On our way home we included a German University town, being wishful to obtain an insight into the ways of student life, a curiosity that the courtesy of German friends enabled us to gratify.
The English boy plays till he is fifteen, and works thence till twenty. In Germany it is the child that works; the young man that plays. The German boy goes to school at seven o’clock in the summer, at eight in the winter, and at school he studies. The result is that at sixteen he has a thorough knowledge of the classics and mathematics, knows as much history as any man compelled to belong to a political party is wise in knowing, together with a thorough grounding in modern languages. Therefore his eight College Semesters, extending over four years, are, except for the young man aiming at a professorship, unnecessarily ample. He is not a sportsman, which is a pity, for he should make good one. He plays football a little, bicycles still less; plays French billiards in stuffy cafés more. But generally speaking he, or the majority of him, lays out his time bummeling, beer drinking, and fighting. If he be the son of a wealthy father he joins a Korps — to belong to a crack Korps costs about four hundred pounds a year. If he be a middle-class young man, he enrols himself in a Burschenschaft, or a Landsmannschaft, which is a little cheaper. These companies are again broken up into smaller circles, in which attempt is made to keep to nationality. There are the Swabians, from Swabia; the Frankonians, descendants of the Franks; the Thuringians, and so forth. In practice, of course, this results as all such attempts do result — I believe half our Gordon Highlanders are Cockneys — but the picturesque object is obtained of dividing each University into some dozen or so separate companies of students, each one with its distinctive cap and colours, and, quite as important, its own particular beer hall, into which no other student wearing his colours may come.
The chief work of these student companies is to fight among themselves, or with some rival Korps or Schaft, the celebrated German Mensur.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, 1914.
September 20, 2015
QotD: German schooling
September 18, 2015
QotD: “… on the shoulders of giants”
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants is correct as far as it goes, but it gives dullards the wrong idea. Those giants don’t hoist you up there for a piggy back. You have to climb up them like a kitten that hasn’t been fed yet, and the giants swat at you while you make the ascent. Once you’re standing on their shoulders, you realize that the giants are drunk half the time and palsied the rest. They were only giants because you were so short. You can’t see as far as you had hoped. There’s a lot of work left to do.
Nobody understands that you have to be able to do it first. You can’t deconstruct a goddamned thing until you can do it, and if you could do it, you wouldn’t get the urge to deconstruct it. Frank Gehry can’t design a proper two-holer so he designs giant monstrosities to hide the fact.
Politics is the same. You will never elect anyone to take the government apart. Once you know how to work it well enough to get in charge of it, you don’t want to wreck it. You want to lord over it and add to it. No one wants the bulldozed empty lot where a Post Office once stood to be named after them. Humans don’t work that way.
Sippican Cottage, “The Cover Charge to Greatness”, Sippican Cottage, 2015-08-23.
September 17, 2015
The rise of the Millennials Snake People
Earlier this year, Eric Bailey released a Chrome extension that replaces the word “Millennials” with “Snake People”. I was reminded of this in an article I read the other day where the author had struck out the phrase “Baby Boomers” and replaced it with “Locust Generation“:
The Internet has been saturated for years with videos and photos of cats. This summer, it is also filled with snake people.
For the thousands of Internet users who have downloaded a browser extension called “Millennials to Snake People,” any online use of the word “millennial,” a common term for people born in the 1980s and 1990s, is automatically changed to “snake person.” An extension is a small software program that modifies an Internet browser such as Google ’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox. Related terms are also altered: “Great recession” becomes “time of shedding and cold rocks,” and “Occupy Wall Street” turns into “Great Ape-Snake War.”
Web designer Eric Bailey, 33 years old, said he created the extension to amuse himself. “I saw one crazy-titled headline too many,” he said. “A lot of these articles speak of [millennials] in terms of this weird, dehumanized, alien phenomenon.”
The joke caught on quickly. Mr. Bailey launched the extension for Chrome in April, and others later adapted it for download in Firefox and Apple’s Safari. The Chrome extension has nearly 12,000 users, while a competing extension that turns “millennial” into “pesky whipper-snapper” has about 2,000.
September 13, 2015
Lord of the Flies, re-imagined for today
In The New Yorker, Joe Keohane gives us an updated, modernized version of William Golding’s 1954 book:
By the time Ralph finished blowing the conch, a large crowd had formed.
