Thursday, January 15. 2009
 An anti-love drug? Brilliant concept. It would eliminate a lot of human misery, frustration, and despair. But it would destroy the music industry.
Raccoon for dinner? Why not? Times are tough, right? Personally, I prefer possum. Possum tastes like chicken, coon tastes like bear.
Dems who hate US taxes. Funny, we now have the new head of the Treasury and the Chairman of Ways and Means, each of whom have been refusing to pay their income taxes. Things must be looking up.
TED spread says TARP is working.
Q&O: End the war on drugs
Why spending stimulus is needed. Becker-Posner. Tiger agrees.
A meaningful tax favor for the semi-rich: A patch for the AMT. I'd guess that the AMT has been hitting Congressmen. It hit me last year because I rent and have no mortgage deduction. In fact, I have zero debt.
About a really big electric motor
How to evaluate gummint health proposals. Coyote
Wednesday, January 14. 2009
It's Climate Change!
We're all gonna die! Global warming causes global cooling, dummy. All sophisticated, bien pensant folks understand that.
Meanwhile, the supposedly Kyoto-friendly Euros beg for more fossil fuel. We thought they gave it up for Lent forever. Yeah, I know: "That was then, this is now."
And more: I guess it's still too hot in Madison, WI. Isn't it nice that those sanctimonious moonbats are trying to save the world by bossing people around?
In the new surveillance societies, why can't we watch back at the watchers? Glenn Reynolds
Wrong, Megan. As with his taxes, it's a question of whether Geitner, certainly an impressive fellow, is interested on obeying the law. He forgot.
State pension losses approach a trillion
Science is rational: scientists are not. Gene Expression
For a mere $495, the spiritual vibes of your water can be improved
Obama cult update. What if they did this with Pres. Bush? h/t, Ace
Why stimulus spending doesn't work
Good traders had high pre-natal testosterone.
China's web users approach 300 million. And not one of them reads Maggie's Farm.
Did you realize that McCain won 29 states and Obama 19? Plus map and other stats.
Staid, cautious John at Powerline:
Alarmists, of course, say that the current cooling is just an instance of natural weather variation that doesn't disprove their theory. The problem is that, for them, nothing disproves their theory. No matter how resolutely the Earth's climate refuses to conform to their models, they ignore the evidence and cling to their theory. This isn't science, it's a combination of faith and politics.
The global warming theory has been around for quite a while. I first learned about it in 1970. But the theory was hatched during a cold period in the Earth's climate, so it initially went nowhere. Instead, the alarmists spent the 1970s warning us that the next Ice Age was imminent. It was only when the climate fortuitously started to get warmer that the global warming theory began to get traction. If it now becomes clear to everyone that the climate is cooling, not warming, government proposals to destroy advanced economies in a bizarre war on carbon--a trace ingredient in the atmosphere that is necessary for life on earth--will be non-starters.
Tuesday, January 13. 2009
Photo: Not far from Palm Beach, yesterday. (Theo)
Eating lettuce is selfish? All eating is selfish, isn't it?
More on Carol Browner's socialism.
2.5 million pounds for this Woman's Studies student's virginity. Watch some Sheikh from Dubai buy it.
Embracing the Sacred: Orthodox Catholic
From AVI: Did Steven Pinker lie? Part 1 and Part 2
College affordability: A wolf in sheep's clothing
More on the voluntary human extinction movement. Why don't they set an example?
Back so soon? Chrysler wants more $. So do I. They ain't stupid - Chrysler is owned by a hedge fund. Related: GM CEO must be out of his mind.
From Wizbang, who has some good historical market graphs:
...the United States has suffered five periods between 1920 and today where the value of the stock market dropped greater than 40% -- 1929 to 1932, 1937, 1973 to 1974, 1987, and 2008. Both of the market drops during the 1930's were either worsened or directly caused by misdirected government intervention.
