Take Me To Your Lizard

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

2012-01-27T08:23:00.002-07:00

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

2012-01-25T07:48:00.001-07:00

High Occupancy Vehicles

2012-01-04T04:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-12-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

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

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

2011-12-15T17:49:00.005-07:00

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

2011-12-09T08:38:00.004-07:00

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.

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

2011-12-08T08:23:00.003-07:00

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

2011-12-07T07:44:00.002-07:00

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)

"You Can't Have Freedom Without Virtue"

2011-12-01T21:00:00.001-07:00

Bill Whittle explains:

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The Case for Newt

2011-11-16T19:36:00.002-07:00

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

2011-11-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

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.

DEX Knows Nothing

2011-11-03T18:39:00.001-07:00

The other day yet another Yellow Pages directory landed on my driveway (there seem to be several). Having absolutely no use for this dead tree directory due to this wonderful invention called "The Internet" it followed a long line of others straight into the trash. So, it didn't provide me a convenience, it just made work for me.

Five minutes ago the phone rang. It was a robocall from DEX asking whether I'd gotten their stupid, obsolete book. Press 1 for yes, 9 for no. I suspect if I'd been silly enough to press 9 they'd have promptly sent another one out. There was no option for "Please stop sending me these bloody things! I don't want them."

Does anyone still use the Yellow Pages anymore? If you are a business that does, you may be wasting your advertising budget becasue I certainly don't use it and don't know anyone that does. I don't look at the Yellow Pages as a convenience, just a waste disposal issue.

/irritable rant.

Andrew Klavan on What Leftism Does to People

2011-11-01T18:36:00.000-07:00

Over at PJ Media, Andrew Klavan explains how leftist ideology inevitably makes people awful:

Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.

This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves.

Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil?Leftists call conservatives hateful…

Read the whole thing.

P.J. O'Rourke on Why "Closing the Wealth Gap" is a Bad Idea

2011-10-30T19:25:00.000-07:00

P.J. O'Rourke explains why efforts to close the "wealth gap" are a a bad idea and destined to fail, as they have everytime they've been tried. This gets to the heart of the matter:

But proposing to close the "wealth gap" is worse than silly. It entails a lie. The notion of economic equality is based on an ancient and ugly falsehood central to bad economic thinking: There's a fixed amount of wealth. Wealth is zero-sum. If I have too many cups of tea, you have to lick the tea pot. But wealth is based on productivity. Productivity is expandable. Otherwise there wouldn't be any economic thinking, good or bad, or any tea or tea pots either.

Read the whole thing.

Paul Ryan's Speech to the Heritage Foundation

2011-10-27T07:58:00.006-07:00

Congressman Paul Ryan gave a speech yesterday at the Heritage Foundation in which he called President Obama (the post-partisan President) on his increasingly strident and divisive class warfare rhetoric.

But instead of working together where we agree, the President has opted for divisive rhetoric and the broken politics of the past. He is going from town to town, impugning the motives of Republicans, setting up straw men and scapegoats, and engaging in intellectually lazy arguments, as he tries to build support for punitive tax hikes on job creators.

The transcript is here if you prefer to read it.

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What Profit Represents

2011-10-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Day:

" Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates."

Kevin D. Williamson at National Review, writing about the late Steve Jobs' contribution to society.

Read the whole thing.

Will We Choose to Be A Nation of Adults or of Children? Live Free or Die - Bill Whittle

2011-09-30T07:53:00.002-07:00

The title of this new Afterburner is "Live Free or Die" but really it is more about the question of what kind of a country or people we want to be. Will we choose to be a nation of adults or one of children whose every decsion is made for them, for their own good, of course. Bonus Latin lesson: "age res proprias tuas." Translation: mind your own business.

Why Does the Good Life End? Victor Davis Hanson Has the Answer

2011-09-26T08:10:00.008-07:00

Victor Davis Hanson has another great Works and Days column over at PJ Media on why societies decline and are swept away. A couple of excerpts:

The outsourcing of private morality to the state is a particularly modern affliction, but equally as pernicious. We witness the startling paradox that today’s private society is crasser, less honest, and more uncouth even as its government’s official morality stresses gender, race, class, and green ethical superiority. But just because the state now thankfully mandates disabled parking spaces does not mean that we honor a crippled relative more than in the past, or that our children are more likely to write a note of thanks to a grandparent’s gift. I can surely see an erosion in the public expression of manners and morality even as I sense our government is now more “fair” and “equal” than ever before.

[snip]

When poverty is defined as relative want rather than existential need, states decay and societies decline. In the fifth century, Athenians were content to be paid to go to the theater; by the fourth, they were paid also to vote — even as they hired mercenaries to fight and forgot who won at Salamis, and why. Flash mobbing did not hit bulk food stores. The looters organized on Facebook through laptops and cell phones, not through organizing during soup kitchens and bread lines. Random assaults were not because of elemental poverty, but anger at not having exactly what appears on TV.

Obesity, not malnutrition, is the affliction at Wal-Mart. In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air conditioners or stereos. But that John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore has a huge house doesn’t mean that mine is inadequate — or the tract homes that sprout in my community for new arrivals from Mexico are too small.

Of course, the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians. But that a fifth of one percent of the taxpayers are finding ways not to pay at the income tax rate on their large incomes does not hurt the republic as much as 50% of the population paying no income tax at all. The latter noble sorts do not bother us as much, but their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich.

The whole thing is, as usual, worth reading but down in the comments, the always astute cfbleachers has a great summary of what's eating us alive. A partial quote:

A society that is hell bent on trying to find new and unique ways to pick a fight with itself is in for a headache. This current group is so inane and arrogant, it at once picks a fight, declares the matter “settled”, calls any principled dissent “racist” and then apologizes to the world for our entire past.

[snip]

The problem, of course…with having the Protest Culture Cult in positions of leadership, is that they can’t produce a budget, have no foreign policy plan, don’t listen to our generals on the ground, can’t fix Wall Street, can’t make a tax program and can’t negotiate a contract with unions…because they have been in “anti” mode for 45 years. They know how to gripe and cry and moan and march in perpetual protest…but, they never had to actually MAKE something, they only had to criticize the efforts of others.

ObamaJobs! - Just What the Doctor Ordered

2011-09-19T20:46:00.002-07:00

I somehow missed this brilliant proposal by my friend, Dr. Paul Hsieh nearly two weeks ago, but this kind of goodness has no expiration date. He has hit upon the solution for the unemployment problem. ObamaJobs! It is modeled after ObamaCare. It's such an obvious solution, we all should have seen it.

Simply by varying a few features of ObamaCare, the president could guarantee nearly “universal” employment just as ObamaCare has guaranteed nearly “universal” health coverage. He could implement an “ObamaJobs” program as follows:
1) Impose a “job mandate” requiring all companies with greater than 50 employees to add 10% new employees to their payrolls. So if a company currently has 50 employees, they would need to hire 5 new workers. If a company has 100 employees, they must hire 10 new workers, etc.

There's more. Go read the whole thing.
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Is It Time to Mandate SEC Filings by Companies Wishing to Receive Taxpayer Guaranteed Loans?

2011-09-16T16:06:00.001-07:00

A Form S-1 is a document a company must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission before it company may offer securities for sale, either equity securities in an IPO or the issuance of public debt. While the online form is only 8 pages long, in reality an S-1 filing can run to hundreds of pages once it is filled out as it must cover several areas of interest to potential investors. This includes, among other things, a description of the company's business, its history, relevant risk factors, the use of the offering proceeds, capitalization and management's discussion and analysis of the business and the company's financial statements. These will include and opinion by an independent auditor as to whether the company's financial statements fairly represent the performance of the business and comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (GAAP) as well as any qualifications to the opinion.

