380,000 city workers in New York is about one person in 23. Clearly too many. Government needs to become much more efficient: the key is openness and responsibility.

But consider just the Iraq war. More than 380,000 people have been *killed*, not wastefully employed. Just one trillion of the money wasted would employ those 380,000 for *fifty years*.

No one denies that our first tries at providing minimal basic services to Americans as a human right were wasteful - but this wasn't anything inherent in the idea of a social democracy and the results of this at its worst were so, so, so much better than the results of Conservatism, since huge quantities of waste and violent death are absolutely essential to military-industrial capitalism.

You can rail all you like about welfare moms, but the fact is that money going to them goes right back into the economy, and all the waste by all the welfare queens there ever were don't even amount to the cost of the wars of this Administration alone, let alone the immense cost of the US military on hostile weapons since the Second World War.

I'll send you money. I hope you break the bank!

What, you expected him to run for President and tell the truth about having a mistress?

Or you expected him to simply not run for President because he'd had a mistress - even though most of the candidates every year have mistresses (YES, for God's sake, get used to it!)?

If you were smart, you'd simply nut fucking care. In other civilized countries, no one would lie about having a mistress - because no one would ask.

It's hard enough finding a competent politician. The traits you're looking for are strongly correlated with a high sex drive: trying to find a sane one who doesn't have this trait expresses is almost impossible.

Wait. I thought your article was arguing against this sort of attitude by example, until I reached the last line.

Are you saying that you think what you were doing to your younger self was a good thing? That you aren't lucky you didn't seriously damage yourself?

I thought this was pretty funny and in a strange way sort of sweet - but overall, very honest.

Really, what's wrong with the message, "We love you no matter what you look like"?

In science fiction circles, it's called the New Weird, but there are lots of contemporary writers like Will Self who aren't in that New Weird world and still produce work very much like what you describe (for example, a London just like contemporary London, except the "people" are chimpanzees...)

So get on it!

And don't worry about the slush pile. Make yourself write volume to start, just to get your pen flowing, and then edit it. I promise you, once you've completely your tenth page, you'll be so worried about how to make the writing you have work, you'll completely forget about the pile...

I just saw Charlie Victor Romeo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Victor_Romeo) in revival. If you can catch it (I think it's up in Dublin right now), you should, it's as fascinating and wrenching as it appears from the description.

ARG!

Do you really not understand that this is a deeply vacuous statement?

To compare it to sports, this is like the statement: "the team that's leading at halftime generally wins" or "the team that scores the most in the third quarter generally wins". Well, duh. A team wins because they overall score more points, so they "generally" score more points in any given part of the game too.

Pick any positive sign for a candidate; any one you like. The winning candidate will generally exhibit that sign.

Without "crunching the numbers," you know that the candidate going into the convention with the highest poll numbers "generally wins" and I'll bet that the candidate who has the highest numbers at midnight on Halloween generally wins.

I've *never* seen everyone here agree, and I agree with them too - don't do it (for all the excellent reasons posted above).

No, we want people to be scared shitless that this will happen and start to realize the risks they are assuming for a very marginal gain - in order to prevent this from happening!