The Other McCain lays out some inconvenient truth.

Solyndra’s other well-connected lobbyists include green-lobbyist extraordinaire and former Appropriations staffer Steve McBee and John Kerry aide Gregg Rothschild.

Carney further reports that Solyndra’s lobbyists included Andy Quinn, former chief of staff for top Democrat Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland.

The lesson to be learned from this is that whenever the government is passing out money, there will be folks lining up with their hands out, and many of those will have had some part in arranging the passing-out and want to wet their beaks. One of the reasons why government procurement is so tediously bureaucratic is because of attempt to construct a system in which this sort of thing can’t happen, and the universal lesson of history is that such systems are successful only in making government procurement tediously bureaucratic. Government attracts crooks the way dogs attract fleas, and the solution is not to attempt to make the dog flea-proof (which never works and merely slows down the dog) but to periodically take steps to kill the fleas. Unfortunately, when it comes to crooks and government the success of such steps depends on the surrounding culture, and our surrounding culture leaves a lot to be desired.

Read it.

The lesson of government waste, whether on $16 muffins or $535 million loan guarantees to solar power companies or $48 billion in “improper” Medicare payments, is one worth relearning every day.

Managers whose budgets do not depend on customer satisfaction and who do not face competitive pressure in the marketplace, will not, on balance, spend their money wisely. Vendors selling to those managers know that price matters much less than it does to, say, Wal-Mart. And anywhere there is political urgency and official involvement high up the command chain, conditions will begin resembling a gold rush.

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Ceramics, metallic alloys, bone powder, wood or stem cells are just some of the substances doctors have used to replace or heal broken bones so far. Now a group of researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, led by Professor Junzo Tanaka, has come up with an alternative: fish scales.

According to the professor, using fish scales comes with three advantages (when compared to using collagen from pig skin, for example): it’s safer (viruses don’t migrate from fish to humans), the artificial bones are stronger, and the material converts to bone about two times faster.

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This Labor Day America stands on the brink of an industrial revival. During the next decade millions of Americans will be re-employed in manufacturing. Tens of millions more will be newly employed in jobs supporting manufacturing and serving the needs of manufacturing employees. The financial sector will shrink and the industrial sector will grow. Balance of payments problems will disappear; tax revenues will increase while tax rates go down.

Read it and see whether you think he’s right.

Read it.

No one appears ready to say it, so we will. The United States Postal Service (USPS) is on the verge of default because it has become one of the largest employers of Black people in the world. It’s disproportionately Black job force – which employs, like the local, state, and federal government, a disproportionate amount of Black people – is a burden to generating profits, maintaining a high standard of work ethic, and ultimately, staving off default.

No company – private or public- can go 365Black and not expect a significant shift in productivity, efficiency, and overall skill within that workforce. The USPS has been prostituted out, like so many other government agencies, as a vast employer of Black people due to private companies and corporations continued inability to “make up” work for Black people to perform.

Read it.

Feel free to add your own.

From Benjamin Domenech:

I’ll concede, of course, that Romney is the most electable candidate. Just look at all the elections he’s won.

To which I’ll add: ‘… compared to Perry.’

Read it.

Quick, somebody call Sarah Palin….

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What if you could ask the author of a book a question while you were reading the book? That’s the kind of world Amazon wants to offer with its new @author feature, which the online bookstore launched on Wednesday with a group of writers including Susan Orlean and self-help guru Tim Ferriss. Readers can ask questions directly from their Kindles while they are reading a book, and the question gets sent to the author’s Twitter account as well as to their home page at Amazon.

Read it.

How debased is the term “Bill of Rights” in modern legislative parlance? This debased–California’s Assembly has passed, and its Senate is considering, a “Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights.” Unlike the original Bill of Rights, which placed limitations on what government to do its citizens, AB 889 demonstrates that government nowadays recognizes few if any bounds at all.

Leftists especially don’t comprehend the difference between ‘rights’ and ‘entitlements’. A right is where you can do something without interference; an entitlement means that somebody has to give you something. A right is good against all other people, whereas an entitlement, while good against all other people in theory, is in practice only good against a designated provider, typically the government.

Tim Carney points out that it’s mostly more cowbell.

Let’s start with the assertion, for which Yglesias offers zero evidence, that “rich businessmen inevitably wind up reaching the view that lower taxes on rich businessmen.”

