Internal Monologue

In addition to their other faults, the Nazis were apparently rather thin-skinned : BERLIN – Newly discovered documents have revealed a bizarre footnote to the history of the Second World War: a Finnish mutt whose imitation of the Hitler salute enraged the Nazis so deeply that they started an obsessive campaign against the dog's owner. Absurdly, a totalitarian state that dominated most of Europe was unable to do much about Jackie and his paw-raising parody of Germany's Fuehrer. In the middle of World War II — months before Hitler ordered some 4.5 million troops to invade the Soviet Union — the Foreign Office in Berlin commanded its diplomats in the Nazi-friendly Nordic country to gather evidence on the dog, and even came up with plans to destroy the pharmaceutical wholesale company of its owner. HT: Mad Latinist via Facebook . You'd think they would have had more important things to think about. But I guess that's what totali

Internal Monlogue has been following the " Settlers of Catan is the new Monopoly " idea for a few years now. Here's another recent blog post on mental_floss touting that idea: The boardgaming world was, however, been pretty stolid for the bulk of the 20th century, with very little innovation from within; the mainstream board gaming companies’ idea of creativity is coming up with themed versions of existing stalwart games. But in 1995, the game Wired magazine dubbed the “Monopoly killer” (although Monopoly isn’t dead … yet) entered the market, and after a long, slow incubation period, is moving into the mainstream and threatening the established order of board games.

Here are some photos from Bell Labs in the 1960's : HT: Gregg Favalora on Facebook .

Looks like it might happen . If you want to gum up the Senate, you shouldn't be able to just phone it in. You should have to show up. And lets get rid of things like anonymous individual holds on nominations, too.

Yes, that Pat Robertson . Let sanity prevail. End the drug war. It won't be perfect. But it will be so much better than the status quo.

from xkcd , of course. Stockings are LIFO .

"Starting in the early 1980s, up through well into 2009, the individual mandate was an eminently respectable Republican position , embraced by conservative policy wonks and leading Republicans. Since then, virtually the whole of the conservative movement has coalesced around the position that the individual mandate is not merely misguided but actually unconstitutional, a fact conservatives somehow overlooked during the previous three decades. [...] Conservatism's sudden lurch from supporting (or tolerating) the individual mandate to opposing it as a dagger in the heart of freedom is a phenomenon that merits not intellectual analysis but psychoanalysis." - Jonathan Chait