One of the potential qualifications is what is known as a "going concern" clause which is the audit firm's way of saying "assuming this company remains in business." By inserting that clause in their opinion they are saying that that may not be a safe assumption. Apparently the auditor's opinion for Solyndra contained this clause and yet the Obama administration pressured the Department of Energy to rush through an approval of a $535 million taxpayer guaranteed loan, despite the Bush administration having turned it down only a couple of months before. There was even concern expressed by DOE analysts that the company was burning cash at such a rate that it would run out by this month. And sure enough, the company filed for bankruptcy, laid off all of its workers and closed its doors on August 31.

If a S-1 was ever filed for this company, I haven't found it and the reason is that the company didn't have to file one because it didn't intend to go public anytime soon. It was entirely funded by venture capital up until the time of the loan.

Yet here I am, an involuntary investor in a bankrupt company, like all the rest of the tax-paying public. I believe that an application for a government loan, guaranteed by the taxpayers, should require the filing of an S-1 or similar disclosure should be made in all cases and that a public comment period of not less than 90 days be mandated before the loan can be made. If the tax-payers can be put on the hook for the loan then they have a right to know what their government is getting them into. The comment period would allow an opprtunity for a crowd-sourced analysis of the company, the soundness of its business case and its financial viability. As long as the government is going to be in the venture capital business and picking winners and losere, and I don't think it should be, this would be a huge leap in transparency and accountability where government and private business intersect.

Update: I just went back to Edgar and searched again. I did find an S-1 for Solyndra. I think I probably searched as "Solyndra Corporation" the first time around and it is Solyndra, Inc. Sometimes less is better when searching. In any case, the financials are from pre-revenue 12/31/2006 and 2007 then nine months ended 9/27/2008 and 10/3/2009 and are every bit as ugly as any financial statements I've ever seen, and I do look at a lot of them. If the company can't get any takers for an IPO, that should be all you need to know about the wisdom of granting a loan. If the market won't touch it, it's sheer idiocy to lend the company money on any terms.

What We Did Right - A New Afterburner with Bill Whittle

2011-09-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to add here. Just watch and enjoy.

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Will LightSquared be the Next Political Favoritism Scandal?

2011-09-16T14:59:00.002-07:00

The Solyndra mess, involving $535 million in taxpayer guaranteed loans to a company that the Obama Administration favored and that just went bankrupt only a year after receiving the loan is dominating the headlines now. However, a new scandal may be brewing.

There’s a White House scandal involving favoritism towards a specific company high on President Obama’s political agenda — and it’s not Solyndra.

In this case, the company owner happens to be a big Democratic Party donor. And in the pursuit of giving preference to a specific company, the White House undercut a legendary four-star general and potentially undermined U.S. national security. Adding fuel to the explosive story: at one time President Obama was a personal investor, with $50,000 of his own money.

Are we starting to see a pattern here? Taxpayer funded largesse is being bestowed on politically favored companies whose heads and/or major investors just coincidentally happen to be major Democratic Party donors, whether the business is viable on its own or not, while established companies whose heads just coincidenatlly happen to favor Republicans (and are non-union) are being raided by armed ~~stormtroopers~~ federal agents over the question of whether a certain kind of wood being used to manufacture guitars was obtained in compliance with the laws of another country. Yet a competing company, which uses the same wood but just happens to be a union shop and whose head happens to donate money to Democrats is left alone. This doesn't look, feel or smell right.

The Obama investment in LightSquared is referred to in the past tense so he doesn't appear to be in a position to profit from any success the company might have, at least not directly. However, through campaign donations from the executives and investors in some of these companies he seems to be making out rather well indirectly.

This kind of activity is the very definition of what crony capitalism is and these scandals, which seem to be multiplying and growing, is more worthy of some tinpot dictatorship than the once (and hopefully future) greatest country on Earth.

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Paul Ryan: Restoring the Rule of Law

2011-09-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

In a speech to the students of Hillsdale College (some of whom woke up at the ungodly hour of 8:30 AM to watch it online) Congressman Paul Ryan makes the case for restoring and supporting the rule of law and the Constitution. An excerpt:

The Constitution’s Framers knew that there is a human inclination to increase personal power at the expense of law, so they created Congress as a decentralized and internally divided institution, but they granted it ample authority to secure the rule of law in every case. Congress holds the power of the pen as well as the purse. It has the power necessary to address attacks on the rule of law in our executive bureaucracies and even in the courts. The Constitution provides us with the power to solve these problems; what we need, is the will to do it.

I've been told lately that the Constitution is out of date and was never intended to address some of the problems of modernday life. I beg to differ and this speech says why better than I can myself. So as the man says, read the whole thing.

Defining "Fair" in Obama's "Paying a Fair Share" Rhetoric - Gary Wickert

2011-09-12T17:38:00.002-07:00

Over at Pajamas Media Gary Wickert does a little bit of translation for us on what President Obama means when he says the word "fair." Not surprisingly it doesn't seem like the same definition of the word most of us would have in mind.

Of course you should read the whole thing. Wickert goes on to discuss how unfair what Obama and his acolytes advocate really is. An example:

One thing you will never hear our president explain is precisely what he means when he uses the word “fair.” The word actually means “free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice.” What Obama means, however, is something quite different. What he is saying is that it is not fair that somebody earns more than another, owns more than another, or has more wealth than another. And he intends to make it “fair.”

According to the National Taxpayers Union, the top 10% of wage-earners — families and small business owners who make over $113,799 — pay an incredibly unfair 70% of all federal income taxes. The top 50% of wage-earners pay nearly all federal income taxes. Is that fair? It seems that our president is not going to allow the half of Americans who pay no taxes to bear the burden of the other half who aren’t paying their fair share [my emphasis]. This is why the vast majority of the half who don’t pay any taxes continue to vote for Barack Obama.

For some more thoughts on fairness, go here and here.

New Afterburner with Bill Whittle - The Truth Is Out There

2011-09-03T09:57:00.002-07:00

The Rehabilitation of Clarence Thomas' Reputation, On the Left

2011-08-29T17:43:00.004-07:00

Writing at his American Interest blog, Walter Russell Mead reviews an article by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker. Mead notes that the Toobin article is evidence that the left is beginning to respect, perhaps even fear, the intellect and jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas. It is fashionable on the left to mock him as an intellectual lightweight but in dismissing him in this way for all these years they have failed to pay attention to the fact that he has had quite an influence on the way the Supreme Court has looked at questions such as the meaning of the Second Amendment.

There are few articles of faith as firmly fixed in the liberal canon as the belief that Clarence Thomas is, to put it as bluntly as many liberals do, a dunce and a worm. Twenty years of married life have not erased the conventional liberal view of his character etched by Anita Hill’s testimony at his confirmation hearings. Not only does the liberal mind perceive him as a disgusting lump of ungoverned sexual impulse; he is seen as an intellectual cipher. Thomas’ silence during oral argument before the Supreme Court is taken as obvious evidence that he has nothing to say and is perhaps a bit intimidated by the verbal fireworks exchanged by the high profile lawyers and his more, ahem, ‘qualified’ colleagues.

Read the whole thing.

(via Instapundit)
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John Allison: The Government Caused the Financial Crisis, Not Greed.

2011-08-25T19:53:00.000-07:00

The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, talks with former BB&T CEO John Allison about the causes of the financial crisis. The industries that have the most interference from government are the most screwed up and Financial Sevices is the most regulated of them all.........

Well worth the 11 minutes it will take you to watch it.

How to Make a Proper Apology

2011-08-24T18:01:00.000-07:00

(~~stolen shamelessly from~~via Vodkapundit)

Is There An Inalienable Right to Self-Defense?

2011-08-21T12:40:00.002-07:00

That is the question Mike McDaniels asks over at Pajamas Media in the context of the British riots and our own Operation Gunwalker/Fast and Furious scandal:

It all comes down to this: Is there an inalienable right to self-defense? If there is, each man has indisputable, inestimable value, value that he may rightly preserve even if the life of another man is forfeit. A man may kill another in lawful self-defense even if the policy preferences of the state would prefer his death. If a right to self-defense actually exists, it is in a very real sense the highest law of the land and all lesser laws must pay it deference. It fundamentally defines the social contract, the nature of the relationship between man and the state.