Who’s the richest businessman in America? Bill Gates of Microsoft. Gates has supported a ballot initiative to raise taxes on the rich. Gates also has spent money to preserve the estate tax.

The second richest man in America is Warren Buffett. Buffett loves taxes on rich businessmen so much that Barack Obama has named a tax on rich businessmen after Warren Buffett. He’s with Gates on keeping the death tax.

Third place is Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. I can’t find his statements on taxes, but his political giving  of the last 20 months — all to Democrats, including Harry Reid — doesn’t suggest someone desperately trying to lower taxes.

Numbers 4, 5, and 8 — Charles and David Koch and Sheldon Adelson — seem to hold the views on taxes and regulation Yglesias attributes to all rich businessmen. But the rest of the top 10 haven’t been reading enough Yglesias to know where they’re supposed to “inevitably” end up.

The Waltons of Wal-Mart wealth are generally conservative, but their company is hardly hammering away for “less regulation of their business.” Yglesias knows this, too, because when Wal-Mart called for a mandate on employers like Wal-Mart, requiring them to provide health-care for employees, the announcement was made in conjunction with Yglesias’s employer CAP, and Yglesias touted it as “an important sign that change is in the air.” Wal-Mart has also lobbied for a higher minimum wage.

Oh, and the only really rich businessman in the Forbes Top 10 I haven’t named yet?

George Soros.

I don’t really have to touch that one, do I?

For all of the class-warfare rhetoric, rich people are mostly Democrats. Why? Well, it might be because, for all of the class-warfare rhetoric, Democrats of the upper class are really most comfortable with other upper-class Democrats. AlGore wrings his hands about global warming and air pollution while living in a ‘house’ that uses as much electricity as a small city. No Kennedy or Rockefeller now living has ever worked a day at a Real Job in his (or her) life. Any objective review of the available evidence will show that Democrats are far more the Party of the Rich than Republicans ever were. Just look at the chief modern icons of each party: Ronald Reagan worked his way up from poverty out in Flyover Country, while FDR was born with a silver spoon in every available orifice with a set left over for his lovely wife Eleanor.

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Some people just have no sense of humor.

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When someone predicts that “our soils will become barren” and “the dairy industry will be destroyed,” it’s best to sit up and take notice; a wrathful god wielding some sort of cattle plague is probably in the vicinity. But in 1886, the year those threats were registered with the U.S. House of Representatives, the source of deadly danger wasn’t a peeved deity. It was margarine.

As Hayek pointed out, the worst monopolies are the ones created by the government.

I remember TV ads that compared margarine to ‘the higher-priced spread’; by law, they couldn’t say ‘butter’. Fortunately, we got better.

Making a cheap thing artificially expensive is a great way to create the conditions for a black market. And lo and behold, by 1915 the United States government was deep into the business of locking up folks like oleomargarine bootlegger Charles Wille in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. He was joined by one John L. McMonigle, who served nearly a year for spread-related crimes, and many, many others.

Can you say ‘Prohibition’? Can you say ‘War on Drugs’? I’m sure you can.

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For decades, families fled the dense urban grid for newer types of neighborhoods that felt safer, more private, even pastoral. Through their research, Garrick and colleague Wesley Marshall are now making the argument that we got it all wrong: We’ve really been designing communities that make us drive more, make us less safe, keep us disconnected from one another, and that may even make us less healthy.

And why was that?

The Federal Housing Authority embraced the cul-de-sac and published technical bulletins in the 1930s that painted the urban street grid as monotonous, unsafe, and characterless. Government pamphlets literally showed illustrations of the two neighborhood designs with the words “bad” and “good” printed alongside them.

The FHA had a hand in developing tens of millions of new properties and mortgages, and its idiosyncratic design preferences evolved into regulation. From the 1950s until the late 1980s, there were almost no new housing developments in the U.S. built on a simple grid.

Your tax dollars at work. Whenever the government gets involved, what happens is that a bunch of ‘experts’ decide what’s best for everybody, and so everybody has to do it that way. And when the experts prove to be wrong, as almost inevitably happens, everybody suffers.

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Yesterday police in Springfield, Oregon, acting on a tip from the FBI, broke into a man’s condominium to prevent him from killing himself. They believed the situation was urgent because the man had purchased a mail-order suicide kit. Seven months ago. For a local newspaper reporter who was doing a story about suicide kits.