Department of Government Stupidity: You have to recycle paper but burn biomass. What's the difference? Also, When government runs something... eg High-Def.
Not your ancestors' England. Gateway. Good grief. They have a civil war now.
A new circus comes to town. PJ O'Rourke. h/t, Jules
Hillary intervened at least 6 times to protect husband's donors. Am I surprised? I am only surprised they only found 6 thus far. Dem sleaze = Dog bites man. No front page story there.
How do you know when you're in San Francisco? Photo via the Pro-Hamas Victory rally in SF:
Monday, January 12. 2009
 Photo on right from Denver. Denver?
Jonah with the New Deal Re-revisited, plus a nifty video: NRO
Climate Change Warning: 30 below (F). Going to be cold as hell in the Northeast this week, and I am planning to be skiing in VT this weekend now that hunting is like totally over.
I'm gonna try to nullify my life. It's about addictions.
Supremes to hear reverse discrimination case
The Extinction Theory of Scientific Progress.
Relativism: Paving the Road to Radicalism. Like we always say.
Cool blog: Language Log. Found via Volokh
A new flight from California?
One for the record book. Feds admit error after destroying a guy's life for years - David Stockman. Usually they can at least find that you picked your nose in public in 1997, and send you up the river for a few years. Besides private jets, money can also get you effective lawyers - and justice.
Russell Kirk, quoted at Bainbridge on utopianism:
Ideology, I venture to remind you, is political fanaticism: at best it is the substitution of slogans for real political thought. Ideology animates, in George Orwell’s phrase, “the streamlined men who think in slogans and talk in bullets.”
I think any version of utopianism is psychotically delusional, but I'd love to give life a try with gummint's boot off my neck. At the least, I'd like to be able to light up a Cuban in a pub, and I'd be willing to let them pick my pocket a little bit for their vote-buying schemes.
It's good to know we missed at least one bubble. The Art Market Bubble: On the folly of investing in modern art. Kimball
Stolen from Driscoll:
"Our friends on the left have put their faith and hope in President-elect Barack Obama. Those of us still on the fence about him hope that he is at least half as great as they say. That is more than the Bush-haters ever offered Bush, so perhaps it is a place to start."
The Anchoress
How did we miss this story? Prize farmer run over by dog tractor driver. We let our dogs drive all of our vee-hickles, and this sort of thing hardly ever happens.
CO2 Fairytales. Am Thinker
Failcare in MA. Surber. More from Rick Moran.
Story with a moral: The pirates
Fr. Neuhaus' study:
There was a colossal sound system, for he loved music, especially Bach; there were bookcases containing the Lutheran Book of Worship, from which he and the ecumenical Community of Christ in the City, with whom he lived, prayed vespers every evening, before and after his reception into the Catholic Church; and there were ample supplies of bourbon and cigars, both of which Richard regarded as essential complements to the ongoing, boisterous conversation that was his intellectual and spiritual lifeblood.
To heck with yourself and your family. Sacrifice for the greater good.
Further thoughts on our Open Letter re business careers, from Tiger.
Joe the Plumber's new career
Campaigning isn't governing. Pajamas. Related: From each group that supported Obama, an agenda
Dump Dodd? Fine, but it's not possible to elect a Conservative in CT. Or is it?
WSJ: Palestinian demographics and the fighting culture:
If we seriously want to avoid another generation of war in Gaza, we must have the courage to tell the Gazans that they will have to start looking after their children themselves, without UNRWA's help. This would force Palestinians to focus on building an economy instead of freeing them up to wage war. Of course, every baby lured into the world by our money up to now would still have our assistance.
Golda Meir famously said something like "We will have peace when the Palestinians care more about their kids than they do about killing Jews."