But if there is no such inalienable right, the entire nature of the social contract is changed. Each man’s worth is measured solely by his utility to the state, and as such the value of his life rides a roller coaster not unlike the stock market: dependent not only upon the preferences of the party in power but upon the whims of its political leaders and the permanent bureaucratic class. The proof of this analysis surrounds us.

Irony abounds in that England, the cradle of the common law and of our doctrine of self-defense, has utterly done away with even a government-condescended privilege to self-preservation. Not only have the English allowed themselves to be virtually stripped of firearms, British politicians have made attempts with varying degrees of success to ban knives. Attempting to protect the self or others from brutal criminal attack can and will lead to lengthy jail sentences in jolly old England — for the victims. Attacking criminals often go free, and often successfully sue their victims for daring to harm them in the process of depriving them of property or their very lives.

Why did the riots in London occur?

England has seen riots because the English allowed those who rule them to place what value they choose on the lives of Englishmen. They chose the indolent, the parasites, the criminals, the barbarians over honest, productive Englishmen and denied them their very right to exist when attacked by members of the parasitical class, the class established by the state and the class which perpetuates the state lest its very nourishment be cut off.

And what value is our own government placing on the lives of individuals such as Brian Terry, a Border Patrol Agent murdered with a gun that our own government knowingly allowed to fall into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels?

And now the Obama administration has revealed its assessment of the value of the life of a Border Patrol officer: Zero. Agent Terry is of no value, for the crime was committed not against him, but the state, which in its wisdom and mercy is far more concerned with protecting feckless bureaucrats and politicians than American citizens.

I happen to believe my right of self defense is inalienable and absolute. The instinct for self defense is hard-wired into the DNA of every creature on the planet and this right may not exist solely at the whim of the state.

Read the whole thing.
(via Instapundit)
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Bill Whittle Explains......

2011-08-20T22:31:00.001-07:00

.....Our Progressive Nightmare:

And the conservative Solution:

Plus some Q&A:

Well worth your time to watch, so please do.

The Deal - Bill Whittle

2011-08-18T23:32:00.000-07:00

Need I say it? Watch.

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Obamacare Conflict of Interest - Major Democrat Donor IT CEO Appointed to Health & Human Services Health Information Technology Policy Committee....

2011-08-18T08:57:00.001-07:00

.... And her company stands to benefit from what it recommends. Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment has the story:

The Washington Examiner’s Lachlan Markay broke news this week about the appointment of a major liberal donor, Judith Faulkner, CEO of Epic Systems Corporation, to the Health & Human Services Health Information Technology Policy Committee. Markay reports that Judy Faulkner was appointed to a stimulus-created board that is charged with disbursing billions of taxpayer dollars for health information technology adoption despite her opposition to the administration’s interoperability goals, which require that health records be shareable across platforms.

Faulkner and her company oppose the president’s vision for health IT, but Epic employees are massive Democratic donors. They’ve given nearly $300,000 to Democrats since 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Faulkner is also the sole representative for the health IT industry on the committee, which has the power to set industry standards. Does anyone doubt that any adopted standards will work to the benefit of Epic Systems? This is a serious conflict of interest for Epic Systems and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is, however, a fairly predictable conflict of interest, highlighting one of the myriad objections to central planning known as regulatory capture. Simply put, regulatory capture is when government agencies work in the interest of specific commercial interests instead of their original charter, and is extremely common due to the fact that industry has the strongest incentive to assume control of the regulatory process. Given this, why should Americans trust any decision made by HHS on Health IT policy?

Sadly, this is not terribly surprising. Actually, with this corrupt an administration it's all too predictable.

Read the whole thing.

Milton Friedman on the Myth of the Free Lunch

2011-08-16T18:18:00.004-07:00

Via Reason's Hit and Run:

Mark Steyn on Lessons of the London Riots

2011-08-13T17:33:00.002-07:00

Mark Steyn'e weekly column in the Orange County Register is his take on the past week's mob violence in London. The bottom line:

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the Earth's surface and a quarter of its population. When you're imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Theodore Dalrymple adds his tuppence worth.
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When Is a Budget Cut Not a Budget Cut?

2011-08-06T09:56:00.003-07:00

It is when you use the (unprincipled) principle of baseline budgeting. I sat down to write something about how the federal government's use of this technique, as it did last week, to simultaneously claim both spending increases and spending cuts but I found that the Intellectual Conservative beat me to it (read the whole thing, of course):

Baseline budgeting says that the budgetary estimate of government spending in any fiscal year is automatically assumed to continue at pre-ordained rates of expansion in all subsequent years. This definition, boiled down to its least common denominator, means that spending never decreases from one year to the next.

P.J. O'Rourke had an amusing illustration of how this works in his 1991 book, Parliament of Whores:

Say the federal government has a program to teach self-esteem, motivation and marketable job skills to debutantes. Call it DebSelf. And say that congress has authorized $100 million in 1990 DebSelf funding. 1991 budgeteers would then factor in 5 percent for inflation, not a 10-percent increase int he population of girls who had coming-out parties in the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas' civilian labor force, assume a 10-percent increae in DebSelf program utilization based on Census Bureau surveys of cotillion-ball activity and give DebSelf a $125 million baseline. (Note that using the current services baseline reasoning, DebSelf grows to be a $10 billion program in twenty years.)

Until we abolish the use of this technique we will never see the federal budget cut as ordinary people like ourselves understand a budget cut; actually spending fewer dollars this year than we did last year. In the example above, the government will claim that the DebSelf program spending is flat and if say, a proposal is made to cut the 5% inflation assumption to 4%, the program still grows but the program's defenders will scream that it is being cut by 20%.

If a company in the private sector used baseline budgeting the executive management would end up in prison, and rightly so. Any company that spends more than it brings in in cash is going to actually cut costs if it wants to continue in business. It will lay off employees, close unprofitable lines of business, sell assets, etc. That is reality for any of us that can't print our own money or have a no-limits Visa card.

This should be the next mission for us Tea Partiers: honest budgeting using real dollar cuts. I'd say federal spending should be cut to 2006 levels, useless departments shut down and employees laid off. It's time the federal government lived with the realities the rest of us do.

Rich Man, Poor Man - A Dose of Perspective from Bill Whittle

2011-08-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

Tweeting Financial Armageddon with Iowahawk

2011-07-30T13:51:00.000-07:00

The always brilliant Iowahawk tweets the number of calamities that will befall us if the debt limit isn't raised. This one is just too horrible to contemplate:

Cowboy poetry utterly lacking in metre.

Even Sesame Street won't be immune:

Sesame Street descends into Mad Maxian anarchy; Oscar the Grouch fashions shivs out the letter J and the number 4

Read the whole thing.

Liberalism: A Luxury We Can't Afford

2011-07-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

That's the title of a post by John Hinderaker over at Power Line this morning and here is how he sums up Liberalism:

Liberalism is a sort of parasite that feeds on the wealth that free enterprise creates. Liberalism exists for two reasons: 1) to stuff the pocketbooks of those who have learned to live at the taxpayers’ expense, and 2) to feed the moral vanity of those who can’t resist meddling in other peoples’ lives. When times are good, the economy can drag a fair amount of liberalism along behind it. But when times are hard, liberalism is a luxury we can’t afford.

(H/T MBG)

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Read the whole thing.

Who's Afraid of Private Industry?

2011-07-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

Over at Power Line, John Hinderaker asks "Who's Afraid of Private Industry?" and makes some good points about who we should really be afraid of:

Many liberals think that the primary purpose of government is to protect them from private industry. I have never understood that. History suggests that it is governments that should be viewed warily, not private enterprise. When has the electric company ever hauled people out of their beds, lined them up against a wall and shot them? When has an automobile manufacturer ever asserted the right to appropriate big chunks of anyone’s income, whether they like it or not? Companies just compete for my business. They supply me with things I enjoy and need, and, with rare exceptions, I like them.

The government, on the other hand, takes close to half of my income by force, drives up the cost of everything I buy with indirect taxes and needless regulations, complicates what should be easy transactions, and will surely do worse the moment we all stop paying attention. So I count on private companies to help protect me against government.