Well, you don’t want to rush these things….

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Amazon on Wednesday announced the launch of its previously-promised Kindle library lending, which will allow Kindle and Kindle app users alike to borrow ebooks from 11,000 local libraries in the United States.

Read it.

The autopsy results from the death of Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic drifter who was allegedy beaten to death by Fullerton, California police will be announced today by Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. Rackauckas will also announce whether he will file charges against the officers involved in Thomas’ death, following the office’s investigation. The confrontation with police took place at a municipal bus station on July 5, with Thomas dying in the hospital five days later. This press conference comes weeks after the Fullerton police  refused to answer questions about the case.

Of course, if this had happened in a Red State (Texas, say), the Lamestream Media would be wall-to-wall with hand-wringing about those red-necked, cousin-screwin’, cigar-chompin’, KKK-robe-wearin’, firehose and police dog deployin’ barbarians in whatever Wide Spot Police Department was responsible.

Have you heard anything about this case other than here? Anywhere? I thought not.

Of course, the Left Coast suburb of Fullerton couldn’t possibly have anything like that happen.

Read it.

Hundreds of Tunisians protested against their imminent repatriation by setting fire to the reception centre they were being held in on the remote Italian island of Lampedusa.

That’s gratitude for you. I wonder how they’d like spending the rest of their time out in the open air, having burned down the accommodation provided for them? But, of course, not being Muslims, the Italians wouldn’t do that.

Nor would they do what they ought to do, which is take them back to North Africa where they belong.

Read it.

Just before students began returning to classes, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a new policy that would require all group health care plans provided by employers – including many Catholic institutions – to cover prescription contraceptives and sterilization for women.

And free pork chops to all yeshivas and madrassas! Is this a great country, or what?

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Every election season, a variety of newspapers and other entities set themselves up as arbiters of the accuracy of politicians’ statements. These “fact-checkers” nearly always turn out to be liberal apologists who don a false mantle of objectivity in order to advance the cause of the Democratic Party. Maybe there are exceptions, but I can’t think of one offhand.

A quick review of the media will reveal that these self-styled ‘fact checkers’ check only those on the right, never those on the left. And yet this is what passes for journalism these days.

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This is Willis’ first Robert Heinlein award, though she is the recipient of numerous Hugo Awards (11), Locus Awards (11), and Nebula Awards (8). Her most recent book is the multiple award-winning two-part time traveling novel ‘Blackout/All Clear’.

And well deserved, too. Connie Willis has been consistently one of the best authors in the field, and is on my small ‘buy automatically’ list.

Read it.

Jonah Goldberg is always worth reading.

But it’s worth noting that when we say there’s no such thing as shovel ready jobs it’s not like saying there’s no such thing as the bogeyman or unicorns or good flan. Those things don’t exist, period. But shovel ready jobs do exist. Drive by your local Home Depot and hire some day laborers. Take them to your back yard and say “I’ll give you $50 to dig a hole.” Guess what? They’ll dig a hole.

What we don’t have is shovel ready government. The only impediment to shoveling is, simply, government. It is government that requires employers to jump through hoops for months to get the right paperwork. It is government that imposes costs on hiring and working. Some of those costs may be warranted, even if the delays are not. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are countless shovel ready jobs, shovel ready workers, and shovel ready shovels. What we don’t have are shovel ready bureaucrats. And that is something Obama could change if he wanted. He is perfectly placed to pursue shovel ready government if he wanted to. But he doesn’t, for political and ideological reasons, as well as a more basic failure of imagination.

Read it.

Men are dropping out. They do this for many reasons.

The same proportion of men are dropping out in Western Europe and Japan, for example. Over a million young men are Hikkimori — they don’t leave their rooms. They have no jobs. They have no life. And nobody can deal with it.

 

Read it.

The HEXAGON’s twin optical bar panoramic mirror cameras rotated as the swept back and forth as the satellite flew over Earth, a process that intelligence officials referred to as “mowing the lawn.”

Each 6-inch wide frame of HEXAGON film capturing a wide swath of terrain covering 370 nautical miles — the distance from Cincinnati to Washington — on each pass over the former Soviet Union and China. The satellites had a resolution of about 2 to 3 feet (0.6 to nearly 1 meter), according to the NRO.

In other words, they could probably tell what kind of car you were driving.

