Take Me To Your Lizard

Judge Jeanine Piro On the Benghazi Hearings

2013-05-12T19:58:00.001-07:00

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Leon Panetta need to be held to account for the Benghazi debacle. Incompetence is the best-case scenario here and I don’t think any of them is that truly incompetent. Watch.

Nobody Knows How to Make a Pencil or Why Government Locks In Failure

2013-05-09T17:57:00.001-07:00

Kevin Williamson has a great article over at National Review Online talking about how in the private sector everything gets better and cheaper all the time, e.g. mobile phones, and how

“We treat technological progress as though it were a natural process, and we speak of Moore’s law — computers’ processing power doubles every two years — as though it were one of the laws of thermodynamics. But it is not an inevitable, natural process. It is the outcome of a particular social order.”

He goes on to show how competitive markets allow for competitors to come and go, rise and fall, and how important it is for failure to be possible as contrasted with institutionalized failure when politics takes over and government tries to pick winners and losers:

“Politics creates the immortal corporation. Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service are two institutions that would have failed long ago if not for government support — subsidies for Amtrak, the government-chartered monopoly on letter delivery for the postal service. The cost of their corporate immortality is not only the waste associated with maintaining them, but also the fact that their existence prevents the emergence of superior alternatives.”

It comes back to “the knowledge problem” or as Hayek put it, the fatal conceit that a small group of people or an individual can have all the knowledge necessary to direct an entire industry (think healthcare, e.g.) or an economy. This article is one of the best discussions of this I have seen.

Read the whole thing.

Udge Jeanine Pirro’s Speech to the NRA Convention

2013-05-05T21:13:00.001-07:00

In the same vein as the post below this……….

Need Some Reasons You Shouldn’t Trust Anti-Gun People?

2013-05-05T17:55:00.001-07:00

There are quite a few of them enumerated in this column at the Iowa State Daily. A sample:

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because in a single breath they tell us that the Second Amendment is irrelevant today and should be repealed because semi-automatic weapons didn’t exist when the Bill of Rights was written, then turn around and say the First Amendment protects radio, television, movies, video games, the Internet, domain names, Facebook and Twitter. Carrying liberal logic on the Second Amendment through to the First Amendment, it would only cover the town crier, and hand-operated printing presses producing only books and newspapers, and nothing else. Even anything written with a No. 2 pencil or ballpoint pen would not be included. And those of you belonging to religions that formed after the 1790s? You’re screwed under liberal logic, too.

Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because, while liberals seek to expand government regulation and services — things that may not be bad or ill-intended on their own — they simultaneously try to curtail the Second Amendment. We don’t trust anti-gun people for this reason because history shows us that every genocide and democide is preceded by expansion of government power and gun control. We don’t trust anti-gunners because here in America, gun control is rooted in slavery and racism, with some of America’s modern anti-gun laws being direct copies of former Nazi laws that banned gun possession for Jews, blacks, gays and other “undesirables.”

There’s a lot more at the link and it is one of the most comprehensive synopses of the debate over guns I think I’ve seen.

Read the whole thing.

How Debt Ruins Systems–Nick Gillespie Interviews Nassim Taleb Over at Reason

2013-03-26T20:57:00.001-07:00

Over at Reason Nick Gillespie interviews (video and transcript) best-selling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former trader and hedge fund manager, and a groundbreaking theorist on risk and resilience. He is also a finance professor at New York University and a research scholar at Oxford. He has some great insights about why systems fail and why decentralized systems are more resilient than centralized systems. An excerpt from the transcript:

Taleb: To cite the great Yogi Berra, a good antifragile system is a system in which all mistakes are good mistakes. And the bad system is one, again to paraphrase Yogi Berra, where you tend to make the wrong mistakes. Let’s compare the banking system to, say, transportation. Every plane crash makes the next plane crash less likely and our transportation safer. Now, with the banking system, [a failure] leads to increased probability of failure of an entire system. That’s a bad system.
reason: What’s the best way to stop that so you’re not allowing the problem to replicate throughout the system?
Taleb: What fragilizes an overall system? Three things: One, centralization. Decentralization spreads mistakes, makes smaller mistakes. Decentralization is where we converge with libertarians. A second one is low debt. The third is skin in the game.

I’ve just acquired The Black Swan and will most likely buy Antifragile when I finish with that. Links to the books below. I highly recommend reading the interview transcript (or watch the video, 56 minutes. Your choice but I can read faster). Links to the books below.