He's exactly right. There's more. Read the whole thing.

Disturbing Thoughts on the Possible Consequences of a US Debt Downgrade

2011-07-23T16:44:00.000-07:00

Glenn Reynolds excerpted and linked to a post by Kevin D. Williamson over at National Review Online talking about the repercussions of a rating agency downgrade of US Treasury debt. It isn't a pretty picture but another Instapundit reader has some even more disturbing thoughts to share in an update to Glenn's orignal post. Here is part of it:

Here’s the position I think we may be in. We’ve been negotiating with the President and The Democrats in Congress on the assumption that they’re sane. It’s okay to play hardball with these guys because eventually, whether they like it or not, reality insists upon itself and they have to cave. It’s a painful process so you expect some tantrum throwing and caterwauling, but eventually they HAVE to accept reality. Except if they’re not sane. If they want five apples and there’s only two plus two but they CAN’T ACCEPT that two plus two equals four. Orwell wasn’t just writing a parable about the eventual end point of IngSoc. He was describing what human psychology can drive Ministers to inflict upon the populace for the sake of “justice”. I’m worried they’ll pull the trigger on default as just one more “political” step in the march towards freedom from want or whatever other principle they’re operating under. They’re playing this game as if they could win, as if taxes in a downturn are a good idea with benign consequences. As if debt equivalent to GDP is survivable for the world’s anchor economy/currency, let alone sustainable.

And so maybe, just maybe, Republican strategy (what little there is of it) has badly misread the opposition. Obama tried to add 400 billion in taxes to a deal he had already agreed with Boehner at the last minute. Boehner walks out cause Obama is negotiating in bad faith and has been all along, but what if Obama is actually incapable of good faith negotiation? I think right now that it’s actually possible we won’t see a deal at all. Because the Republicans are looking at the math and at reality and saying “Okay, Democrat demands can’t be serious because they can’t possibly work” and Democrats are looking at politics and how it works and saying “We don’t have to give in cause that’s not how you win these things. You pin it on the other guy politically and then reap the political dividends.”

Read the whole thing.

What Do You Get When Capital Is Absent? One Word: Haiti

2011-07-19T20:52:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Tucker at the Ludwig von Mises Institute examines why commerce and trade alone are not sufficient by themselves to create wealth using Haiti as an example. Both are necessary conditions and both occur there, so why isn't Haiti prosperous? It is the lack of capital which he defines as an institution. Capital is goods, not goods to be consumed but to be used in the production of other goods for consumption. It is a near certainty in Haiti that any capital anyone begins to accumulate will be systematically looted by the government. It's a very insightful article and you should definitely read the whole thing but here is the conclusion:

Now, to be sure, there are plenty of Americans who are firmly convinced that we would all be better off if we grew our own food, bought only locally, kept firms small, eschewed modern conveniences like home appliances, went back to using only natural products, expropriated wealthy savers, harassed the capitalistic class until it felt itself unwelcome and vanished. This paradise has a name, and it is Haiti.

Advice on How to Handle Friendships With Liberals

2011-07-12T17:17:00.023-07:00

Belladonna Rogers has an advice column over at Pajamas Media on how to deal with liberals entitled "The Unbearable Smugness of Liberals: A Guide for the Perplexed." She has some great advice for a conservative reader living in the deep, deep blue territory of San Francisco. It's all good but this advice for conservative women stands out, and I'd say it applies almost equally well to men:

(8) Many conservative women, in particular, encounter liberal men in social settings who become uncontrollably loud and abusive when a conservative woman fails to nod pleasantly and express respectful agreement with his political views. When this happens, remain as cool as you can. Hold your ground. Let the liberal become apoplectic while you calmly say, “I disagree with your characterization” or “I don’t share your contempt,” “I don’t accept your premises,” or “I see things differently.”

You be the rational one, while the liberal is driven around the bend not only by your views and your knowledgeable statement of facts, but also by your composure and your refusal to be bullied.

Don’t be surprised or stunned into silence or submission when this happens. And it will happen. Expect it. Trust me.

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Read the whole thing.

The Failure of Al Gore - Part Three

2011-07-02T09:46:00.000-07:00

Walter Russell Mead has a third essay up about the failure of Al Gore and the Climate Change movement, "Singing the Climate Blues." Mead attributes Gore's failure mainly to his worldview, which is stuck somewhere in the past and his inability, like many of his ilk, to see the world as it is and adapt. A sample:

The trouble and even the tragedy of Al Gore is that he comes at the tail end of this tradition; he is a living example of what you get when a worldview outlives its time. He presses the old buttons and turns the old cranks, but the machine isn’t running any more. The priests dance around the altar, the priestess chews the sacred herbs, but the god no longer speaks. Like President Obama watching a universal healthcare program that he thought would secure his place in history turn into an electoral albatross and a policy meltdown, Al Gore thought that in the climate issue he had picked a winning horse. Judging from his Rolling Stone essay he has no idea why the climate movement failed, and no clue at all about how he could re-think the issue.

Read the whole thing, of course. Links to parts one and two are here.

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Walking Into Mordor With Bill Whittle

2011-07-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

Bill Whittle's latest Firewall video is up.......

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The Global Warming Counterargument...

2011-07-01T09:00:00.001-07:00

....from Ray spencer and Bill Whittle.

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Andrew Klavan Has a Question for the Ages

2011-07-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

Why do black people vote for Democrats?

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The Scourge of the ATM Machine

2011-07-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

Brought to you by Mary Katharine Ham.....

(via Instapundit)

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Who Is the Forgotten Man?

2011-06-29T08:20:00.001-07:00

Samizdata's Quote of the Day for yesterday:

“Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, willing to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfil it, with respect to both sides and favor on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer. But we stand with our backs to the independent and productive laborer all the time. We do not remember him because he makes no clamor; but appeal to you whether he is not the man who ought to be remembered first of all, and whether, on any sound social theory, we ought not to protect him against the burdens of the good-for-nothing.”

- The Forgotten Man, page 209 from On Liberty, Society and Politics. The Essential Writings of William Graham Sumner, Edited by Robert C. Bannister.

Very well said. Johnathan Pearce has further comments on the quote so click on over and take a look. More Sumner essays are available free of charge at the online library of Liberty Fund.

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The Failure of Al Gore and the Green Movement

2011-06-28T08:54:00.000-07:00

I haven't blogged about the global warming/climate change debate in quite a while as I was getting rather exhausted with the subject and others are doing a much better job of shining light on the subject. One such is Walter Russell Mead who has written a pair of essays on Al Gore and the Green movement, the failure of their argument for a Global Green Carbon Treaty and why the whole enterprise was and is destined to fail. Part One is here and Part Deux is here. Of course you should read both essays but here is a sample from Part Deux:

Mr. Gore’s work up to and including his latest Rolling Stone essay has taken a demagogic rather than intellectual approach. His method of arguing is to trumpet the science of climate change and to make ad hominem arguments against its opponents. The science is clear, it is settled, and the opposition against it is funded by people with an economic stake in denial. I am right about the science and my opponents are a bunch of evil opportunists in it only for the money.

That is Mr. Gore’s position, and it is his entire position. He says nothing about the feasibility of the proposed GGCT or its cost effectiveness. That, presumably, we must take on faith. There is nothing to discuss about policy. It is essentially the cry of Chicken Little: “The sky is falling and we must run and tell the king.”

Thus speaketh Al Gore: the world is burning down and so you must immediately follow my plan for fixing what’s wrong. He does not discuss whether his plan is feasible; to anyone who objects to the ponderous, unwieldy Rube Goldberg style green treaty agenda, Gore simply bellows: “What’s the matter you soul-dead, hired flack of the evil oil companies, don’t you believe in Science?”