In a fascinating footnote, the film bucket from the first KH-9 HEXAGON sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in spring 1972 after Air Force recovery aircraft failed to snag the bucket’s parachute.

The film inside the protective bucket reported contained high resolution photographs of the Soviet Union’s submarine bases and missile silos. In a daredevil feat of clandestine ingenuity, the U.S. Navy’s Deep Submergence Vehicle Trieste II succeeded in grasping the bucket from a depth of 3 miles below the ocean.

As I recall, the film Ice Station Zebra (with Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, and Patrick McGoohan) was based on something similar.

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A 90-year-old Brazilian man has fathered at least 50 children by four different women – including his sister-in-law and his mother-in-law.

Must be that funky Latin beat.

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Results from the Reason-Rupe poll actually demonstrate a willingness by a majority of Americans to increase taxes on the “wealthy.” However these preferences depend greatly on how one defines wealthy. The poll asked the standard question “Do you think the federal government should increase taxes on the wealthy,” with 69 percent in favor and 28 percent opposed. However, respondents in favor were then asked what household income they would use to define someone who is wealthy and should therefore pay higher taxes. Respondents consistently listed incomes that were above their own, even high-income respondents, suggesting that people may want to raise taxes, but just not on themselves.

Funny thing about that.

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A new federal proposal to give all patients in the U.S. direct electronic access to their lab results could make it easier to track important health markers like cholesterol levels and the body’s response to blood thinners – – with an iPhone.

The  rules proposed by the Dept. of Health and Human Services are part of a broader effort to give patients more access to their own medical data, so they can become more engaged in their care. They would replace a confusing patchwork of state laws and privacy statutes  and affect more than six billion lab tests a year.

Read it.

If everybody did things the Texas way, we’d all be better off.

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How can that be? According to the Democrats, billionaires are all Republicans!

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Waiting for some Muslim to paint a swastika on it….

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A fun game that everyone can play.

‘… our President would have a pair.’

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You first.

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In one of those freak accidents that sometimes occur in science, where someone is looking at something for one purpose and finds another for it, Dan O’Sullivan has found a use for a byproduct of harmless bacteria commonly found in the human gut; called bisin, it appears to work as a sort of super-preservative for meat, dairy and eggs, allowing them to go unspoiled for perhaps years.

Jerry Pournelle at his finest.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

 First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

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Two thirds of EU officials are cashing in on an expat perk that gives them an extra 16 per cent on top of their salary for their entire working life at a cost of £200 million a year.

As Jerry Pournelle often observes, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.

And, as John Derbyshire (Patron Saint of Dyspepsia) always says, ‘Get a government job!’.

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South Africa’s foreign minister spent £20,000 on a private jet after getting into a shouting match with security officials at Oslo airport when she refused to let them X-ray her handbag, it has emerged.

Well, let’s see what we can observe from this incident.

1. Members of the Crust have no hesitation in squandering taxpayers’ money to suit their own convenience.
2. Even members of the Crust can run afoul of the Security State.
3. Diplomatic immunity doesn’t mean what it used to.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt does a spit-take.

While I definitely don’t agree with famed 7th Circuit appeals court judge Richard Posner on everything, he’s generally recognized as a smart judge with a strong libertarian belief and a recognition and understanding of real economic issues. However, there are a few times when he seems to just reach a weird conclusion.

I like Judge Posner more than Mike does, apparently, but I have to agree with him this time.

We’re talking about recording public officials who are paid with taxpayer dollarsdoing a job in public, and Posner is worried about their privacy rights? Wouldn’t it be a goodthing for reporters and bloggers to be “snooping around” police if it turns up problems or corruption?

Well, yeah….

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

According to Turkish press, as quoted by Ynet, the Turkish air force will be fitting its F-16 fighter jets with new IFF systems, which will not treat the signal from an Israeli IFF transponder as friendly, and will thus facilitate more efficient attack.  The F-16’s original IFF system is made to US/NATO specifications, and identifies an Israeli IFF response as friendly.  This creates an inconvenient requirement to override the system’s restrictions preventing engagement of friendly aircraft, in order to fire on an Israeli plane.

Why Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has never been clear to me.

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Did you know that it is a crime to tell a lie to the federal government? Even if your lie is oral and not under oath? Even if you have received no warnings of any kind? Even if you are not trying to cheat the government out of money? Even if the government is not actually misled by your falsehood? Well it is.

