Eat The Rich!

In his latest Firewall video, Bill Whittle shows us how to cover the government's expenses for one year by eating the rich, with a shout-out to Iowahawk who did the statistical legwork.

Obama's Inner Bracket

The blogger known as Zombie got to thinking about Obama's bracket picks for the college basketball finals and a question occured to her; "Don’t we all have what is essentially an “inner bracket” which delineates our personal hierarchy of priorities, beliefs, behaviors and traits? If there was a bracket which revealed the inner workings of Obama’s mind, what would it look like? And what trait would emerge dominant?"

See the answer here.

(via Power Line)

Ross McKitrick and Earth Hour

One of the leading debunkers of the whole anthropogenic global warming (or is it climate change now?) religion, Ross McKitrick was asked what he thought about Earth Hour, the annual event where everyone is supposed to turn off the lights and sit in the dark so they can feel good about "doing something" for "the Earth." This year it will fall on March 26. Here is part of what he had to say about it:

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading. Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world's poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that's how the west developed.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

You can read the whole thing here. I, for one, will be turning on an extra incandescent light or two to celebrate modern civilization.

Update 3/25/11: Welcome visitors, about 120 in the last couple of hours. For a look at what energy poverty looks like in reality, go and watch this video. I linked it a few months back from this post, which you might also want to read..

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Well Duh, Where Else Would It Be?

The headline writer had fun with this one: "Deputy: Strip Search Finds Crack Between Buttocks"

That's some fine detective work there, deputy.
(via Boortz)

Your Public Sector Unions at Work - Andrew Klavan

Andrew Klavan explains how private and public sector unions are different and what it means for you, the taxpayer.

What Is Big Government? David Steinberg Has Answers

About three weeks ago I had some comments on downsizing the federal government and how it could be done by breaking the task down into lots of smaller tasks. Now David Steinberg, over at Pajamas Media, has compiled a list, or map of sorts of the federal government to make it easier to spot the redundancies. This should, in turn, make it easier to identify what to cut. Go and take a look, but his conclusion, speaking to the left, is worth noting:

What are we talking about when we talk about Big Government?

What is Big Government?

It is our time: It is oxidizing, the aging process applied to civilization and turning us to dust. Big Government is nothing less than the consumption of our very moment here on Earth, our lives spent creating and producing. Take our works and humanity, skim from the top, then the middle until we were not here.

No man’s time is another’s to waste, not politics but morality. This stupid, stupid list is our government, and the creators of this owe an answer to their benefactors — an answer to a question neither about the politics or the theory, as none of that is relevant to the actual government that exists as people working at the above agencies, being paid from the profits, and then the principal, of civilization. Simply, they owe us this question answered:

Are you proud?

Because you seem to be proud. Conservatives did not want a government made of these agencies, you did, and we now have them, a hundred years of liberal lifetimes spent creating. It’s yours and we deserve to know if you are proud of this structure — not the principles behind the structure, the ideals, but the actual structure. This is the government, now, crushing and wasting us, and rational men cannot be proud of what you have done here. Are you, and do you understand us?

A good question.

World Currency Markets Ruled by a Kabal of Kitties

Author Claire Berlinski, whose excellent book, "There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters" I am in the midst of reading, is guest-blogging over at Power Line where she makes this rather stunning admission:

"I'm that journalist who lives in Istanbul with seven cats and secretly manipulates the world's currency markets from her basement, also known as the Alexander Haig of Ricochet."

Does anyone else realize what this means? As anyone who has ever owned a cat knows, you don't own the cat, you are its staff and it owns and manipulates you.  This can only mean one thing. The world's currency markets are not being manipulated by Claire, as she thinks (they just allow her to think that), but by a cabal of tabbys. Claire merely carries out their wishes.  The world makes a lot more sense once you understand this fact.

I wonder if I sent them some catnip or kitty treats would they do something about my 401(k).

Just asking.

Bill Whittle - The End of the Beginning

Another great history lesson from Bill Whittle on the three great waves of human civilization and how the power of public sector unions is bound to collapse as power devolves back to the people because of the information age and the people's ability to self-organize. Witness the Tea Parties.