“Well, then,” he said, clearing his throat. “First rule: we can’t have everyone talking at once.”
Jack was on his feet. “We’ll have rules!” he yelled excitedly. “Lots of rules!”
Ralph explained, “We need to have ‘hands up,’ like at school. Then I’ll pass the conch.”
“Conch?” someone asked.
“That’s what this shell’s called,” Ralph said. “I’ll give the conch to the next person to speak. He can hold it while he’s speaking. And he won’t be interrupted, except by me.”
“Just because we’re stranded doesn’t give you the right to use non-inclusive language,” Jack said.
The littluns muttered in assent.
“Uh, O.K.,” Ralph said. “So he or she can hold this conch when he or she is …”
“He or she,” a littlun cried, “imposes a binary view of sexuality that excludes the gender-non-conforming.”
“I feel unsafe!” Percival whimpered.
“O.K.,” Ralph said. “During assembly, any person who holds the conch—”
“Excuse me,” Roger began, “remind us again why you get to interrupt us even if you don’t have the conch?”
“Because I’m the chief,” Ralph said. “I was chosen.”
“By whom?”
“By you.”
“I didn’t vote for you,” Roger said, with a frown.
“We had a vote. The majority rules.”
“Oh, that’s brilliant — the majority,” Jack scoffed. The littluns tittered. “If anything, that means you have even less of a right to interrupt than we do!” Jack faced the others. “If you agree with me, wiggle your fingers.”
They wiggled their fingers.
“Look, I’m trying to get us rescued by the grownups,” Ralph said, gesturing toward a plane that had been circling the island for some time, and now seemed to be flying away.
“You are speaking from a position of privilege,” Jack said, “so you have no right to criticize us or tell us what to do.”
QotD: The fine art of speaking foreign languages
We slept that night at Barr, a pleasant little town on the way to St. Ottilienberg, an interesting old convent among the mountains, where you are waited upon by real nuns, and your bill made out by a priest. At Barr, just before supper a tourist entered. He looked English, but spoke a language the like of which I have never heard before. Yet it was an elegant and fine-sounding language. The landlord stared at him blankly; the landlady shook her head. He sighed, and tried another, which somehow recalled to me forgotten memories, though, at the time, I could not fix it. But again nobody understood him.
“This is damnable,” he said aloud to himself.
“Ah, you are English!” exclaimed the landlord, brightening up.
“And Monsieur looks tired,” added the bright little landlady. “Monsieur will have supper.”
They both spoke English excellently, nearly as well as they spoke French and German; and they bustled about and made him comfortable. At supper he sat next to me, and I talked to him.
“Tell me,” I said — I was curious on the subject — “what language was it you spoke when you first came in?”
“German,” he explained.
“Oh,” I replied, “I beg your pardon.”
“You did not understand it?” he continued.
“It must have been my fault,” I answered; “my knowledge is extremely limited. One picks up a little here and there as one goes about, but of course that is a different thing.”
“But they did not understand it,” he replied, “the landlord and his wife; and it is their own language.”
“I do not think so,” I said. “The children hereabout speak German, it is true, and our landlord and landlady know German to a certain point. But throughout Alsace and Lorraine the old people still talk French.”
“And I spoke to them in French also,” he added, “and they understood that no better.”
“It is certainly very curious,” I agreed.
“It is more than curious,” he replied; “in my case it is incomprehensible. I possess a diploma for modern languages. I won my scholarship purely on the strength of my French and German. The correctness of my construction, the purity of my pronunciation, was considered at my college to be quite remarkable. Yet, when I come abroad hardly anybody understands a word I say. Can you explain it?”
“I think I can,” I replied. “Your pronunciation is too faultless. You remember what the Scotsman said when for the first time in his life he tasted real whisky: ‘It may be puir, but I canna drink it’; so it is with your German. It strikes one less as a language than as an exhibition. If I might offer advice, I should say: Mispronounce as much as possible, and throw in as many mistakes as you can think of.”
It is the same everywhere. Each country keeps a special pronunciation exclusively for the use of foreigners — a pronunciation they never dream of using themselves, that they cannot understand when it is used. I once heard an English lady explaining to a Frenchman how to pronounce the word Have.
“You will pronounce it,” said the lady reproachfully, “as if it were spelt H-a-v. It isn’t. There is an ‘e’ at the end.”