Fight, Republicans, Fight

2013-03-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

Michael Walsh at National Review has it exactly right:

Advice to the RNC: Don’t “re-brand.” Fight.
That’s it. Fight. Fight them on every front, fight them in every state, fight them on television and in print and on the airwaves. Confront them at every opportunity, seek out and embrace conflict, and fear not bullies like Chuck Schumer (the living embodiment of the Lefty Sneer), Dick Durbin, and passive-aggressive corruptocrats like Harry Reid. Don’t make nice with them, don’t play fair with them, don’t reach across the aisle and above all, treat them and their ideas with exactly the same amount of respect with which they treat yours: none. Contempt is the only language they understand. [emphasis added]

Truer words are hard to imagine. Read the whole thing.

Milton Freedman on the Most Persistent Economic Fallacy of All Time

2013-03-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

This is Milton Freedman on the fallacy that Economics is about money. Economics is about production and when the government takes money from the productive sector of the economy and spends it, it is not growing the economy.

Obama Donor Reportedly Buying and Gutting America’s Top Pro-Gun Media Outlets.

2013-03-04T18:04:00.001-07:00

I was just forwarded this Daily Caller article.

Employees of Obama donor Leo Hindery Jr.’s media conglomerate Intermedia Partners, which now owns most of the top gun-culture media outlets in the country, believe that Hindery plans to gut and destroy all of them as part of a business plan that has already led to numerous layoffs and the virtual shuttering of prominent television production facilities in Minnesota and Montana.

Apparently this Leo Hindery Character is setting out to gut all the pro 2A media outlets, e.g. Guns & Ammo and many other magazines and production companies. He is one of two managing partners of a private equity fund called Intermedia Partners. If this is true, I have to wonder if the other investors in this fund know about it and how they feel about a managing partner deliberately setting out to destroy the value of their holdings. Last time I looked it is the fiduciary duty of fund managers to try and maximize the value of their investments.

Last December Glenn Reynolds suggested that GOP investors acquire some of the women’s interest media outlets in an effort to get a more positive message (Hell, any message at all) out to women. Perhaps conservative investors should also be looking to buy up some of the pro 2A media properties too, if only to rescue them.

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society

2013-02-17T14:09:00.001-07:00

This half hour or so video is well worth the time to watch.

Rand Paul’s SOTU Response

2013-02-13T20:43:00.001-07:00

I can’t find anything to disagree with here.

Daniel Hannan–Occupy Wall Street Debate at the Oxford Union

2013-01-20T16:55:00.001-07:00

British MEP Daniel Hannan gave a speech in a debate before the Oxford Union earlier this week in which he defended capitalism and pointing out that the system we have now is not capitalism but corporatism. He also said that the Occupy Wall Street crowd were occupying the wrong places. This man is one of the most eloquent speakers I’ve ever heard. Watch, listen and learn.

Looking Into My Father’s Eyes

2013-01-18T20:49:00.001-07:00

It’s ten years to the day since my Father passed. I miss him.

What’s Old Is New Again

2013-01-15T19:33:00.001-07:00

Via Instapundit we have the news that Fort Lauderdale's Octavio Marc David Silva is using the micro-funding site [Kickstarter] to back his new line of jeans specifically designed with men's, ahem, anatomy in mind.

We’ve seen this before, a very long time ago. It’s called the codpiece.

Argument from Intimidation–A Favorite Debating Tactic of Bullies With No Other Argument Otherwise

2013-01-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

Not only was Ayn Rand prescient when she wrote “Atlas Shrugged” in 1957 she did it again with this essay from 1964. It’s a bit shorter than “Atlas Shrugged”. It’s about what she identified as another logical fallacy that she called the Argument from Intimidation which is closely related to Argumentum Ad Hominem. From the essay:

The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy. The pattern is always: "Only those who are evil (dishonest, heartless, insensitive, ignorant, etc.) can hold such an idea."

Argument from Intimidation is the type of “argument” employed by Piers Morgan as he debated Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com last week but Shapiro recognized the tactic and wouldn’t be intimidated and as Roger Kimball put it a PJ Media, Morgan was deftly filleted by Shapiro.

Go and read the whole essay. It isn’t long and it’s well worth the read if you want to recognize and defeat the tactic.

An Open Video Letter to Senators Franken, Klobuchar and Rep. Nolan

2013-01-12T12:05:00.001-07:00

This is an excellent demonstration of why an “assault weapons” ban is nothing more than an attempt to limit our freedom to defend ourselves. Gun control is about controlling people, not guns. Stewart Mills, owner of sporting goods retailer Mills Fleet Farm in Minnesota demonstrates very convincingly that a 12 gauge shotgun is far more destructive than an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. The shot gun inflicts far more damage in a little over 3 seconds than the AR-15 inflicts in over 33 seconds. Watch and learn.