Al Gore’s logic is exactly like the genealogy of the man who boasted that his line of descent went all the way back to Julius Caesar — with only two gaps. Gore’s ironclad argument has only two gaps: he presents no evidence that the GGCT is either feasible (that it would be efficacious if put into practice and that it can in fact be put into practice in a reasonable time frame) or economical (that it is the cheapest and most effective means of reaching the goal, and that the cost of the fix is less than the cost of the problem).

This is the method of the global green movement as shaped by Al Gore: an ever-crescendoing invocation of blizzards, droughts, locusts and floods aims to stampede the populace into embracing one of the most dubious and unworkable policy prescriptions ever presented to the public eye.

And from Part One on Gore's rank hypocrisy:

But you cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.

It is not enough to buy carbon offsets (aka “indulgences”) with your vast wealth, not enough to power your luxurious mansions with exotic low impact energy sources the average person could not afford, not enough to argue that you only needed the jet so that you could promote your earth-saving film.

You are asking billions of people, the overwhelming majority of whom lack many of the basic life amenities you take for granted, people who can’t afford Whole Foods environmentalism, to slash their meager living standards. You may well be right, and those changes may be necessary — the more shame on you that with your superior insight and knowledge you refuse to live a modest life. There’s a gospel hymn some people in Tennessee still sing that makes the point: “You can’t be a beacon if your light don’t shine.”

Who Are the Socialists?

2011-06-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

There are none, according to Victor Davis Hanson:

There are none. Only technocratic overseers who wish to give someone else’s money to others as a means of winning capitalist-style lifestyles and power for themselves — in a penultimate cycle of unsustainable spending. When this latest attempt at statism is over, Barack Obama will enjoy a sort of Clintonism, a globe-trotting post officium lifestyle of multimillion dollar honoraria to fund a lifestyle analogous to “two Americas” John Edwards, “earth in the balance” Al Gore, a tax-exempt yachting John Kerry, a revolving-door Citibank grandee like Peter Orszag, or a socialist Strauss-Kahn in $20,000 suits doling out billions to the “poor.”

"So what is Socialism?"

It is a sort of modern version of Louis XV’s “Après moi, le déluge” – an unsustainable Ponzi scheme in which elite overseers, for the duration of their own lives, enjoy power, influence, and gratuities by implementing a system that destroys the sort of wealth for others that they depend upon for themselves.

And there's this:

This discussion is, of course, a belabored example of why and how socialists do not like socialism. Indeed, statism is not a desired outcome, but rather more a strategy for obtaining power or winning acclaim as one of the caring, by offering the narcotic of promising millions something free at the expense of others who must be seen as culpable and obligated to fund it — entitlements fueled by someone else’s money that enfeebled the state, but in the process extended power, influence, and money to a technocratic class of overseers who are exempt from the very system that they have advocated.

Read the whole thing.

Mr Kelly Goes to Washington - and Gives'em Hell

2011-06-24T11:23:00.002-07:00

A magnificent rant by Congressman Mike Kelly (R-PA), taking both sides of the aisle to task, and the Democrats in particular, over the lack of progress on passing a budget.

(via Hot Air)

A Brilliant Defense of Free Speech by Mark Steyn

2011-06-22T12:17:00.004-07:00

Mark Steyn makes a remote appearance at an event held by Australia's Institute for Public Affairs to stand up for the free speech rights of Australia's best known conservative columnist, Andrew Bolt. Bolt is being prosecuted under the country's very restrictive racial tolerance laws.

Mark Steyn on Free Speech at the IPA from Institute of Public Affairs on Vimeo.

(Via Power Line)
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Is Dmitri Medvedev to the Right of Obama?

2011-06-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

By this account at Power Line it certainly sounds plausible.

Read the whole thing.

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The Wisdom of Winston

2011-06-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

Samizdata's Quote of the Day today:

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle

- Winston Churchill

The fact that this isn't self-evident is a crying shame.

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OMG, It's Right Under Me!

2011-06-17T17:13:00.011-07:00

I don't know why this one amuses me so much but it does.

Your mileage may vary.

(via Charlie Martin at The Tatler)

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Klavan's Economic Smackdown: Paul Ryan vs. Barack Obama

2011-06-16T17:32:00.002-07:00

Andrew Klavan compares the Ryan Medicare plan (an actual plan) to Obama's (demagoguery).

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If Life Were Like Facebook...

2011-06-11T10:19:00.000-07:00

(via Ann Althouse)

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Weinermandiaus - More Iowahawk Brilliance

2011-06-10T10:03:00.001-07:00

With apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nemesis Strikes Again

2011-06-06T20:21:00.002-07:00

Victor Davis Hanson returns once again to the theme of Nemesis in this piece over at Pajamas Media.

Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?

Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state. Bono and his ensemble may be the highest paid rock group in the world, the most eager to shake a finger at Western governments on their moral duties to help the less fortunate. He is a pop icon always ready to fault the consumerist Western lifestyle. But Bono and his pals are quite determined to avoid Irish tax laws to ensure more of their hard-won capitalist profits so necessary to support their global lifestyles, at a time when their alma mater is broke and unable to fund its once ample entitlements.

They are all part of what Angelo Codevilla called the Ruling Class. They make the rules to apply to us, but not to them.

The always astute commenter cfbleachers adds the following to VDH's piece:

If you pay homage to the leftist propaganda machine, you don’t have to worry about accountability.

You have to worry about karma.

You have to be a complete imbecile to be a leftist and get caught in a scandal. Tony Baloney lied through his teeth, blamed others, said it was a frame up by wingnuts, said he was hacked….

John Edwards lived in “two Americas”, one where honor and integrity were merely trifling things and the other where he lied about them with impunity.

Barney Frank has never been made to come clean about the prostitution ring in his basement or his close ties to Fannie’s internal collapse.

Obama and Rezco, his and Michelle’s law licenses, Ayers, ….there is a pathway from the lack of accountability that leads directly to corruption.

Republicans, being held to a higher standard by BOTH constituencies, fair far worse when exposed.

Leftists being held to NO standard by their own, and, in fact often given great cover…are the new integrity welfare state. They are dependent upon the coverup and corruption in the media and their inner circles. The conspiracy of silence destroys their need for honor.

Nothing they do, say or promote gets examined…and therefore it becomes weak, corrupt and necrotic.

They are the permanent ethical underclass, living in a ghetto of no scruples. And, worst of all…it looks like paradise to them.

Read it all.
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Latest Absurd Assertion from the Obama Administration - He Doesn't Have to Sign Bills Before They Become Law

2011-05-31T08:15:00.002-07:00

No, really. That's the latest out of the Obama Administration. This is in spite of what the Constitution says in plain English. A bill:

“shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States: If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it.”

So, first, Congressmen need not read the bills they pass before voting on them. Now the President need not read them or sign them for them to become law. I wonder what our government would think of the argument that the logical extension of that line of reasoning is that if Congress and the President needn't follow the plain language of the Constitution then we needn't follow the laws thusly "passed." Somehow I don't think a pass is what we'll get.

Our government is out of control. November 2012 can't get here soon enough for me.

Barack Obama as Turncoat - Bill Whittle

2011-05-28T22:51:00.000-07:00

Watch.

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Higher Education Bubble Update Over At Instapundit

2011-05-24T21:29:00.001-07:00

With one college-age daughter and another about to be, Glenn Reynolds' Higher Education Bubble updates are something I've followed very closely. He has a very long, multi-updated one today that is worth reading.

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Meme Busting, Bill Whittle Style

2011-05-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

I've been busy the last couple of weeks so I missed this earlier. Bill Whittle takes on and takes apart numerous media perpetuated memes in this Firewall video.

Did Avoidance of Salt Cause My Type 2 Diabetes?

2011-05-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

It seems like a possibility. I have avoided salt for years. I don't care much for excessively salty food but I had even avoided using it in more than minimal amounts in cooking and never added it to the food on my plate. From the article:

So what to make of the efforts of the low-salt advocates to subject all Americans to what amounts to a mass uncontrolled experiment without their consent (informed or otherwise) and without the oversight of an ethics review board that might otherwise be charged with safeguarding the public? And what to make of the absence of the Precautionary Principle typically unfurled before our self-styled public health advocates march us out to face nature's cannons? Apparently "caring" means never having to say you're sorry.

