Decline with a whimper

[scourge]

What are we really best at anymore? Financial and intellectual fraud, shopping, and narcissism are at the top.

New York's World Trade Center has been crowned the tallest building in the nation. That's fourth when ranked among the world's tallest skyscrapers.

I wanted to write "only" fourth in the world. Because when you start to compare our tallest with the tallest around the world -- and with one particular sky-scraping building in the works -- it's hard not to feel puny.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/shareitnow/la-sh-world-trade-center-tallest-building-20131112,0,5491033.story

[lost_wanderer]

I wonder how much time skyscrappers like that can last. All of that reminds me of the Babel's tower.

[dead last]

Penises.

[crow]

Termite mounds.

[scourge]

Similarly:

Everyone knows that the HealthCare.gov website has been performing abysmally, and the actual numbers confirmed what everyone could only guess at until now because the White House had withheld the data.

Overall, only about one-fifth of the people the White House expected to sign up for insurance in the first month actually did so: 106,185 against a forecast of 500,000. That's just slightly less than a capacity crowd at Penn State's Beaver Stadium. And of those who signed up, only 26,794 did so on the federally run exchanges in 36 states. The rest enrolled on state-run exchanges.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/11/13/healthcaregov-obamacare-website-exchanges-editorials-debates/3520503/

Blaming the web site is just defensive displacement by disillusioned former supporters who write these kind of articles. People generally know the Affordable Health Care Act itself is broken but the crowd shouts down any honest critique of their fantasy ideal as extremism anyway.