Sunday, January 11. 2009
From our guest poster Bruce Kesler:
If conditions and challenges weren’t ominous enough for the new Obama administration, his strong-willed mother-in-law is moving into the White House. If that alone isn’t enough for most, imagine yourself facing a relocation to very difficult new job, almost every one with power affecting you having differing wants and confronting you with demands often at odds with your own, literally not enough money in the world to satisfy everyone’s desires and the demands increasingly undercutting even necessities, and gangs of lethal thugs roaming the streets around you. Even your formerly most staunch supporters begin to report that most of your previous smooth talk is empty that got you the job and that you’re in over your head. Like vultures expecting a fat carcass but facing a rotting pigeon of a meal, they squabble and fight each other. Almost all your mentors expose they haven’t really much clue what to do. Well, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t just do something, stand there. Most of the challenging conditions will sort themselves out. Running around like a chicken without a head, or doing for the sake of doing, will not only likely have little positive effect but will probably have worse consequences.
Let’s go through a brief list:
The Economy: Not every one, but in aggregate, individuals are better deciders of what is worth working for and spending on than any Delphic group in Washington. Money is the motivation to work and risk. The only economic measure by Washington with a track-record of supporting and increasing this motivation is low taxes. Federal spending, on anything, is inefficient and tends to favor means and ends that reduce individual incentives. Further, in excess -- and multi-trillion dollar printing of dollars is certainly excess, it has been proven, sadly repeatedly, to lead to lasting inflation that is even more impoverishing and destructive of incentives.
Healthcare: As we’ve become wealthier, compared to any other nation, the portion of our personal and national incomes that need be devoted to food, clothing and shelter has declined. That has unleashed the means for medical technologies and treatments that, although often overused, we decide we can afford and deem worthwhile to our better living. Every scheme for “reforming” healthcare is based on forcing us, against our better judgment and self-caring, to have less healthcare, through reduced access and innovation. Bureaucrats’ choices of what they think “cost-effective” for spending our own earnings and taxes are not our choices. The only ones to benefit are government-employment and government-employee unions.
Education: Surely, a well-educated workforce, allowed incentives to be productive, enriches most. Major portions of our enormous spending on education, however, are wasted or siphoned off to non-enriching ends. In higher education, we have lavish campuses failing to serve quality or practical degrees. In primary education, we have multiplying programs that shortchange the basics, while teacher unions expend their huge political war chests to battle reforms. Allowing the influx of uneducated illegal immigrants has diverted a large percentage of education spending to their remedial teaching, reducing standards and programs for excellence among the rest. Border and employer enforcement in motion has and will reduce illegal immigration. Budget restraints are directed by those in power to punish the customers. With the necessity of budget restraints evident, those ideologic and self-serving pedagogues will lose some of their influence to undermine core, productive education.
National Defense: From the pains of combat, we’ve learned that a larger professional armed forces is critical. At the same time, sophisticated, expensive major weapons systems cannot be avoided if we are to have deterring diplomacy with major adversaries, or soundly defeat them if diplomacy fails. The ‘90’s, Clinton path of virtually ignoring the emergence of such threats only leads to larger, more dangerous crises. Cutting defense spending to fuel wasteful domestic spending by Washington is proven suicidal behavior. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Cutting the ounce is deceptively self-destructive.
Middle East: Our avoidance of domestic sources of energy and of transmission has increased our dependence upon and hefty self-impoverishing buying of oil from hostile and trouble-making countries. Take that US financial underpinning out from under them and they are less of a global or regional threat, less capable of attacking Israel as well. A regional conflict is less of a threat to itself or the world.
Having, thus, freed up Obama from otherwise counter-productive activities outside the White House, he personally will benefit not only from things sorting themselves out better but will have more time to deal with his mother-in-law.
Yes, I did have a good hunt yesterday. Thanks for asking. Grouse. Got two, missed two. Passed on shooting one in a Birch tree. Passed on a Woodcock in a swamp because I could not remember whether they were still in season. I was right to pass on that tempting bird. Tired legs from tramping through the snow all day.
 Iraq politics. Sounds like normal.