I'm looking at you, Mayor Boomberg.

Make sure you look at the study abstract too.

Cactus Flowers

2011-04-30T10:41:00.001-07:00

My front yard is dominated by one rather large prickly pear cactus and once a year it flowers This is that time of year.

…and the red yucca is flowering too.

Keynes vs. Hayek - Round II

2011-04-28T08:59:00.000-07:00

Via Instapundit, we have this music video of Keynes and Hayek facing off in the hearing room/boxing ring. It's a good summary of the philosophical differences between their approaches to the economy. Produced by Econstories.com

Making Space Pay and Having Fun Doing It

2011-04-24T15:08:00.002-07:00

Jeff Greason, Head of XCOR, talks about space and civilization in htis inspirational 16 minute video. This quote, about a minute in really struck me:

That's how a Dark Age begins. A Dark Age is not just when you, as a civilization, forget how to do something. It's when you forget that you ever could.

What Is Fairness?

2011-04-24T13:43:00.002-07:00

British Prime Minister David Cameron asked polling organization Policy Exchange to find out what the people think it is.Telegraph Columnist Janet Daly tells us what they found out:

The quite unequivocal reply that was received (with breathtakingly enormous majorities in some forms) came as no surprise to this column. To most voters, fairness does not mean an equal distribution of resources and wealth, or even a redistribution of these things according to need. It means, as the report's title – "Just Deserts" – implies, that people get what they deserve. And what is deserved, the respondents made clear, refers to that which is achieved by effort, talent or dedication to duty: in other words, earned on merit.

She goes on:

Imagine that. After all these years of being morally blackmailed by the poverty lobby, harried by socialist ideologues and shouted at by self-serving public sector axe-grinders, the people are not cowed. Even after being bludgeoned by the BBC thought monitors and browbeaten by Left-liberal media academics with the soft Marxist view of a "fair" society – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs – they have not bought it. They do not believe that if people are poor, it is necessarily society's fault, and therefore society's duty to deal with the consequences.

The left isn't really interested in alleviating poverty. If the problem of poverty went away they would have no reason for being. Poverty allows them to buy votes with other peoples money.

Read the whole thing.

"A Pyromaniac In a Field of Strawmen" - Paul Ryan on Obama's Speech

2011-04-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

Congressman Paul Ryan sat down with The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes on Thursday for a wide ranging interview in which he talks about Obama's Wednesday speech but also goes into depth about his budget plans and the whys and wherefores. Watch it here.

Lower Tax Rates Lead to Higher Tax Revenues

2011-04-15T08:37:00.003-07:00

“Tax cuts for the rich are what led to this massive deficit,” is what the Democrats keep yelling. The facts (you know, those pesky things lefties are oblivious to?) are different. CBO numbers show that from 2003, when the Bush tax cuts went into effect, and 2006, the last year of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, tax revenues to the Treasury rose from $1.783 trillion to $2.407 trillion, a 35% increase.

Federal Tax Revenues

2003

2006

	Billions	% of GDP	Billions	% of GDP
Individual	794	7.3	1,044	8
Corporate	12	1.2	354	2.7
Other Tax	857	7.9	1,009	7.7
Total	1,783	16.5	2,407	18.4

In January 2007, both houses of Congress were taken over by the Democrat Party at a point when under a Republican Congress the deficit was $160 billion, its lowest point in five years. Go here to see what happened next.

(H/T MBG!)

Letters from an Ohio Farmer

2011-04-14T08:53:00.001-07:00

Steven Hayward over at Power Line links to a fairly new site today called "Letters from an Ohio Farmer." The site is inspired by the "Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer", penned by John Dickinson under the pen name Fabius contemporaneously and in agreement with The Federalist Papers in the 1787-88 era during the birthing of our Constitution. Dickinson was a collaborator with Thomas Jefferson in 1775 on the Declaration and Causes of the Necessity of Taking up Arms which, perhaps due to the less than catchy name didn't quite take. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence (much better!) the following year but Dickinson abstained from voting on it, hoping for some reconciliation with Britain. Here is Hayward's summary of what the Ohio letters is about:

"These letters are formally addressed to members of the 112th Congress but are also written for the engaged citizen. Many of the large class of new House members came to office in an election marked by an unprecedented populist fervor for constitutionalism. For that is partly what the Tea Party movement is--a populist constitutional movement--something James Madison would have thought at first glance not merely improbable, but an oxymoron, though on second thought he might have celebrated that the Tea Party represents the fulfillment of one of the Constitution's larger purposes, which was to create a reverence among citizens for the principles of the nation."

Read Hayward's whole post for background, then head on over to the Ohio Farmer letters, eight so far, and be inspired.

Update: I just had to call out this paragraph from the most recent Letter, "A Republican Form of Government" :

"Here Madison may have been too optimistic. The lessons of recent American politics suggest that minority factions can be more dangerous than he imagined. The modern phenomenon he failed to anticipate was a government entrusted with so many responsibilities, and so much power and money, that it becomes a faction unto itself, with its own passions and interests adverse to the rights of other citizens. Those in the control room have both the motive and means to steer the ship of state in directions advantageous to themselves, rather than ones preferred by the passengers who employ them."

Rick Perry, Meet Salman Khan.

2011-04-05T19:01:00.001-07:00

Back in February, Texas Governor Rick Perry challenged the state's colleges and universities to find a way to offer a four year degree for $10,000 or less. Not $10,000 per year, $10,000 total. Including books. With the technology available today it should be possible. The cost of a four year degree the way it is done now has risen by over 400% from when I collected my degree almost 30 years ago. higher education must be one of a very few enterprises to have had negative productivity growth over time. Wander over to Instapundit and search on the term "higher education bubble" and you will get a 100 or more results. The current higher education system is becoming unsustainable and is an increasingly poor return on investment for the student.

Which brings me to Salman Khan. He may have the answer to how Texas can meet Perry's challenge. Khan was a hedge fund analyst working in Boston. He has some younger cousins that lived in New Orleans who needed tutoring in math. He put together a few YouTube tutorials for them so they could learn at their convenience. He didn't make the videos private, so other people started to watch them and thus was the Khan Academy born. I'll let him tell you the rest of the story in the TED video that follows. I see the question that needs to be answered is the determining how you test to make sure that degree requirements are met. I don't see this as a huge problem but the higher education establishment willl undoubtedly try to make it harder than it needs to be because this won't just upset their rice bowl, it will kick it across the room and shatter it. The video is 20 minutes. It's worth every minute.

Eat The Rich!

2011-03-31T08:57:00.002-07:00

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

2011-03-29T08:17:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-18T09:17:00.002-07:00

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..

Well Duh, Where Else Would It Be?

2011-03-17T08:41:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-10T17:42:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-08T17:44:00.008-07:00

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

2011-03-08T09:04:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-06T09:46:00.000-07:00

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.

The Big Guy Talks About the Big Things - Chris Christie at AEI

2011-02-24T19:58:00.010-07:00

Chris Cnristie gave an hour-long talk at the American Enterprise Institute last week, talking about the Big Things in politics. The full hour-long video of the speech is here but here is a brief excerpt:

Do watch the whole speech, if you have the time.

Roger L. Simon Has Some Thoughts on Liberals as Reactionaries in Wisconsin

2011-02-22T08:07:00.001-07:00

Pajamas Media co-founder and CEO Roger L. Simon, a former lefty himself, has some thoughts about what we are seeing playing out in Wisconsin:

"So why has our left become so reactionary, so unwilling or unable to adapt to a changed world that they “act out” with all the juvenility of adolescents deprived of the family car keys? Some say it is because they have replaced religious faith with politics and I, an agnostic, see some truth in that. But there is more. Liberalism has become a mask for greed in our culture — a way of hiding excessive selfishness from others and, importantly, from the self. It’s a deflection, really.

