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AlterNet: Neocons on a Cruise: What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren’t Listening

From time to time, National Review – the bible of American conservatism – organises a cruise for its readers. I paid $1,200 to join them. The rules I imposed on myself were simple: If any of the conservative cruisers asked who I was, I answered honestly, telling them I was a journalist. Mostly, I just tried to blend in – and find out what American conservatives say when they think the rest of us aren’t listening.

These are the winners, the smooth talkers, the sundogs; certain the losers deserve to lose, and they themselves deserve to win. They believe in the wall, in the way things have always been, in examples and lessons. But a time is coming, and they are afraid of it, when the wall will be used for reasons other than those they built it for. When that time comes, it will come heavily.

David and I spent a week backpacking in Yosemite a few days ago (as we try to do most summers), and it was sensational. The best one yet. The secret to being the best one yet, I think, is that I prepared not at all for it. Usually I try to work up to one of these things by exercising pretty regularly for weeks and months beforehand, but not this time. This time I didn’t exercise at all and ate badly. Because of this, I had a great time and few to no aches and pains after leaving the mountains. A direct cause and effect relationship. I suppose staying every other night in the high sierra camps contributed to our well-being in some marginal way, but I like to think my slothful habits had more impact.

And I can recognize trends when I see them. Next year I plan to increase my pleasure by actively sabotaging my health. A 3 or 4 pint blood donation a week prior to our expedition should do the trick.

So we had a great time, and all goals were met. I even managed to snag a new desktop for the ‘puter:

As you know, the prettiest picture can fail as a desktop because it’s too cluttered, or dark in the wrong places, or stretches ridiculously, or any number of other things that make it interesting in the wrong way. So taking a desktop picture is kind of a trial-and-error event; in fact, the pictures I took with an eye toward their utility as desktops were uniformly unusable.

Chinese ‘trucking’ live rats to southern restaurants – CNN.com

Live rats are being trucked from central China, suffering a plague of a reported 2 billion rodents displaced by a flooded lake, to the south to end up in restaurant dishes, Chinese media reported.

I recall something happening in Australia like this a few years back.

Rat vendors had been doing a roaring trade thanks to strong supply over the last two weeks, the China News Service quoted vendors as saying.

This is my favorite part:

“Recently there have been a lot of rats… Guangzhou people are rich and like to eat exotic things, so business is very good,” it quoted a vendor as saying, referring to the capital of Guangdong province, where people are reputed to eat anything that moves.

I’m not sure I’d like a reputation for eating anything that moves.