Interesting political piece in the New Yorker: The Code Of The West: What Barack Obama can learn from Bill Ritter.

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Originally uploaded by smooth.

Thank you racoons, for ruining my only remaining pumpkin and not even EATING the fu*king thing.

So yeah, maybe our entire financial system is melting down (thanks wall street), we’ve f’d up the environment to the point of no return, and our war mongering has pissed off the entire rest of the world. And this week I’ve discovered that China even has some really bad ass female beach volleyball players.

It’s times like these that I like to think about arenas in which we’re still unquestionably the dominant world power. 5 things the US still kicks ass at:

Julia Child was a spy?

Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell says yes - we have been visited. The interesting question to me is… how long could X people inside the government, NASA, etc. keep a secret like this before credible evidence from a credible source comes out? The key would be keeping a lock on the evidence, so without simultaneous confirmation from a large group of insiders each leak looks like a minor kook.

Update: here are the pictures: http://www.news.com.au/gallery/0,23607,5029118-5007150-1,00.html

From cnn: Bush: Olympic boycott would insult Chinese. I think that’s the point.

Not that I’m in favor of an olympic boycott, I just can’t resist the opportunity.

As if I needed another reason not to buy an American car, the inside cover of this week’s Business Week includes this gem of an ad from Chrysler:

We live in a car culture. Don’t apologize. Without our cars, we lose a measurable source of freedom, individuality and, yes, happiness.

That’s why we consider it our obligation to improve the technology within the car so your experience behind the wheel remains blissfully unaltered.

So thanks Chrysler, glad to hear that you have everything under control.

Dwight Schrute presenting The National

Originally uploaded by smooth.

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

We don’t let Niko watch a lot of tv, but his two favorite shows are Cash Cab and Deadliest Catch. Today we turned on Cash Cab just in time to see a friend of ours from b-school (w/ three other ppl) miss the last strike and get booted out of the cab with nothing.

Apparently those seven years at Cornell really paid off for him…

The Dalai Lama comes to Seattle:

The visit by the Dalai Lama, who arrived here Thursday afternoon on a flight from Japan, is his first to the United States since the onset of international protests over the Chinese crackdown in Tibet. But the trip was planned long before the recent troubles, and few expect him to use it to begin making demands for Tibetan independence.

Nor, for that matter, is he expected to guest on bass or bellow backup vocals when he joins the rocker and local organic parent Dave Matthews onstage here Friday evening.

The expectation, instead, is that he will stick with what got him here, “dialoguing” about the importance of an inclusive kindness and compassion: pitch-perfect preaching for an area with one of the country’s lowest rates of church attendance and a notable lack of interest in mainstream American religion.