“But I thought,” said the pupil, “that you did not sound the ‘e’ at the end of h-a-v-e.”
“No more you do,” explained his teacher. “It is what we call a mute ‘e’; but it exercises a modifying influence on the preceding vowel.”
Before that, he used to say “have” quite intelligently. Afterwards, when he came to the word he would stop dead, collect his thoughts, and give expression to a sound that only the context could explain.
Putting aside the sufferings of the early martyrs, few men, I suppose, have gone through more than I myself went through in trying to I attain the correct pronunciation of the German word for church — “Kirche”. Long before I had done with it I had determined never to go to church in Germany, rather than be bothered with it.
“No, no,” my teacher would explain — he was a painstaking gentleman; “you say it as if it were spelt K-i-r-c-h-k-e. There is no k. It is—.” And he would illustrate to me again, for the twentieth time that morning, how it should be pronounced; the sad thing being that I could never for the life of me detect any difference between the way he said it and the way I said it. So he would try a new method.
“You say it from your throat,” he would explain. He was quite right; I did. “I want you to say it from down here,” and with a fat forefinger he would indicate the region from where I was to start. After painful efforts, resulting in sounds suggestive of anything rather than a place of worship, I would excuse myself.
“I really fear it is impossible,” I would say. “You see, for years I have always talked with my mouth, as it were; I never knew a man could talk with his stomach. I doubt if it is not too late now for me to learn.”
By spending hours in dark corners, and practising in silent streets, to the terror of chance passers-by, I came at last to pronounce this word correctly. My teacher was delighted with me, and until I came to Germany I was pleased with myself. In Germany I found that nobody understood what I meant by it. I never got near a church with it. I had to drop the correct pronunciation, and painstakingly go back to my first wrong pronunciation. Then they would brighten up, and tell me it was round the corner, or down the next street, as the case might be.
I also think pronunciation of a foreign tongue could be better taught than by demanding from the pupil those internal acrobatic feats that are generally impossible and always useless. This is the sort of instruction one receives:
“Press your tonsils against the underside of your larynx. Then with the convex part of the septum curved upwards so as almost—but not quite — to touch the uvula, try with the tip of your tongue to reach your thyroid. Take a deep breath, and compress your glottis. Now, without opening your lips, say ‘Garoo.’”
And when you have done it they are not satisfied.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, 1914.
September 12, 2015
QotD: “Carbon offsets are dumb”
“Well if you want to be greener perhaps we could look at carbon offsets.”
“Carbon Offsets,” I say, working up a head of steam, “are dumb. I could word it better than that but it’s so dumb that the people that support it wouldn’t understand those words.”
“What’s wrong with carbon offsets?”
“Analogy-wise, paying someone in South America to grow trees so that I can burn trees is a bit like me paying someone in Uganda 10 quid to be good to someone else so that the PFY can punch you and the Boss here in the face.”
“I think that’s being rather simplistic — carbon offsets will negate the harm you do in the shorter term while you look for better alternatives,” says the Architect.
“Yes, but it doesn’t cancel it out geographically. If that were the case I could pay someone in Africa to filter water while I pee in your bathtub!”
“They could pay me to do their carbon offsets,” the PFY suggests.
“You don’t have sustainable forestry plantations,” the Architect blurts.
“Yes I do, I have acres of them in Scotland,” the PFY lies.
“Are they CDM approved?”
“Of course.”
“So I could actually go and see them?”
“Absolutely. In fact I would insist upon it. You, me, possibly the Boss, a shovel, some lime — it would make a great day out!”
It appears stupidity does know some bounds as our greenie takes on a little of the colour after doing some mental arithmetic.
“I think we’ll just stick to the original plan.”
“Well, have at it, maestro!” I say, gesturing for the PFY that it’s time to be moving on.
“Nutters!” the PFY says as we exit the meeting room.
“No,” the Boss says. “It’s very important to the board. They want to be carbon-neutral by 2040.”
“You mean after they’re all dead — with some token greenification stuff to happen in the next 20 years and all the major changes left till the last few years?” I suggest. “I’m surprised they even stumped up the cash for the consultation.”
“Oh, they didn’t,” the Boss says. “Our director put up 70k of our equipment budget, given that IT is one of the highest power consumers.”
“70k — of OUR budget you mean.”
“It’s not really your money, it’s the company’s!”
. . .
Ten minutes later I’m sending 100 quid to Uganda and the PFY to the Director’s office…
Simon Travaglia, “BOFH: On the PFY’s Scottish estate, no one can hear you scream…”, The Register, 2014-03-21.
September 10, 2015
Rob Paravonian has a thing about Pachelbel
Uploaded on 21 Nov 2006
A comedian rants about how much it sucks to play Pachelbel’s Canon in D on a cello. Recorded live at Penn State, this piece by comedian/musician Rob Paravonian has been a favorite on the Dr. Demento Show.
H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.
September 8, 2015
Helpful wine pairings for parents
The Rambling Redhead offers wine pairing advice for parents:
1. Riesling pairs perfectly with an explosive poopy diaper.
If your newborn baby had an explosive bowel movement, leaving your hands literally shit-stained from the yellow substance we call “poop”, we suggest chugging a glass of Riesling immediately. Riesling is refreshing, tends to be sweet and has a low acidity level. You’ve handled enough liquid that smelled of pure acid today, so kick back and enjoy this smooth, light wine that usually possesses the smell of apples. How lovely.
2. Chardonnay goes great with a middle schooler’s attitude adjustment.
If your middle-school child, let’s call her Megan, gave you non-stop attitude today and yelled the words, “You’re the worst parent ever!” or “Why can’t you be cool, like Addison’s mom?!” then you would most likely benefit from a good buzz. We recommend Chardonnay for your drinking pleasure this evening. Chardonnay has been described as tasting sweet like various melons and has a subtle creaminess. Subtle creaminess sounds divine. Megan’s insults sound annoying.
[…]
5. Pinot Noir goes well with dented or scratched vehicles.
If your teenager was involved in a minor “fender-bender” today (aka – she backed her new car into your car that was parked in the driveway) then we recommend a Pinot Noir. This wine is very delicate and fresh, unlike your daughter, whose sole purpose in life seems to be attempting to destroy all of the cars you own. The tannins in this wine are very soft, making it the opposite of bitter. Nobody needs a dry wine when their daughter is constantly participating in a real-life game of bumper cars…. you’re already bitter enough, thanks to her.
September 6, 2015
QotD: Picking wild fruit
One afternoon in the course of a climb we emerged upon a plateau, where we lingered perhaps too long, eating more fruit than may have been good for us; it was so plentiful around us, so varied. We commenced with a few late strawberries, and from those we passed to raspberries. Then Harris found a greengage-tree with some early fruit upon it, just perfect.
“This is about the best thing we have struck,” said George; “we had better make the most of this.” Which was good advice, on the face of it.
“It is a pity,” said Harris, “that the pears are still so hard.”
He grieved about this for a while, but later on came across some remarkably fine yellow plums and these consoled him somewhat.
“I suppose we are still a bit too far north for pineapples,” said George. “I feel I could just enjoy a fresh pineapple. This commonplace fruit palls upon one after a while.”
“Too much bush fruit and not enough tree, is the fault I find,” said Harris. “Myself, I should have liked a few more greengages.”
“Here is a man coming up the hill,” I observed, “who looks like a native. Maybe, he will know where we can find some more greengages.”
“He walks well for an old chap,” remarked Harris.
He certainly was climbing the hill at a remarkable pace. Also, so far as we were able to judge at that distance, he appeared to be in a remarkably cheerful mood, singing and shouting at the top of his voice, gesticulating, and waving his arms.
“What a merry old soul it is,” said Harris; “it does one good to watch him. But why does he carry his stick over his shoulder? Why doesn’t he use it to help him up the hill?”
“Do you know, I don’t think it is a stick,” said George.
“What can it be, then?” asked Harris.
“Well, it looks to me,” said George, “more like a gun.”
“You don’t think we can have made a mistake?” suggested Harris. “You don’t think this can be anything in the nature of a private orchard?”
I said: “Do you remember the sad thing that happened in the South of France some two years ago? A soldier picked some cherries as he passed a house, and the French peasant to whom the cherries belonged came out, and without a word of warning shot him dead.”
“But surely you are not allowed to shoot a man dead for picking fruit, even in France?” said George.
“Of course not,” I answered. “It was quite illegal. The only excuse offered by his counsel was that he was of a highly excitable disposition, and especially keen about these particular cherries.”
“I recollect something about the case,” said Harris, “now you mention it. I believe the district in which it happened — the ‘Commune’, as I think it is called — had to pay heavy compensation to the relatives of the deceased soldier; which was only fair.”
George said: “I am tired of this place. Besides, it’s getting late.”
Harris said: “If he goes at that rate he will fall and hurt himself. Besides, I don’t believe he knows the way.”
I felt lonesome up there all by myself, with nobody to speak to. Besides, not since I was a boy, I reflected, had I enjoyed a run down a really steep hill. I thought I would see if I could revive the sensation. It is a jerky exercise, but good, I should say, for the liver.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, 1914.
September 4, 2015
QotD: Joe Biden’s memoirs
I must admit, I have read neither Biden’s memoir nor Dole’s preamble to full erectile function. But I think that the vice president may have a great book in him — not Grant’s memoirs great, but pretty great. I dream of Joe Biden’s writing a postmodern surrealist political manifesto titled Literally Delaware: This Book Has No Subtitle, which I suspect would be colorful reading inasmuch as in his role as under-cretin to the World’s Most Powerful Man™ he has access to the 152-color “Ultimate” Crayola set, though presumably he is allowed to use the included sharpener only under adult supervision. The book would be available only at stores in Amtrak stations and should be read only on the train, a piece of locative literature.
Kevin D. Williamson, “A Plague of Memoirs: A courageously awesome American story of awesomely American courage”, National Review, 2014-10-06.
September 3, 2015
QotD: The lingering malady of poetry
For no man, of course, ever quite gets over poetry. He may seem to have recovered from it, just as he may seem to have recovered from the measles of his school-days, but exact observation teaches us that no such recovery is ever quite perfect; there always remains a scar, a weakness and a memory.
Now, there is reason for maintaining that the taste for poetry, in the process of human development, marks a stage measurably later than the stage of religion. Savages so little cultured that they know no more of poetry than a cow have elaborate and often very ingenious theologies. If this be true, then it follows that the individual, as he rehearses the life of the species, is apt to carry his taste for poetry further along than he carries his religion — that if his development is arrested at any stage before complete intellectual maturity that arrest is far more likely to leave hallucinations.
H.L. Mencken, “The Nature of Faith”, Prejudices, Fourth Series, 1924.
September 2, 2015
QotD: The only four ways to spend money
In Milton Friedman’s 1980 PBS TV series Free To Choose, Friedman drew a simple graph showing that, mathematically, there are only four ways to spend money.
Spending your money on yourself is efficient. Tonight’s Special, prime rib with a small side dish of kale, looks like a good deal.
Spending your money on other people is efficient too. She’ll have the mac and cheese.
Spending other people’s money on yourself is not so efficient. The Wall Street Hedge Fund Managers’ Annual Dinner will be at Maxim’s in Paris.
But spending other people’s money on other people is the way government spending is done. Free caviar for all Americans! Whether they like caviar or not. And get in line because there’s nothing except caviar, and it will be rationed.
P.J. O’Rourke, “My Coffee Klatch With Rand Paul: The Kentucky small-l libertarian (and likely presidential candidate) talks with P.J. O’Rourke about philosophy, money, and hopelessness”, The Daily Beast, 2014-09-27.
August 30, 2015
QotD: The debatable Vosges
Having completed to our satisfaction the Black Forest, we journeyed on our wheels through Alt Breisach and Colmar to Münster; whence we started a short exploration of the Vosges range, where, according to the present German Emperor, humanity stops. Of old, Alt Breisach, a rocky fortress with the river now on one side of it and now on the other — for in its inexperienced youth the Rhine never seems to have been quite sure of its way, — must, as a place of residence, have appealed exclusively to the lover of change and excitement. Whoever the war was between, and whatever it was about, Alt Breisach was bound to be in it. Everybody besieged it, most people captured it; the majority of them lost it again; nobody seemed able to keep it. Whom he belonged to, and what he was, the dweller in Alt Breisach could never have been quite sure. One day he would be a Frenchman, and then before he could learn enough French to pay his taxes he would be an Austrian. While trying to discover what you did in order to be a good Austrian, he would find he was no longer an Austrian, but a German, though what particular German out of the dozen must always have been doubtful to him. One day he would discover that he was a Catholic, the next an ardent Protestant. The only thing that could have given any stability to his existence must have been the monotonous necessity of paying heavily for the privilege of being whatever for the moment he was. But when one begins to think of these things one finds oneself wondering why anybody in the Middle Ages, except kings and tax collectors, ever took the trouble to live at all.
For variety and beauty, the Vosges will not compare with the hills of the Schwarzwald. The advantage about them from the tourist’s point of view is their superior poverty. The Vosges peasant has not the unromantic air of contented prosperity that spoils his vis-a-vis across the Rhine. The villages and farms possess more the charm of decay. Another point wherein the Vosges district excels is its ruins. Many of its numerous castles are perched where you might think only eagles would care to build. In others, commenced by the Romans and finished by the Troubadours, covering acres with the maze of their still standing walls, one may wander for hours.
The fruiterer and greengrocer is a person unknown in the Vosges. Most things of that kind grow wild, and are to be had for the picking. It is difficult to keep to any programme when walking through the Vosges, the temptation on a hot day to stop and eat fruit generally being too strong for resistance. Raspberries, the most delicious I have ever tasted, wild strawberries, currants, and gooseberries, grow upon the hill-sides as black-berries by English lanes. The Vosges small boy is not called upon to rob an orchard; he can make himself ill without sin. Orchards exist in the Vosges mountains in plenty; but to trespass into one for the purpose of stealing fruit would be as foolish as for a fish to try and get into a swimming bath without paying. Still, of course, mistakes do occur.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, 1914.
August 25, 2015
QotD: Poetry
Many years ago, when I was more reckless intellectually than I am today, I proposed the application of Haeckel’s biogenetic law — to wit, that the history of the individual rehearses the history of the species to the domain of ideas. So applied, it leads to some superficially startling but probably quite sound conclusions, for example, that an adult poet is simply an individual in a state of arrested development — in brief, a sort of moron. Just as all of us, in utero, pass through a stage in which we are tadpoles, and almost indistinguishable from the tadpoles which afterward become frogs, so all of us pass through a stage, in our nonage, when we are poets. A youth of seventeen who is not a poet is simply a donkey: his development has been arrested even anterior to that of the tadpole. But a man of fifty who still writes poetry is either an unfortunate who has never developed, intellectually, beyond his teens, or a conscious buffoon who pretends to be something that he isn’t — something far younger and juicier than he actually is […] Something else, of course, may enter into it. The buffoonery may be partly conscious and deliberate, and partly Freudian. Many an aging man keeps on writing poetry simply because it gives him the illusion that he is still young. For the same reason, perhaps, he plays tennis, wears green cravats, and tries to convince himself that he is in love.
H.L. Mencken, “The Nature of Faith”, Prejudices, Fourth Series, 1924.
August 24, 2015
“If you want to understand American elections, read a comic book”
Megan McArdle on the difference between what voters indicate they want from their elected representatives and what they actually get:
Now, you won’t learn much about how politics happens. Politics doesn’t have clear villains or decisive, powerful action. Politics muddles along on a heavily adulterated biofuel composed of interpersonal favor-trading, compromised ideology, soul-sucking proceduralism, and ponderous interest-group mobilization.
But elections — that’s where your back issues of Action Comics will come in handy. They tell you a lot about what voters think.
Voters rally to get a candidate elected, then call on the politician to stop technological change from tanking the local economy, to give them much more generous health care at half the cost of whatever they’ve currently got, to cut their taxes without touching Social Security or Medicare because they earned those benefits, to provide large new entitlements paid for entirely by taxing hedge fund managers, to reform the education system so that all the students will be above average, to defuse conflict in the Middle East and maybe leap some tall buildings in a single bound. You know, the usual.
Time passes. These voters notice that these things have not been done. Obviously, they have elected the wrong superhero. It is time to stop messing around with Squirrel Girl and Jack of Hearts and elect Superman, already. So the story starts all over again.
The tendency of American voters to treat political problems as if they were occurring in an alternate universe was first noted by Matthew Yglesias during the Iraq war debate, when he coined the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, in which the US military has unlimited powers if only it is wielded by someone with sufficient will; Julian Sanchez expanded this to the home front with the Care Bear Stare Theory of Domestic Politics: “They’d line up together and emit a glowing manifestation of their boundless caring, which seemed capable of solving just about any problem.” Sound familiar? If only people cared enough.