The best option is to do a Sgt. Schultz: Say nothing.

For example, if you lie to your employer on your time and attendance records and, unbeknownst to you, he submits your records, along with those of other employees, to the federal government pursuant to some regulatory duty, you could be criminally liable.

‘Oh, but I have nothing to hide. I want to cooperate.’ Two words: Martha Stewart. Not enough? Two more: Scooter Libby.

It may be true that most federal agents and prosecutors are decent people who would not intentionally abuse Section 1001. Moreover, it is very important from a law enforcement perspective for federal agents to be able to informally question witnesses during the initial stages of an investigation. And certainly citizens are under no obligation to speak to a law enforcement agent in the first place, although, as shown below, it is essential to learn how to decline to speak to government officers. But power corrupts, and the potential for abuse of this statute is great, especially during periods of public outcry over corporate and other white-collar crimes. When we reflect upon how many petty rules and regulations get broken and how many white lies are told during the course of an average American business day, it is apparent that Section 1001 can easily be applied and misapplied to normally upstanding folk.

Do you really want your future to depend on the honor or honesty of a government employee? Three letters: TSA.

Keep it zipped. No exceptions.

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Israeli security forces have broken up 13 Hamas terrorist cells in the West Bank since May, according to a report released this week by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

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Perry told the students, “God uses broken people to reach a broken world.” What does that even mean?

Well, Maureen, for Christians, of which I realize you are not one, it means that people are broken and the world is broken but nevertheless God uses the one to attempt to improve the other.

It would probably help if you used as much effort to understand the people you cover as you do to keep up with What’s Happenin’ Now on the Upper West Side.

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Over 46 million people are living in poverty, 2.6 million more than in 2009 and the poverty rate has reached 15.1 percent.

This is the sort of drivel that gets you tenure at Princeton. One would think that a professor of history and public policy at the third best university in the country could look behind the numbers from the Census Bureau and realize that 46 million people are not living in poverty, but merely qualify for the Census Bureau’s rather fanciful notion of ‘living below the poverty line’, i.e. prior to accounting for government benefits. Having failed that threshold, the rest of his article is dreck — and tendentious dreck, at that; it’s obvious what agenda he’s pushing.

Which makes this particular paragraph especially ludicrous:

Despite the enormity of this social problem, American politicians in either party rarely discuss the subject. Since the poor don’t tend to vote in high rates or contribute much in campaign funds, they don’t get a place at the table in Washington, D.C. Yet with the U.S. poverty rate being the highest in the developed world according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, this statistic marks a terrible failure for the nation as a whole.

Funny, you can’t spit on a page of the New York Times without hitting a Democrat politician wringing his hands (or a leftist professor wringing his hands) about the problem of poverty in the U.S. Perhaps the poor don’t tend to vote in high rates — although, with ACORN, those who do get an opportunity to make up for the ones who don’t — or contribute much in campaign funds, they nevertheless seem to be a very handy excuse for politicians looking for every new and clever ways to dip their hands in the wallets of working people.

And this is despite there being a ‘war on poverty’ in this country since the Johnson administration, a war that has cost to date multiple trillions of dollars. It would seem that the failure is not one for the ‘nation as a whole’, but rather a failure on the part of politicians who keep spending money without anything to show for it.

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An excellent example of how the Aggregation Fallacy can infect even the Wall Street Journal.

David Brooks, actually making sense for once. Enjoy it while you can.

Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future. That’s fine. Optimistic people rise in this world. The problem comes when these optimists don’t look at themselves objectively from the outside.

The planning fallacy is failing to think realistically about where you fit in the distribution of people like you. As Kahneman puts it, “People who have information about an individual case rarely feel the need to know the statistics of the class to which the case belongs.”

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The world is full of pointless activity.

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We’ve been puzzling over the Author’s Guild’s decision to sue several university libraries for participating in the digitization and storage of millions of works (largely in connection with the Google Books project) and making scans of some of those works available to the academic community. Simply put, it appears that the Guild is dead set on wasting time and money addressing imaginary harms, whether or not its efforts might actually benefit either its members or the public.

What puzzles me is why anybody pays attention to a group suing on behalf of people who are not members of their group. How do they have what we lawyers like to call ‘standing’?

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We have the technology.

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His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like
underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy
who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those
boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at
high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one
of those boxes with a pinhole in it.