Constrained vs Unconstrained Government - Bill Whittle

Bill Whittle's latest Firewall video is up an is a informative as usual:

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One More Reason to Avoid Meetings; They Make You Stupid

I've often felt like I've left meetings with fewer IQ points than when I went into them.  Apparently I'm not imagining it.
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Steyn - Brokest Nation in History Fusses About Sex

Mark Steyn has an op-ed over at Investors Business Daily that asks the question; why are we having a debate about birth control when we have much bigger problems (try runaway debt growth) than whether people should be paying for their own birth control or whether their employers should be made to pay for it for them?

The received wisdom among media cynics is that Obama has engaged in an ingenious bit of misdirection by seizing on a pop-culture caricature of Republicans and inviting them to live up to it: Those uptight squares with the hang-ups about fornication have decided to force you to lead the same cheerless sex lives as them.

I notice that in their coverage NPR and the evening news shows generally refer to the controversy as being about "contraception," discreetly avoiding mention of sterilization and pharmacological abortion, as if the GOP have finally jumped the shark in order to prevent you jumping anything at all.

It may well be that the Democrats succeed in establishing this narrative. But anyone who falls for it is a sap. In fact, these two issues — the Obama condoms-for-clunkers giveaway and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 900% by 2075 — are not unconnected. 

Misdirection is exactly what it is and if you buy the nonsense that the Republicans are trying to ban birth control then yes, you are a sap. As Steyn points out, Glenn Reynolds has distilled the misdirection technique down perfectly:

 "It's as if we passed a law requiring mosques to sell bacon and then, when people objected, responded by saying 'What's wrong with bacon? You're trying to ban bacon!!!!'"

Indeed, as the man himself would say.  Read the whole thing (both).

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Why Being a Conservative Sucks, According to Bill Whittle

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Government: Where Does the Money Come From and Where Does It Go?

In a new Firewall video entitled The Vote Pump, Bill Whittle explains where the funding for government comes from and where it goes. Actual government, incuding defense, is actually only around a third of all expenditures, The rest is entitlement spending. We can't solve the problem unless we address that.



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State of the Union - Cato Takes It Down Point by Point

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High Occupancy Vehicles

And they make their own HOV lanes too................

All taken in front of "Big C" department store, Nakhon Sawan, Thailand January 4, 2012/2555.

Bill Whittle Recaps the First Three Years Under Obama

For his last Afterburner of 2011 Bill Whittle recaps Obama's first three years.

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That's quite a rcord of non-achievement for three years of what I hope will be a single four-year term.

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A Voters Guide to Rebublicans

Bill Whittle's latest Firewall video tells you all you need to know about those evil, greedy, fascist, racist Republicans.



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Words Are a Shorthand for the Things They Describe, Not the Things Themselves

Newly minted Samizdatista Rob Fisher has a great post over at Samizdata (of course) on why we should always try to think past the words we use as a kind of shorthand to describe things and be more aware of what they actually mean. For example, "property" or "tax" :

I propose that if people were in the habit of of questioning the deepest meaning of words, that statism would be much less acceptable. For example, such questioning would yield the realisation that 'property' really means what Julie from Chicago described in a recent Samizdata comment: "One's property is untouchable by others because it is the product of a portion of one's life."

Imagine there were no word for tax, or you disciplined yourself not to use it, much as Korzybski recommends listing individuals rather than using group words. You would be unable to say, "I propose an income tax." Instead, you would have to say, "I propose that for every hour you spend working to provide for your family, we are going to demand that you spend a further hour in servitude to some men you have never met, and if you refuse to do this eventually we will send some other men round to your house who will drag you away from your family and lock you in a cell." It would be a lot harder to advocate certain statist ideas.

It should be harder. Read the whole thing.

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David Harsanyi: Obama Proposes to Save The Middle Class by Enslaving It.

Over at Reason Online, David Harsanyi unbundles President Obama's speech at Osawatomie, Texas Kansas earlier this week:

In Teddy Roosevelt's era, President Barack Obama explained to the nation this week, "some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress....But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can."

And he's right. Even today there are people who believe they should have free license to take whatever they want from whomever they can. They're called Democrats.

It just gets better from there. Read the whole thing.

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Eric Raymond: Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

The next time you hear some claim about science, say something like carbon dioxide generated by human activity is causing the climate to change, you might want to refer back to this handy list of ways to spot when you are being presented with junk science put together by Eric Raymond:

• Science by press release.
• Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of eschatological panic.
• Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of moral panic.
• Consignment of failed predictions to the memory hole.
• Over-reliance on computer models replete with bugger factors that aren’t causally justified.
• If a ‘scientific’ theory seems tailor-made for the needs of politicians or advocacy organizations, it probably has been.
• Past purveyers of junk science do not change their spots.
• Refusal to make primary data sets available for inspection.

These are good points to rmember, especially in the wake of the latest data-dump of emails among the pedlars of the great AGW/climate change scare, dubbed Climategate 2.0.

Detailed version of the list at the link. Read the whole thing.

(via Samizdata)

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"You Can't Have Freedom Without Virtue"

Bill Whittle explains:




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The Case for Newt

Professor Jacobson makes the case for why Newt Gingrich should be the Republican nominee for President. I'm begining to lean in that direction myself. I'm definitely not a Romney fan. I just don't trust him. I like Rick Perry alot but he just hasn't been very impressive in the debates ( I recognize that the format is terribly flawed) and I like Hermann Cain alot too but he appears to have very superficial command of some of the most important issues, such as foreign policy. This piece in The American Spectator is also very convincing.

I credit Newt Gingrich, not Bill Clinton, with balancing the federal budget back in the late 90's. Presidents seem to take the credit, or the blame, for budgets, mainly because they ultimately sign them into law, but it is important to remember that all spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives and it was the first Republican majority in 40 years that passed the first balanced budget in decades.

Newt gets the credit in my mind for passing that balanced budget and I am willing to bet that as President he can prevail upon the Congress to do it again.

Mark Steyn - Corporate Collaborators

Mark Steyn writes at National Review about corproate collaboration with the Occupy Wall Street movement (is that like a bowel movement?) as "in the Nazi-occupied-France sense: The city’s feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures."

It's all good but here is what it boils down to:

At heart, Oakland’s occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the “idealism” that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge — at least until the window-smashing starts. To “occupy” Oakland or anywhere else, you have to have something to put in there. Yet the most striking feature of OWS is its hollowness. And in a strange way the emptiness of its threats may be a more telling indictment of a fin de civilisation West than a more coherent protest movement could ever have mounted.

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