Win Ben Stein's Contempt: Glenn Reynolds found this amusing and accurate rant. Reynolds thinks Stein is too pessimistic, but perhaps he hasn't seen the line on the Peach Bowl shifting away from the Vols. I think Stein is right, and I think the pudding has a theme -- the glorification of everything transient, unearned, and often undeserved: luck (or astrology or mysticism or crystals) over science and education; celebrity over honor; hitting the lawsuit lottery over hard work and investment; demanding the fruit of another's labor over getting your own. I think it's a wholesale surrender of agency. And I think it has at least something to do with the way the government is determined to save us from our helpless selves, though whether that government is the cause or effect, I don't really know.