(via Power Line)

If They Come for Your Guns, Do You Have a Responsibility to Fight?

2013-01-07T17:43:00.001-07:00

That is the question Dean Garrison, a blogger I haven’t heard of before, is asking. It’s a question we should all be asking ourselves. He’s made it clear where he comes out on the question. You’ll have to answer it for yourself though.

An important reminder from the post:

About a month ago I let the “democracy” word slip in a discussion with a fellow blogger. I know better. Americans have been conditioned to use this term. It’s not an accurate term and it never has been a correct term to describe our form of government. The truth is that the United States of America is a constitutional republic. This is similar to a democracy because our representatives are selected by democratic elections, but ultimately our representatives are required to work within the framework of our constitution. In other words, even if 90% of Americans want something that goes against our founding principles, they have no right to call for a violation of constitutional rights.

Our founders did not want a “democracy” for they feared a true democracy was just as dangerous as a monarchy. The founders were highly educated people who were experienced in defending themselves against tyranny. They understood that the constitution could protect the people by limiting the power of anyone to work outside of it much better than a pure system of popularity. A system of checks and balances was set up to help limit corruption of government and also the potential for an “immoral majority” developing within the American People. We have forgotten in this country that we are ultimately ruled by a constitution.

Read the whole thing.

Reason–Why Double Taxation Must Cease

2013-01-06T16:12:00.001-07:00

A must-read article over at Reason on why taxation of capital gains and dividends should be lower if not zero. I personally favor the FairTax, which is a tax on consumption, not income.

Afterburner with Bill Whittle–The Rule of Lawlessnes

2013-01-05T11:37:00.001-07:00

Bill Whittle’s latest Afterburner video is up. In it he details the descent of our government into lawlessness and rule by decree.

Update:

Bill kind of skimmed over why Harry Reid will not allow the Senate to pass a budget.The reason Harry Reid has not passed a budget out of the Senate in nearly 4 years can be explained by two words: baseline spending. That is Washington’s way of doing budgets. They take all the services the government is currently providing, assume they will continue providing all of those, add a bit for inflation, say 5% and then if anyone proposes an increase of only 2% they start shrieking about how you’re cutting the budget, or taking credit for budget cutting depending on the optics you want. With no budget, Washington has been spending at the 2009 level which has all the “temporary” stimulus spending baked into it and operating on a series of continuing resolutions. If they were to pass a budget in line with 2007 our deficit would be nearly erased but it won’t happen because the stimulus spending is being used as a giant slush fund that Obama is using to reward his favored constituencies.

More on how baseline budgeting works here.

Banning “Assault Weapons” Is the Wrong Answer

2013-01-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

Forbes has a good article that explains just why a ban on “assault weapons” is a futile gesture. Referring to the “assault weapons” ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2003:

The evidence is in on the effect of her previous assault weapons ban: zero, zilch, nada, as the saying goes. The ban made no perceptible difference in the gun violence statistics when it went into effect, and no perceptible difference when it was allowed to expire 10 years later, in 2003.
That is because the term “assault weapon” is just a PR stunt that fools the gullible and easily deluded. It is defined in legislation by cosmetic features that frighten white bread suburbanites, but do not involve any functionality of any gun. We tried it, conservatives said it wouldn’t work, and it didn’t work. Yet, it is the liberal answer to the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn.

In the wake of atrocities such as Sandy Hook it’s easy to get caught up in emotionalism and feel that we need to “do something.” As Megan McArdle put it over at The Daily Beast: “There's a terrible syllogism that tends to follow on tragedies like this: 1. Something must be done. 2. This is something. 3. Therefore this must be done.” She also says:

“It would certainly be more comfortable for me to endorse doing something symbolic--bring back the "assault weapons ban"--in order to signal that I care. But I would rather do nothing than do something stupid because it makes us feel better. We shouldn't have laws on the books unless we think there's a good chance they'll work: they add regulatory complexity and sap law-enforcement resources from more needed tasks. This is not because I don't care about dead children; my heart, like yours, broke about a thousand times this weekend. But they will not breathe again because we pass a law. A law would make us feel better, because it would make us feel as if we'd "done something", as if we'd made it less likely that more children would die. But I think that would be false security. And false security is more dangerous than none.”

There’s lots of good information in both articles and I recommend that you go and read both of them.

Update: More from Larry Correia Quote: “So now that there is a new tragedy the president wants to have a “national conversation on guns”. Here’s the thing. Until this national conversation is willing to entertain allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons, then it isn’t a conversation at all, it is a lecture.”

