• Only plays a custom “Devastator” Bass made out of graphite; the current model was made by Bernie Rico, Jr. with an M like body and a cyclops skull on the headstock. It has no tone or volume control knobs because he only plays it on full blast.

    —Jerry Only - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • [T]he problem of fertility in agriculture is deeply unnatural. Nature has inspired many good ideas, like crop rotations and recycling of nutrients [and] these practices, along with reductions in food waste and meat consumption, will be imporant parts of efforts to mitigate the “growing pollution web.” That said, nature does not take an interest in the well-being of humankind, so it seems unwise to expect it to solve the problems that we have created for ourselves. Too much synthetic nitrogen fertilizer causes problems, but that doesn’t mean the solution is to use none at all.

    —An unlikely fix: nitrogen fertilizer and organic agriculture - Inexact Change

  • Al Gore ran on a platform of higher military spending than Bush did. Democrats’ proposed alternative to the 2001 Bush tax cuts involved higher military spending. The mainstream Democratic Party complaint about the Bush administration’s Iraq policy in 2003-2005 was that he hadn’t sent enough soldiers there. In 2004, John Kerry proposed to expand the size of the regular military and to send additional forces to Iraq. […] And here we are in 2013 with Barack Obama proposing to increase spending on (among other things) the military…

    —Political economy of rearmament: Left-wing governments rearm more enthusiastically.

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    I talk a good game about Dune being my favorite movie. Don’t tell anyone, but Do The Right Thing is actually my favorite movie – and the best movie ever made.

  • Exhibit A:

    Since the public response to the pinkification of gender-neutral products seems, at face value, to be universally negative, we were wondering, why do companies keep making these things?

    Exhibit B:

    But Skinnygirl’s outsize sales show why companies will keep making products just for women: because there’s money to be made.

    See also the apocryphal Pauline Kael quote that she “couldn’t believe Nixon had won”, since no one she knew had voted for him.