We see this in the billionaire extremes of a George Soros and a John Kerry, but also now in the demonstrators in the streets of Madison. Many are suffering economically in our country. Huge numbers are unemployed. But when asked to pull together for the good of the mean, the liberals, the ones who pay the greatest lip service to equality, say NO.

They hide behind “Union! Union! Union!” and “No pasaran!,” but it’s all a fake. When the chips are down, our modern liberals are overcome by their own sense of entitlement. Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism has infected them to such a degree reality cannot intrude. I get my pension even if there’s no money, even if you have to pay for it and you’re broke without any pension of your own.

Socialism, my fat fanny! It’s just plain old selfish greed."

Read the whole thing.

Obama's Friends and Enemies - Bill Whittle

2011-02-17T20:13:00.006-07:00

In his latest Firewall video, Bill makes the case that "President Obama and his administration's contempt for our traditional allies, coupled with his comfort with our traditional adversaries can no longer be attributed to inexperience, or even incompetence. It must be due to ideology."

Judge for yourself but I agree with Bill.

Why Public Sector Employee Unions Should Not be Allowed

2011-02-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

Unions once had their place in protecting workers but in the modern age workers have access to information in the form of what other employers than their own are paying in wages and benefits and are free to take a better offer. Employers know they have to compete with each other for the best employees. Unions have become largely irrelevant. In the public sector, unions are actually destructive because they can influence elections and support candidates who, though elected to represent the interests of voters, are actually then beholden to the public sector unions and will act to increase government employee wages and benefits to the detriment of the voter/taxpayer. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Public sector employees now make more on average than their private sector counterparts, who must pay taxes to support them and they have the protection of civil service laws to boot. In other words, the employees get to elct their own bosses, who must then keep the employees happy.

Over the last few days, teachers in Wisconsin have been staging a sickout in protest of Governor Scott Walker's plan to rein in the power of the unions by removing their collective bargaining rights with respect to benefits, not wages, just benefits. Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist Patirck McIlhern sums it all up here but I thought this part of his column on the issue best sums up the difference between private and public sector unions:

"Unions in the private sector are a way of organizing private interests, those of employees, against other private interests, those of a company's owners, for economic gain and for protection against unfairness. In government, workers are already protected against unfairness by civil service laws, and Walker has supported expanding those. Economically, government unions pit a private interest, that of employees, against the public's interest, that of taxpayers and voters."

Read the whole thing.

Hayek's Top 10 Do's and Don'ts in a Recession

2011-02-15T18:36:00.002-07:00

Over at The Heritage Foundation's Foundry blog, David Azerrad has a list of top 10 do's and don'ts in a recession, as distilled from the works of F.A. Hayek by Bruce Caldwell. You should read the whole thing, of course, but here is the even shorter version.

“We usually don’t have the necessary knowledge to intervene effectively in the economy, and the political process is such that, even if we did, we still likely would get bad policy, coupled with an ever-growing government sector.”

The ever-growing government sector is a bug, not a feature.

(via Instapundit)

Downsizing the Federal Government - It Can Be Done.

2011-02-14T08:51:00.001-07:00

The Cato Institute has a blog called Downsizing the Federal Government which I just found via John Hood at National Review Online's The Corner blog. It has a department by department guide of federal agencies, what they spend and how they can be cut.

I think a lot of us look at the scale of federal spending and think, how can we ever get this under control? The answer is that you solve it the way you do any other problem. Break the task down into manageable pieces, as Cato has done here. The individual pieces may not look significant when you are comparing them to the overall problem, but they add up.

Also at the site, a comprehensive plan to balance the federal budget by 2020 without raising tax rates by reducing federal spending from its current (abnormally high) level of 25% of GDP to 18.5% of GDP, which is in much closer alignment with the historical average of tax revenues as a percent of GDP, as shown by economist Kurt Hauser.

Go and check the site out. I think you will see the task of getting the deficit under control a lot less daunting if you do.

Stop the Hate! A New Klavan on the Culture

2011-02-11T09:14:00.000-07:00

On the mark, as usual.

(via Instapundit)

Four Reasons Why Big Government Is Bad Government

2011-02-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

Another Economics 101 video from the Center for Freedom & Prosperity.

I posted another one back in November on Why Keynesian Economics Is Wrong and there are lots more here at the CF&P website.

Bill Whittle on The Free Frontier

2011-02-08T19:51:00.000-07:00

Here is Bill Whittle talking about how the private sector looks to continue our access to space. Amazing. As our government loses interest and bows out, private interests, i.e. profit seekers, fill the void and do it better and more cost-effectively. It's a reverse of the usual crowding out effect where as government gets more involved, the private sector is pushed aside. Go and watch.

What Happens When You Taxi Your F-16 Fighter a Titch Too Close Behind a B-1B Bomber

2011-02-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

Whoopsie daisy.....

(h/t Vodkapundit)

Pima Sheriff and County Prosecutor Trying to Silence the Tucson Tea Party

2011-02-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

This is shameful conduct on the part of Pima County Sheriff Dupnick and County Attorney Barbara LaWall and should not be happening in a free and open society.

The Anchoress on Uncredentialed Wonder

2011-02-05T17:21:00.006-07:00

That would be wonder as in that sense of joyful curiosity and delight in learning new things.

I've been following the rather worrisome phenomenon known as the "higher education bubble" lately. The cost of a college education keeps going up and up, 440% since I collected my degree almost 30 years ago, yet there seem to be fewer and fewer good job opportunities for college graduates, particularly ones that will pay them enough to retire the massive load of non-dischargeable student debt many will acquire, or even save enough money to retire themselves one day. (As the joke goes; how do you get a psych major off your porch? Pay him for the pizza.)

Over at The Anchoress, Elizabeth Scalia has a wonderful post that explores the question of whether we have come to value a credential more than a true education. She also talks about the many examples of some very successful people who though they may not have possessed even so much as a GED are demonstrably better educated than some highly credentialed ones who are overtly disdainful of some of those successful people for the simple reason that they don't possess the right credentials. From the post:

I wonder if that’s really good for America, though. To become educated is a marvelous thing; to have the opportunity to study is a privilege too many take for granted. But have we become a society that places too much weight on the attainment of a diploma, which sometimes indicates nothing more than an ability to keep to a schedule and follow a syllabus, and underappreciates the ability to wonder, to strike out on an individual path, and to learn on one’s own? When did non-conformists become so unromantic and undervalued?

[snip]

It is a wonderful thing to sit in a classroom and grow in knowledge, if one is in fact doing that, but often it seems that degrees should be awarded in going through the motions; they come without a genuine expansion of thought, or an enlargement of wonder. And, to paraphrase Gregory of Nyssa, it’s the wondering that begets the knowing.

My sister also makes a great point:

Our Great-grandfather was a self-educated man, the eldest of 14 children, who rose to become the local equivalent of Superintendent of Schools without ever setting foot in a college or university. He used to walk the 5-10 miles to the local library whenever he had the chance. Point is, credentials are fine, if they are meaningful, but it is intellectually slovenly to assume that there is only one way to acquire wisdom and knowledge. With our over-emphasis on credentials, we cheat ourselves out of the contributions of many bright ( or late-blooming) minds.

Read the whole thing.

State of the Union- A Conservative Response - Bill Whittle

2011-02-01T22:22:00.001-07:00

This is Bill Whittle's response to the State of the Union Address. Do I really need to encourage you to watch?

If you like to read rather than watch, the transcript is here.

Book Review - Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It by Gary Taube

2011-01-28T18:41:00.004-07:00

I just bought Gary Taubes' book, "Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It." The central thesis of the book is that we get fat not because we eat too much and exercise too little but that we are consuming far too many refined carbohydrates. The cure, he says, is to eat a high fat diet, at least 3:1 fat to protein and not overdo the exercise. There are alot of diet books out there that give similar advice, South Beach, Atkins, etc., but Taube manages to pull all this together in one fairly short and readable book that argues his case very effectively. This advice tracks to my own experience.