Sentimental Journey and Maid In the Shade Get Ready to Go Flying

2012-12-29T21:24:00.001-07:00

I decided to drop in at the Commemorative Air Force Museum at Falcon Field in Mesa today and was rewarded by getting there just in time to see their Boeing B-17, Sentimental Journey, starting up prior to taxiing out for a flight. Here’s the video:

I just love the throaty rumble of those radial engines.

Shortly after Sentimental Journey taxied out it was the turn of the museum’s B-25J, Maid in the Shade to start up and taxi out. Here she is:

Who Costs More, True Royalty or the Obamas?

2012-12-08T11:18:00.001-07:00

This is Mark Steyn in his weekly Orange County Register Column:

The cost to taxpayers of flying one man, his wife, two daughters and a dog to Hawaii is estimated at $3,639,622. For purposes of comparison, the total bill for flying the entire Royal Family (Queen, princes, dukes, the works) around the world for a year is £4.7 million – or about enough for two Obama vacations.
According to the USAF, in 2010 Air Force One cost American taxpayers $181,757 per flight hour. According to the Royal Canadian Air Force, in 2011 the CC-150 Polaris military transport that flew William and Kate from Vancouver to Los Angeles cost Her Majesty's Canadian subjects $15,505 per hour – or about 8/100ths of the cost.

[Snip]

As the Daily Mail in London reported, "High Fliers: Prince William and his wife Kate spend an incredible £52,000 on the one-way flight from L.A. to London for themselves and their seven-strong entourage." Incredible! For £52,000, you couldn't take the president from Washington to a state visit to an ice cream parlor in a Maryland suburb. Obama flew Air Force One from Washington to Williamsburg, Va., requiring a wide-bodied transatlantic jet that holds 500 people to ferry him a distance of a little over 100 miles. And, unlike their British and Canadian counterparts, the American media are entirely at ease with it.

Read the whole thing.

Democrat Duplicity–Will the GOP Fall For It Again

2012-12-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

Milton Wolf has a must-read column over at The Washington Times in which he asks; “How many times does Lucy have to pull away the football before Charlie Brown finally wises up and quits playing her game?”

The Democrats do this to the Republicans again and again. They sucker them into agreeing to tax increases in exchange for vague assurances of spending cuts at some future date which, of course, never happen and it works. Every. Single. Time. Will the GOP finally wise up this time?

There’s more to the Democrats’ game than just this and this part of the column explains:

The Democrats’ lust for tax increases goes far beyond simple class warfare, as atrocious as that alone is. Democrats are fully aware that the rich already are paying more than their fair share. The wealthy (top 10 percent) may earn 50 percent of the income, but they pay 70 percent of the federal taxes. If that’s not fair, what is? Eighty percent? One hundred percent?
The Democrats’ long game is to push an ever-increasing tax burden onto fewer and fewer taxpayers. This grows a class of Americans who may or may not earn paychecks but certainly become beneficiaries of government largesse while remaining blissfully detached from its enormous cost. (What’s their fair share?) Economists would call this a recipe for disaster. Democrats would call it a voting base. Weak-kneed Republicans are poised to help them build it.

Read the whole thing.

Took a break. Now, back to work.

2012-12-05T08:22:00.000-07:00

It’s now just shy of a month after the election and I have to say the results left me in stunned disbelief. I am still having a hard time processing how Barack Obama could possibly get reelected with the record of the last four years. I suppose the answer is that he was able to do it because he didn’t have to run on his record. He just had to demonize and distract with phony issues like the supposed “war on women” while the MSM provided cover for him by playing along and studiously avoiding any subject that might make him look bad. That covers a lot of subjects too.

I am also disappointed in the turnout, or lack thereof, on our side. With the stakes for or country and the economy so high how could anyone possibly justify just staying home and not voting? Romney wasn’t your first choice of candidate (he wasn’t mine either) so you just decided not to play? As they say in the military, you go to war with the army you have, not the one you wish you had.

Well, let’s just hope the damage over the next four years isn’t as bad as we fear and that the GOP manages to get its act together in time for the 2014 midterms, though I’m not holding my breath on either count.

Where Socialism Leads, and Why You Should Vote Republican This Tuesday, November 6, 2012

2012-11-03T19:13:00.001-07:00

The following video is from a man who has been there, done that (to him). Learn from his experience so that you don’t experience it yourself.

Are You Thinking About a “Protest Vote” On “Principle?”

2012-11-01T20:58:00.001-07:00

Bill Whittle asks you to think twice. A final pre-election appeal to principle: