• The underpaid, undermotivated, poorly managed stormtroopers can’t even track down the Empire’s most wanted fugitive androids in an extremely sparsely populated area where they have undisputed control. If Tatooine still had meaningful senatorial representation and local government, Luke never would have gotten off the planet. Whole systems just break away and form not just a resistance, but a giant frickin’ fleet of spaceships that destroy not one, but two death stars. The failure of leadership is so total and complete that Tarkin is killed in his own fortress and the Emperor is murdered in his own office by his own right-hand man.

    The Death Star is a cheaper solution to the problem of projecting imperial power across the galaxy, but cheaper solutions are worthless – and turn out to be much more expensive in the long run – if they don’t work.

  • “I’m a huge Martin Amis fan,” said Simon Rich, a novelist and writer for Saturday Night Live who recently purchased a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, “but I’m a little bit concerned for him. If he wants to be taken seriously as a Brooklyn artist, he’ll need a mustache, and last time I checked he was clean-shaven. It doesn’t matter how good Money was. He needs to grow at least a Fu Manchu or he’ll be laughed off the L train.”

    Informed that Mr. Amis would be living by the F train, Mr. Rich said, “The F’s not as strict but he’ll probably still need some basic muttonchops.”

    —Martin Amis moves to Brooklyn (via authenticityhoax)

  • On the efficacy of herbal medicine:

    Plants have been trying to kill us, not cure us.

    Because they believed in the tooth fairy.

    It was absolute rubbish. They had no idea how the body worked.

    The basic concept that most people have missed is that plants are poisonous.

    In most cases it’s been a myth from day one. Homeopathic medicine is a complete fairy tale.

    Nailing a brick to a wall would have been just as effective.

    The thousands of years of plants being used as medicines have actually taught us very little.

    People have faith in herbal medicine and if you have faith in something then it has an effect. The only thing wrong with [herbal medicine] is that it may have a side effect. Also, you may not be treating the illness.

    I promise you, in 50 to 100 years’ time, people will be as rude about most of the medicines we take today as I am about peony root.

    Dr. Henry Oakeley, the garden fellow at London’s Royal College of Physicians

    via Boing Boing

  • But George W. Bush pushed the wrong cultural buttons; he spoke with a fake drawl; he embraced ersatz middle-American pseudo-Christianity; he mispronounced nuclear. We OPPOSE this WAR BASED ON LIES! But when Barack Obama wades in, they wring their hands. Oh, dear. Oh, my. Qaddafi is killing his own people. God, someone please…

    …Put someone in charge who makes the appropriate cultural signals, and skepticism vanishes. Their is no anti-war movement in America, no “left”–merely an unseemly collection of neoliberal cultural chauvinists, just as eager to cheer on the carnage, so long as it wears the appropriate guise and does not embarrass them at the dinner table.