@7:19PM

I had no idea this existed, but apparently 400 of them were made at the end of 1978 and sold only in Australia.  This one has a 302 Cleveland under the hood and an automatic transmission, but after the first 30, which were built exclusively for race drivers, the next batch to come off the line housed 351 Clevelands and optional 4-speed manual trans.  The dictionary definition of BOSS.

via (and more pics at) Jalopnik 
h/t wiki

1 in 100 American adults is in prison, according to a new study by Pew. 1 in 100. And that vastly understates the depth of the problem. Confine your sample to adult men and it’s one out of 54. Confine it to black men and it’s one out of 15. Many of these men have, of course, committed grave crimes. But many haven’t. Many have been swept up in our ill-fated, poorly conceived drug war. And many have committed minor infractions that the richer — and let’s be honest — the whiter among us regularly get away with.
—Ezra Klein

alexbalk:

…Harvey…Jimmy Stewart…:

My mother used to say to me, ‘Elwood’—she always called me Elwood—‘Elwood, in this world you must be oh-so clever, or oh-so pleasant.’ For years I was clever. I’d recommend pleasant—and you may quote me.

I admire the hell out of that sentiment, and every now and then I actually think about trying to put it into practice, but I know it’s never going to happen. I’m stuck being a smartass, either because I’m too weak, too scared, or too bored to be better.

In my not so secret life, this is a big part of and a big reason for the 2008 Moratorium on Cynicism.  I feel the same way Balk does; I know a lot of my friends/ acquaintances/ generation/ nation/ species do, too.  But if I don’t man up and at least attempt a change in spirit, approach and general disposition, I will, quite literally, internally and spontaneously combust.  Hence the Moratorium on Cynicism.  Man cannot live on snark alone.

alexbalk:

“Exxon Mobil, the giant oil corporation appearing before the Supreme Court yesterday, had earned a profit of nearly $40 billion in 2006, the largest ever reported by a U.S. company — but that’s not what bothered Roberts. What bothered the chief justice was that Exxon was being ordered to pay $2.5 billion — roughly three weeks’ worth of profits — for destroying a long swath of the Alaska coastline in the largest oil spill in American history.

‘So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive-damages awards such as this?’ Roberts asked in court.

The lawyer arguing for the Alaska fishermen affected by the spill, Jeffrey Fisher, had an idea. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it can hire fit and competent people.’”

…[Former CIA officer Marc] Sageman’s harshest judgment is that the United States is making the terrorism problem worse by its actions in Iraq. “Since 2003, the war in Iraq has without question fueled the process of radicalization worldwide, including the U.S. The data are crystal clear,” he writes. We have taken a fire that would otherwise burn itself out and poured gasoline on it.

the Washington Post via The Washington Monthly

One of my favorite bloggers is back after a long absence.  The former Lemon Red.  Welcome back, dude.  There was a discernable void.  Now I just need billups and billmon to come back, and the internets will again be interesting.

Sébastien Tellier - “Kilometer”
from Sexuality

“I would like to make an erotic movie about sportswear and when I do, everybody will be as sexually interested in sportswear as I am.” - Sébastien Tellier

By which what is right for us is right for others, and what is wrong for others is also wrong for us.  John McCain’s rejection of this principle, though it’s couched (unconvincingly, not to mention Orwellianly) in terms of acceptance by completely redefining the principle to mean its exact opposite, puts him on the aggressive end of mainstream elite opinion on this point, pretty much since this nation’s founding.  From our own indigenous population, to Cuba and Central and South America, to Indochina to the Middle East, US administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have consistently impuned the principle of universality through unqualified dedication to American exceptionalism: What we do is right, what our enemies do is wrong, because we are good, and they are evil.

It’s a more nuanced history than that, obviously, but the trend holds up pretty well.  At least the way I understand my American history (i.e., like a damn commie).

Matt Yglesias has more on McCain’s particular fondness for agression and empire:

I’m not sure the point can be made forcefully enough that John McCain is, among practical politicians, perhaps the single most committed advocate of an imperial vision of American foreign policy out there. This case can (and will!) be made at great length, but one quick way of getting at the point is through Teddy Roosevelt.