Neologisms

I got this in an email back in 2007 and printed it off.  It's been floating around my studio now for the last nine years.  Too good to throw out, but not important enough to keep.

Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.
The winners are:
1. Coffee - the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted - appalled over how much weight you've gained.
3. Abdicate - to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade - to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly - impotent.
6. Negligent - describes the condition in which one absentmindedly answers the door in one's nightgown.
7. Lymph - to walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle - olive flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence - an emergency vehicle that picks one up after one has been run over by a steam roller.
10. Balderdash - a rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle - a humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude - the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokémon - a Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster - one who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism - the belief that, when you die, your soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent - an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

The Washington Post's Style Invitation also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
The winners are:
1. Bozone - the substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.  The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the future.
2. Foreploy - any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
3. Cashtration - the act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
4. Giraffiti - vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
5. Sarchasm - the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
6. Inoculatte - to take coffee intravenously when one is running late.
7. Hipatitis - terminal coolness.
8. Osteopornosis - a degenerate disease.
9. Karmageddon - it's, like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right?  And then, like, the Earth explodes, and it's, like, a serious bummer.
10. Decafalon - the grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
11. - Glibido - all talk and no action.
12. - Arachnoleptic fit - the frantic dance performed after walking through a spider web.
13. - Dopeler effect - the tendancy of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
14. - Beelzebug - Satan in the form of a mosquito in your bedroom at 3am which cannot be cast out.
15. - Caterpallor - the color one turns after finding half a worm in the fruit one is eating.

Lindsay Graham

Well, this is fun. Senator Lindsay Graham shows us that he's not completely nuts.

Divide and Conquer

Using racism to divide and conquer

Tim Wise talks about how the elite have historically used racism to divide and conquer.

Posted by Reggie Hood on Sunday, March 13, 2016

The Socialist Candidate of Foxworld

In Foxworld, Bernie Sanders is planning to take half your money and stuff and give it to the undeserving poor.

In Foxworld, this is "Socialism."

The Methodology of Brad DeLong

"In general, when I embark on an understanding-and-critique task, I find myself in one of four situations. Sometimes the people I am reading are not as smart as I am and have not done their homework: they are my lawful prey. Sometimes the people are smarter than I am but have not done their homework: I critique them by doing yet more homework. Sometimes the people have done their homework but are not as smart as I am: I critique them by working hard to be smart.
"And sometimes the people are smarter than I am and done their homework. Then I have a very hard task indeed--and readers should understand that for them to bet on the correctness of my conclusions would not be to maximize expected value."
--Brad DeLong

Devolution: Reading List for 3-3-16

"Once they lost power, the GOP elites tried to block Obama by playing up nationalism but convinced themselves it was about conservatism. The Tea Party was supposed to be limited spending! First principles! But it was also about birtherism and death panels and other lies. The Tea Party was really the idea that Obama was taking from people who deserved help—working class whites—and giving to the undeserving.
Now the GOP elites are finding out that more of their voters prefer nationalism to conservatism—and it’s ugly."  - Matt O'Brien

"... the rest of us are not GOP primary voters for a reason. Some of us may want to vote in the Democratic primaries. Some of us may be independents and have to wait to see what dumbasses the parties elect. Some of us may belong to third parties because we’re political idealists/masochists. The point is, we have other plans for the day. They are legit plans. They don’t involve keeping the GOP from setting itself on fire." - John Scalzi

"As we will see, this is a party divided. But this party is not divided on its fundamental doubts and fears about Democratic governance and immigration. It is not divided on supporting leaders who will battle to get illegal immigration under control. That is what Donald Trump understands.
"When we look at the different dimensions of Republican thinking using a factor analysis, the conventional conservative views on national defense, regulation, markets and taxes just are not that important at the moment.
"The most powerful dimension of Republican thinking is defined by Republican voter hostility to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, the Affordable Care Act, President Obama and his attacks on the Constitution. That one dimension explains more than twice as much of the variation in GOP thinking as the next strongest dimension." - Stanley Greenberg and James Carville

"Finally, by squeezing wages and rigging the economic game in your favor, you have invited an unprecedented political backlash – against trade, immigration, globalization, and even against the establishment itself.
"The pent-up angers and frustrations of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever yet getting nowhere, and who feel more economically insecure than ever, have finally erupted. American politics has become a cesspool of vitriol." - Robert Reich

The Immigrants of Foxworld

In Foxworld, there's a line for immigration.