I am 51 years old and 5'11" tall. At this time last year I weighed somewhere between 180 and 185 pounds (depending on whose scale I was standing on). I didn't think of myself as especially heavy but my weight had gradually crept up over the years, even though I am physically active. Last year my doctor told me I had developed type 2 diabetes. I have no family history of it and I don't even like sweets, which doesn't seem just somehow. But who said life is fair?

Pre-diagnosis I went to the gym 3 times a week spending 2 hours at a time. That included spending an hour on an elliptical machine with the goal of 900 calories and 60 minutes. That is, if I made it to 900 calories in 58 minutes, I'd keep going to 60 or if I was a bit short on calorie burn at 60 minutes I'd keep going until I got there. I didn't overeat at all, I've never been a big eater and yet the weight kept creeping up.

I have a strong aversion to taking medications of any kind so I asked the doctor what I could do to avoid it. He told me to avoid pasta, potatoes, white rice and bread, essentially the same advice Taube gives. So I did that.

Now I eat meat/chicken (skin on)/fish, butter, eggs, bacon, cheese and all the green vegetables I want. I don't even worry about fat, except to make sure I am getting a good balance of Omega 3 to Omega 6. I still go to the gym 3 times a week but ony 1 hour each time and have changed the routine. I spend an hour lifting weights (to build lean muscle mass which burns fat) on two of those days and I take a yoga class on the third day for strength, balance and flexibility.

The result of the changes to my diet and exercise routine were that I lost 35+ pounds in less than 6 months and am back to the weight I was in my early 30's and have stabilized around 145-147 pounds. My blood glucose is regularly in the high 70's to high 90's range now (normal is 65-99) and my A1C is down to 5.8 or almost back to the normal range. My cholesterol is normal with an HDL (the good kind) of around 70. And note, the weight loss is with half the time spent at the gym every week compared to before. Finding the two hours to spend three times a week before was quite a challenge.

Fat is the body's preferred fuel. If you deprive the body of fat that little reptilian part of your brain will start thinking "famine" and start slowing your metabolism and signalling your cells to store fat. Refined carbs are the most easily converted so the more of that you consume the fatter you will get. Eventually the cells are going to say no more and that is where the insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes begins.

Obviously I didn't have the benefit of the Taubes book a year ago but previous readings did help me figure out the diet and exercise routine necessary to reach my goals. Three books I can recommend in particular are "Real Food: What to Eat and Why" by Nina Planck. I think highly enough of it that I've given away probably a dozen copies to family, friends and even my doctor. One of her source material books was "The Schwarzbein Principle" by Diana Schwarzbein MD, an endocrinologist. If you read nothing more than the introduction to her book you'll learn alot (and it's a Look Inside book at Amazon, so you can). Lastly, I got the exercise part figured out by reading "Fit for Combat : When Fitness is a Matter of Life or Death" by JD Johannes, a combat filmmaker and retired (there's no such thing as ex!) Marine. I am not as extreme as he is but he got me pointed in the right direction. There are other books too numerous to list but these are all very readable and the ones I credit most with helping me get on track.

Klavan on the Culture - "Heckuva Job Greenies" and Assorted Other Usual Suspects

2011-01-28T08:09:00.000-07:00

Andrew KLavan takes us on a quick tour down the road to Hell.

Thomas Sowell Has Something for Everybody Today

2011-01-24T18:36:00.000-07:00

Two Blogs, two separate quotes from one interview that Thomas Sowell gave to John Hawkins at Right Wing News recently.

Glenn Reynolds keyed in on this one:

THOMAS SOWELL ON WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN WHEN BIG-SPENDING STATES RUN OUT OF MONEY: “They should go bankrupt. I’m looking forward to it.”

Glenn's observation:

"It’ll hurt people who have relied on their promises to pay. But so did what was done to the Chrysler bondholder"

At Samizdata, this caught the attention of Perry DeHavilland:

John Hawkins: Now, in recent years we started to hear more people calling to get rid of the Federal Reserve. Good idea, bad idea? What are your thoughts?

Thomas Sowell: Good idea

John Hawkins: Good idea? What do you think we should replace it with? What do you think we should do?

Thomas Sowell: Well it's like when you remove a cancer what do you replace it with?

Personally, I liked the following point about government employee unions:

John Hawkins: "Well, related question to that -- certainly we should allow unions in society. Should we be allowing government workers to unionize?

Thomas Sowell: "Oh, I don't know about allowing them to unionize, but they certainly should not be allowed to strike -- and there was a time when they weren't allowed to unionize. There's a whole atmosphere in which a strike is regarded as some kind of sacred thing. A strike is not simply a refusal to work. We all can refuse to work whether we're unionized or not. A strike is a refusal to let other people do the work that you refuse to do and I don't know why anybody should have that right

There's a lot more. Read the whole thing.

.

Book Recommendation - The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism

2011-01-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

I just acquired and am about halfway through a book by National Review's Kevin D. Williamson. It is called "The Politcally Incorrect Guide to Socialism." So far the book is an excellent accounting of the origins and history of the Socialist movement and shows how much Socialism has crept into our own country's structure and institutions. One example is our system of public education. The book also shows how Socialism's record on nearly anything is worse than any capitalistic endeavor, for example the environment. Some of the greatest environmental catastrophes of all time have taken place under socialist regimes and they weren't all accidents but by design. One such is the Aral Sea which was formerly one of the largest lakes in the world with thriving fisheries, commerce and communities economically dependent on it. Now it is largley dried up and has now become three separate bodies of largley toxic water. How did this happen? The Soviets diverted the rivers that fed it to irrigate their massive collective farms without any regard to the effect on the lake or the people who depended onit for their livelihoods. That is but one example.

The book is far from a dry read considering the subject matter. It is actually difficult to put down and I usually only find that to be true about really good novels. So, if you would like to become a bit more educated about Socialism, this book is an excellent choice to achive that end.

Blackberry Help

2011-01-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

Very clever.

(h/t Lee!)

This Is a Thing of Beauty.

2011-01-16T23:38:00.000-07:00

A magnificent rant by Don Surber:

For two years now, I have been called ignorant, racist, angry and violent by the left. The very foul-mouthed protesters of Bush dare to now label my words as “hate speech.”

Last week, the left quickly blamed the right for the national tragedy of a shooting spree by a madman who never watched Fox News, never listened to Rush Limbaugh and likely did not know who Sarah Palin is.

Fortunately, the American public rejected out of hand that idiotic notion that the right was responsible.

Rather than apologize, the left wants to change the tone of the political debate.

The left suddenly wants civil discourse.

Bite me.

The left wants to play games of semantics.

Bite me.

The left wants us to be civil — after being so uncivil for a decade.

Bite me.

There's more. Really, do read the whole thing.

A Handy Guide for Anti-Gun Journalists On How Not to Sound Stupid on the Subject of Guns

2011-01-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

Via Instapundit, we have a little help on how to write about guns if you are an anti-gun journalist. This point in particular is worth repeating in light of last wee's events in Tucson:

1. Don’t assume criminals follow laws.

In a way, this goes right to the heart of the gun-control debate. It is a conservative talking point that only the law-abiding will follow — and thus be disarmed by — gun laws.

.........

Jared Loughner left his house that day intending to assassinate Representative Giffords. There is absolutely no reason to believe that a more restrictive concealed-carry regime would have changed that. If he was willing to violate laws against murder, he was willing to violate laws against concealed carry. Suggesting otherwise just shows that you haven’t bothered to think things through.

This is the (regrettably often fatal) flaw in thinking that because you might post a sign that says "No Guns Allowed" somewhere that someone bent on murder is going to think twice about carrying out the act. No, you might as well put up a sign that says "Unarmed Victims Inside. Have At It;" Spree killers, sometimes also called active shooters, look for places like this. They often do not intend to come out of the incident alive themselves but want to kill as many others as they can before they take their own lives or are killed themselves.

A "cooling off period" has been employed in some places, requiring a gun buyer to wait a few days to pick it up from the store. Perhaps what would serve society better is a requirement for a cooling off period before anyone tries to pass poorly conceived law that won't solve the problem it is trying to address or make any of us safer.