We all want longer, healthier lives but it's going to cost us. WaPo. One quote:
We are on a collision course between our wish to live longer, healthier lives and our capacity to pay for that wish. Whether we can somehow avoid the collision is perhaps the most important domestic issue of this century. From now on, health care costs will be up there with globalization, terrorism and climate change as a force shaping our world.
Let's fry up some fresh Sea Kittens. Perfect for those good folks who like to eat pussies.
JC Phillips: My New Year's resolution is to make more soup. Mine too.
The MLA is so mad at David Horowitz that they could spit. Idiots. See, unlike Bill Ayers, David had second thoughts about The Revolution. h/t, Viking
The vacuity of contemporary art.
Kudlow on Obama's tax cuts. The Repubs fear Obama's tax-cutting ideas. But Pelosi wants to punish the earners. She's a paleo. In my view, gummint cannot spend to prosperity. It's no different from living high off your home equity.
Fourth quarter GDP coming on Jan 30. What if it isn't terribly bad?
Chutzpah is right. We need to legalize illegals to save our economy. Um, what?
Insty:
WELL, IF YOU ASK ME, free markets are “social justice.”
Ayn Rand warned us about this stuff.
LA: "Put Jews in the ovens." This refrain is going around. It's an old song, and one of the ugliest.
Good point at Neoneo about Obama's negativity.
Saturday, January 10. 2009
 We have been officially notified that Maggie's Farm has probably won the top blog award from the highly-respected ICEIE.
It's quite remarkable and deeply gratifying to us, especially since we think blog awards tend to be bogus and a bunch of baloney, and therefore have nothing to do with them.
But not this one. This one is a keeper. The Grand Pricks. We will treasure it always.
 Remembering Antietam. Jules
What card check would do to the Sun Belt
In search of the just-right desk. Desk feng shui? Gimme a break.
via Jim Miller:
U.S. household debt, which has been growing steadily since the Federal Reserve began tracking it in 1952, declined for the first time in the third quarter of 2008. In the same quarter, U.S. consumer spending growth declined for the first time in 17 years.
Bailing out one of the 20th Century's best business models. Quote from Reason:
Blaming the customer is the second-to-last refuge of any crappy industry, business, or organization (the last refuge being asking for a handout on Capitol Hill). As my ex-L.A. Times colleague and current Reason magazine Contributing Editor Tim Cavanaugh has noted in our pages, the paper we both short-timed for was filled with people making jokes about whether we could just "fire our readers." Over the recent holidays, an entire journalistic Festivus celebration of customer-blaming broke out over New Yorker finance columnist James Surowiecki's lament that, "The real problem for newspapers…isn't the Internet; it's us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free." To extrapolate, if only us greedy human beings would realize that our very democracy was at stake, that we "are taking an active step in the formation of a country without a civic conscience," then we'd damned well volunteer to pay an unnecessary premium to keep our finest journalists in permanent six figures. Sounds precisely as convincing as the argument that enlightened voters will surely agree to pay extra taxes so that political campaigns can be financed through "clean" money.
Related: The Seattle P-I is dying.
Allah Akbar in Oslo. Oslo?
Where to put your money: Why mattress sales will take off. Warren Buffet:
“This should be bullish for Berkshire. With great foresight, I long ago entered the mattress business in a big way through our furniture operation. Now mattresses have become fully competitive as a place to put your money, and sales will soon take off.”
Friday, January 9. 2009
h/t, Theo:
Joe the Journalist, plus the fake CNN Gaza clip, at Michelle.
A sand expert
Spending too much? Bad. Saving too much? Bad. It's true: people are not buying stuff. But I am. Some rugs, a standing lamp, and a new Colt in December. Somebody's got to keep the economy moving. I need a sofa too. Everything is on sale these days.
Why party boss Soros wants Norm Coleman out.
How we know that they know that they are lying
A new world economic order? Who are they kidding?