Stagefright: The Ben Carson Edition

    I got a phone call the other morning from the Ben Carson campaign on my cell phone (wth).  I thought I was prepared for just such an occurrence, but I totally froze up.  I couldn't breathe without huffing, and my lower back tensed up and I felt like someone had kicked me in the kidneys.  The fellow on the phone asked me if I'd be willing to consider voting for Carson in the primaries coming up next Tuesday, and I mumbled something about being a Sanders guy.  He said, oh, okay, but would I at least look at Dr. Carson's platform.
   Now, what I would have liked to have said - what I should have said - was that, yes, I would definitely consider voting for Dr. Carson, but not for reasons that he, the caller, would appreciate.  As a RINO, I really don't want any of the current Republican candidates to win the general election, so I when I vote in the Republican primary, I would be voting for someone who had no chance of winning the general election.  Up until recently there were too many choices.
    In the beginning, there were seventeen republican candidates: sixteen crazy people and George Pataki.  Governor Pataki dropped out early on - not crazy enough to get any support from his party's voters - and, among the crazy people, that left two who had a chance in the general election, Jeb! Bush, and John Kasich.  Jeb! turned out to be beige at its brightest intensity, and had to drop out under the glare of Trump's neon pink.  Eleven others dropped out along the way, and now there are five.  Trump and Cruz are just too scary to contemplate, so that leaves Rubio and Carson.  Rubio is still considered a real candidate in spite of not having reached puberty yet, so Carson is the likeliest to get my vote.
    As I said, the campaign caller would probably not have appreciated that response.  But He did ask me to look at Dr. Carson's platform. Okay.

    I can skip over some of the more entertaining things, like his beliefs about the pyramids, or how much of his personal story turned out to be fabricated, or what his own advisors think of him.  I'm not really a foreign policy guy.  His views on climate change are simultaneously disturbing and amusing.  But my main interest is in his economic plan.  I'm not impressed.

"Under my flat tax, everyone pays the same percentage of income with no deductions, loopholes or shelters. "

    Well, we can pretty much just stop right there.  Flat tax plans are inherently regressive, which means they raise taxes on people who don't have any money while lowering taxes for people who do.  And then there are the massive budget deficits.
    Dr. Carson is basing his plan on the concept of tithing, starting with a 10% rate for everybody.  “You make $10 billion, you pay a billion. You make $10, you pay one.”  (Ultimately the rate on $10 turned out not to be so.)
    During the third Republican debate, Dr. Carson was put on the spot when moderator Becky Quick pointed out that his tax plan would leave a $1.1 trillion dollar hole in the budget. "You would have to cut government by about 40 percent to make it work with a $1.1 trillion hole."  (Politifact says that number would actually be 30%.)  She asked how would that work. He replied that tithing was just an analogy, and that the rate would actually be closer to 15 percent.  When he finally released his plan, the actual number was 14.9%. Carson added that he’d fill the gap through "strategic cutting."
    The Congressional Budget office already projects a $7.2 trillion cumulative deficit over the next 10 years in addition to the deficit Carson's plan would create, so Carson would have to come up with $10 trillion dollars in savings over those ten years to reach a balanced budget.  So, what about that strategic cutting?  He told Marketplace’s Kai Rysdal he plans to direct every government agency to cut 3% or 4% from their budget.  In order for that to work, that 4% figure would also have to apply to Social Security and the military, though the military is not part of the plan.
    When his tax plan was finally revealed, it also showed that in addition to the deficit producing flat tax, he also intends to get rid of taxes on capital gains and dividends, the estate tax and the Alternative Minimum Tax, while allowing businesses to immediately write off the full cost of investments.  All of this is, of course, based on the Supply-Side myth that tax cuts produce growth.
    In spite of all this, I don't believe that his economic plan is the reason he's doing so badly in the polls.  After all his economics only put him on par with his three main rivals (although Ted Cruz is still considered the worst.)  And he believes a lot of the same erroneous ideas that are common among several of my Facebook friends, including my Dad.  Jeff Spross discusses one of those ideas in an article for The Week:

Consider a few quotes Carson gave to Jim Tankersley at The Washington Post: "By the time I was a young attending neurosurgeon, I was really struck by the number of indigent people I saw coming in who were on public assistance, and who were not working," Carson said. "They were able-bodied people, and they were not working. I thought, this is out of whack." This comes amidst a longer lament by Carson about how government aid encourages dependency, and how America has failed to create an "environment that encourages entrepreneurial risk-taking."

There's a pretty simple assumption sitting beneath these observations: Namely, that jobs are available for people, if they were only willing to take the initiative. This idea — that jobs are just magically "there" — is incredibly common in American politics. (Here's a New York Times columnist recently indulging in it.) But this idea is also dead wrong. There is, in fact, a set supply of jobs out there. The macroeconomic policies we collectively choose as a society can certainly increase the set number of jobs, if we choose correctly. But if we choose poorly, there won't be enough jobs for everyone who needs one, no matter how hard we may "encourage" work.

 So I don't believe that his standing in the polls has anything to do with important issues, but regardless, it does help me determine who I will be voting for.  Mr. Carson, I have looked at your platform.  It's really really terrible.  But you've got my vote.
    Or not.