the primaries, but then again I'm a bloodthirsty, Catholic, social conservative.

The question of morality and progressive ideology is tricky.  The true progressive's morality is his political goals.  They occupy the space of deeper truths in the absence of religion or any other normative truths about the nature of existence, one's place in the world, relation to higher powers, etc. 

For the progressive, these mysteries of life are not filled by the divine or any perfecting norms, but by temporal politics.  This is destructive and leads to great dysfunction and confusion in a person.  I would also point out that this phenomena is not exclusive to the left, but seems to be more prevalent on that side in my experience.

Internships are never what you expect them to be, but they will go on your resume regardless of the fact that all you really learned was data entry skills, or advanced espresso pickup skills, which you already possessed.  Interns have to go through some low-level hazing to get started in an industry, some people get some free labor, and life goes on.  It's just for a summer usually.

I think this particular case was made on the claim that they were doing work that paid employees got paid to do, and they didn't.  Thus free menial labor, not "experience."  I had thought this was an open secret; but I guess these guys didn't realize that yes, in fact, you will be doing b---- work for free, to get your foot in the door in an internship, and no, its not really a problem.

Avoid sugars and processed grains.  Eat grass-fed beef if you can get it.  Eat bacon.  Use more salt.  Drink raw milk if your state's dairy lobby hasn't made it illegal.  Lard is great, try to avoid the hydrogenated lard.  Exercise.  You'll be fine.

Watch this lecture.

Cholesterol isn't going to kill you and the current bad reputation it enjoys is the result of decades of medical science's maleficence.  Saturated fats are also fine, and their reputation is the result of the same.  Basically we believed that eating cholesterol and fat made you have high cholesterol and fat, which is quite ridiculous when you think about how the body digests foods.

Just avoid the sugars and grains so your body doesn't produce insulin, which in turn causes fat deposition.  It's not really the calories; it's the hormones that make us fat.

Your husband is sort of on the right track, but soda is really quite bad for you, even in "moderation."  I don't have as much sugar as in one can of Coke in an entire day.  If there is a choice between soda and wine; drink wine.

The CPI isn't so much a crock as it is a broken clock.  It factors in with the the iron-clad essentials of living, food and gas etc,  a bunch of useless crap (new cars etc.).  So while the price of useless crap goes down (because fewer people are demanding it), the price of essentials rise due to a weakening dollar.  It's not that the essentials really cost more, it's that our money is worth less.

So while the CPI might be relatively stable, I would wager that the realized inflation is much greater because people buy essentials and sacrifice extras.  So more of our cash goes to inflated goods, and thus less can go to the extras.  Low incomes are naturally hit the hardest by this, having less discretionary income.

That and we have some regime uncertainty.  People have cash; they're sitting on it because they believe a more favorable regime is coming their way.  Let us hope they are right.

So the economy is in a holding pattern.  Better than more recession, but we can only wait so long.

Today college isn't worth the sticker price.  After spending about 80 grand on a private, classical, liberal education (about half was covered by the GI bill and grants, but I account for all of it as "spent" money, even if I'm not on the hook for all of it) I'd say a liberal education is worth about 10 grand today.  And it would cost that to boot if there was no such thing as a student loan and "education administration."

I was pleased that my undergraduate major didn't make the top 10.  I studied Classics.  At least I walked away from it with a real set of skills, reading Latin and Ancient Greek.  Which, at the very least, is quite impressive, and I can go out and get payed to teach these subjects.  But in retrospect I wish I had stuck to my original plan and gotten my BSE degree.

The machines will drive with less error than humans by a long shot, the vast majority of the time.  It's the .001% that the humans will do better.

Still though, just like I wouldn't get in a plane without a pilot, I wouldn't trust a machine I didn't control at some level.  Humans think creatively, machines can't.

I'd take an autopilot car so long as I could still drive it.  I'd like to think of it as the evolution of cruise control.  I'm not exactly driving, but I'm not exactly letting the thing do whatever either.

This post contains spoilers.

Khan wasn't really the bad guy in the movie.  The Admiral who thawed out Khan was.  I always appreciate how Star Trek's earth history has a terrible eugenics period which comes back to haunt the future.  One of Roddenberry's better contributions to the universe I think.

The reboot kept some set pieces, but it really wasn't Wrath of Khan at its core.  This pleasantly surprised me because I sat down fully expecting Wrath of Khan reboot.  

The Kirk character grows in a more sophisticated manner than I expected.  He goes from defiance for its own sake to calculated defiance for the sake of principled action.  I appreciated how Kirk's right action foils Khan's plan without Kirk even knowing it at the time.  He simply did the right thing and it worked out.

Kirk is also more rebellious than the old universe counterpart, and this seems to be on account of him not having a father to reign him in as he grows up.  But Kirk grows up later in any event.

STID was quite good, better than the first reboot by a fair margin.

Wine reviews are much like movie reviews.  It's more important to find a wine reviewer who shares your tastes.  It's a subjective art for the most part, but there's some set pieces and general standards.

A surprise pregnancy would be a great opportunity to seriously consider marriage, but only in the same way that unexpected and serious events tend to focus our attentions on what matters.  But alone, a surprise pregnancy isn't sufficient to get married.

Legalism, there oughta be a law against it.

In the case of martyrdom the canonization process is a bit different.  This is an evolution from early Church practice of veneration of public martyrs during periods of persecution.  Historically only the local bishop's approval was required.  Today no evidence of miracles is require in the case of martyrs.  All that is required is an investigation into the character of the martyr, that the martyrdom took place, and that the martyrdom took place for the Christian faith.  A well attested event such as the 800 in question is not really controversial.

I can't agree more.  Art was always a representation of nature.  What we've managed to do is destroy nature.  So, oddly enough, the same truth is spoken to.  Art still represents nature, but as our grasp of nature deteriorates, so too do our representations.

It makes you wonder how we managed for all these millennia of recorded history without a bunch of busybody nannies running other people's lives.

I looked into Bitcoin about a year ago.  I had considered setting up a mining operation, basically a bunch of high end video cards crunching away at the crypto-currency, but decided against it in the end since it seemed too risky, and my landlord would probably wonder why his power bill went up a lot.

Bitcoin isn't a fiat currency because its necessarily finite, and beyond state influence, since everyone, and no one, controls monetary supply.  And Bitcoin is immune from the bad monetary policy, but it is also immune from good monetary policy.  This is to say that all fiat currency is necessarily bad, it's just very easy to abuse, as we see happening now.

I see Bitcoin not as a viable long-term currency, but as a kind of John-the-Baptist precursor.  Our money is too easy to abuse by bad actors, and Bitcoin exposes this weakness.  Bitcoin won't be the final destination of currency, but it's a "proof-of-concept" of sorts.

My hope is that some government embraces a similar currency style and goes about replacing its fiat paper with something more controlled.

The rich are getting richer in this faux-recovery because of cheap dollars.  The closer you are to the financial sector, the better you're doing because the money is cheap.

So yeah, some rich are getting richer, because interest rates are nothing and the fed can give interest free loans to itself for the time being.  It won't/can't last forever, but for now the financial sectors, and those who can leverage a bunch of cheap money, will do pretty well.

What the rich aren't getting rich doing is hiring more employees to expand their buisness for a variety of factors.  The money is better spent elsewhere, or held as cash for now.