Happy Thanksgiving, Canada

And hugs to all my friends up there. I'm very thankful to know any, let alone all, of you.

What are you thankful for today?

Government Is Good

There is a longstanding argument made by many conservatives and libertarians that Government Is Bad. (This philosophy tends to be amended or ignored when there's a good war on, or when someone with different beliefs or morals than you needs supervising.) Mostly, they don't like government getting in the way of them making a profit, or being left alone (again, for sufficiently specific values of "alone" -- modern politicians tend not to support laws preventing themselves from doing something).

I disagree pretty much completely. Government, under the American system as written if not as interpreted by BushCo, is We The People, doing collectively what we cannot do individually. Taxes pay for that, a smaller amount from everybody than if we tried to pay for the same services through the private sector. This tends to honk pro-business people off; it's nonprofit! What's up with that?

Anyhow, Ezra Klein linked to a site, and a specific essay, which may make the point better than anything I could ever say or write.

Because, you see, Government Is Good.

Those Who Can't Do, Make "Worst Of" Lists

Blender (a subsidiary of Alpha Media Group and a spinoff of Maxim Magazine, last I checked, so we're not exactly talking the smartest guys in even a small room) names Sting as their Worst Lyricist, invoking his "mountainous pomposity (and) cloying spirituality."

I think they were just pissed because they had to look stuff up to know what the songs were about.

What are your choices for most pretentious lyrics ever, and why? I'd cop to most of the songs in the musical Jekyll/Hyde, because they try to hard so make the Oh So Dramatic Situation as fraught as possible by spelling out every single detail in such a way that you realize the whole show could've been over in one act. Right behind that is "Reflections" from Disney's Mulan, trying to be both generic and specific and managing only to be cloying, and "A Thousand Miles" by Vanessa Carlton, which has all the deep meaning and soul-searching you'd expect from a fifteen-year-old writer of Pokemon fanfic.

(Oy. On the Blender front page, they have an article on Vanessa Carlton. She's into "ass beats". Whatever that may be.)