Travel and Leisure‘s list of the fifteen ugliest buildings in the world mostly just seems to reflect a strong dislike for postmodern architecture. I think this picnic basket building is pretty cool, for example. And this Chinese coin building isn’t ugly at all. This thing in Portland is genuinely bad, but it’s hardly one of the great aesthetic crimes of all time.

I would reserve my ire for projects like City Hall / Government Center in Boston that sort of kill pleasant urbanist neighborhoods. But if you’re going to put up a big office complex in a field somewhere, you may as well try to make the building interest-looking.

I have to say that I’m getting a bit tired of reading different versions of this article:

While he understands the allure of Home Wreckers and Big Macs alike, this British celebrity chef has made it his mission in recent years to break people’s dependence on fast food, believing that if they can learn to cook just a handful of dishes, they’ll get hooked on eating healthfully. The joy of a home-cooked meal, rudimentary as it sounds, has been at the core of his career from the start, and as he has matured, it has turned into a platform.

Grrr. I like to cook. Sometimes. I think it’s fun. And I”m certainly glad I know a few recipes. I hope to learn more. And everyone should know a few. But the idea that a large-scale increase in the proportion of home-cooked meals is the solution to the world’s public health problems really makes very little sense.

If over time people were getting poorer, but the number of hours in the day was getting longer, and gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening. Compared to people in 1959, people in 2009 have more money, less time, and less ability to call on socially sanctioned unpaid domestic labor. So obviously they’re going to cook less. Or to look at it another way, there are lots of things you can do in 2009 that you couldn’t do in 1959—read a blog, download an MP3, get a movie from Netflix on Demand. There are also a lot of things you can do in 2009 that were prohibitively expensively in 1959—fly cross-country, make a long-distance phone call to your sister. But there’s no more time in the day. Which implies that people need to spend less time doing the things that you could do in 1959. Sometimes we can get out of this box by finding technological innovations that let us do things more quickly, but you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch.

The good news is that there’s no real reason to think that food you prepare yourself is for some reason intrinsically healthier than food someone else prepares for you. Indeed, a normal “home cooked” meal is mostly eaten by people who didn’t cook it. One or two people cook, and the kids or the guests eat. And at the same time, it’s not as if the good people at Taco Bell are serving unhealthy food out of some perverse desire to clog America’s arteries. They’re just trying to make money the best way they know how. If someone—Jamie Oliver, for example—devised an appealing mass-market food product that was better than Taco Bell on the taste/price/convenience dimension but also healthier, well that would be an excellent thing for the world.

And maybe someone could do it. The world’s purveyors of processed foods have noted a real market demand for healthier products. Consequently, they’re poured a lot of time and energy into creating things that at least seem healthier. And so we really have a lot of healthy-seeming options. But they’ve never, as best I can tell, poured all that much effort into trying to create things that are actually healthier. But someone could. Jamie Oliver could do it. Mark Bittman could do it. Michael Pollan could do it. And it would be more likely to succeed than an endless procession of NYT Magazine articles hectoring people about how they should cook more.

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

The key to understanding McCain’s strategic “thought” is that he loves war. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to start on any given day is the war he wants to start. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to escalate on any given day is the war he wants to escalate. The entire rest of his erstwhile worldview will just revolve around that. In the mid-nineties, he wanted to start a war against North Korea. In 1999, he wanted a land invasion of Serbia. But in 2002, he viewed North Korea’s nuclear program as no big deal (and certainly wasn’t mentioning the need to invade Serbia) because that might distract from the goal of invading Iraq. In 2006, he downplayed problems in Afghanistan to further his goal of sending more troops to Iraq. But now Afghanistan’s in the spotlight so we need to send troops there. But just last summer, he thought we needed to intervene in the war between Russia and Georgia.

It’s a consistent point of view in the sense that no matter the question, McCain’s answer is always “more war” but it doesn’t reflect any kind of coherent theory about national priorities or strategic issues. You never see people from the American Friends Service Committee brought on TV to talk about Afghanistan policy. But pacifists have a much stronger case to make on behalf of their approach than does the “all war all the time” crowd that continues to be treated by the media as possessed of vast credibility on these matters.