The highest crane operator in the world. In Dubai. of course.
Thursday, January 8. 2009
 Nepotism Nation
Big government never needs justification.
Neoneo loves Sanjay
More on the health care Trojan Horse. Coyote
The Generational Theft Act. Michelle
Porn biz wants a bailout too.
How Bush tried to rein in Fanny and Freddie.Rove
Chesler: “The non-Muslim world must have no illusions.”
Jimmy Carter’s defensive tunnels
Kennedy vs. Palin: Driscoll. Related: Palin strikes back
A little ME history. Tiger
How will people handle the end of The New York times?
Via No Left Turns, from Dick Morris:
So it is both fair and sensible to give the poor a tax break and to draw the bulk of federal revenues from the rich. But to exempt the bottom half - a majority of the voters - from paying any taxes and to award them refund checks instead would dangerously alter the fundamental balance of national politics. For the economically well off, it could effectively become taxation without representation - which, as the founders of our nation warned, leads to tyranny.
London busses: There’s no God, so have some fun Via Mr. Free Market:
Dang link problems and spacing problems have me needing a few cold Morettis.
Extreme Alaska cold grounds planes, disables cars
Deadly cold, heavy snow grip Europe; Poles freeze to death
Wheat prices rise as unusual cold snap may damage U.S. crop
Cold and freezing rain in south and central China
Still having linking problems. This from Insty:
IF ONLY BUSH HAD BEEN SUCH A RAMPANT FREE-MARKETEER: “Mythmaking is in full swing as the Bush administration prepares to leave town. Among the more prominent is the assertion that the housing meltdown resulted from unbridled capitalism under a president opposed to all regulation. . . . Rather than a failure of capitalism, the housing meltdown shows what’s likely to happen when government grants special privileges to favored private entities that facilitate bad actors and lousy practices.”
Wednesday, January 7. 2009
Homeland Security's records of your travel. Creepy.
Take two aspirin and call your Congressman in the morning
Vicar: Crucifix too scarey. What? Sacrificial love?
Record snows. Where's the warming we've been waiting for?
Rebuilding the GOP, one internet user at a time. But we aren't Repubs - we're Conservatives.
Tuesday, January 6. 2009
Owl Wars in the Pacific Northwest. Some want to kill the Barred Owls. However, the two species are essentially different races of the same big bird. I thought they decided to reduce their fossil fuel consumption anyway. So what's the problem? Bush designates more vast marine sanctuaries. Thanks, W. Politics, Chicago-style Half of economists believe the New Deal worsened the Depression From Nyquist on Strategic Reality 101: I believe there is a societal motive behind our culture’s marginalization of “enmity,” and it should be discussed; but first let us give an example of enmity’s marginalization. As America has been targeted by Islamic forces, America’s political establishment refuses to see Islam as an enemy. In fact, today’s Western culture adroitly fends off the notion that traditional Islam signifies universal submission to the will of Allah. Regardless of the fact that nominal Muslims readily coexist with Westerners, the teachings of Islam are unequivocal. The only reason Europe is not under Islamic law today, is because Europe’s military power surpassed that of Islam in the sixteenth century. This point is lost on nearly everyone, and shows the extent to which enmity has been marginalized in the West.
A quote from Krauthammer, on The Necessity of Israel: For Hamas the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians.
Man, am I busy and frazzled at work now that the holiday season is over. My posting will be frazzled too.
Remembering a Maggie's favorite President: Vermont's Silent Cal (fixed)
Remembering Edward Aloysius Murphy
Pelosi opens war against House Repubs. Gateway. Besides the thuggishness, it's a bad idea for many reasons. Related, VDH via NRO on Who will police the police?: If it was true that when the Republicans enjoyed majorities in the House and Senate and ran the White House, there was no one to object when they overspent, grew the government, and ran up the debt, who now will police the Democratic police in matters of corruption? Rep. Rangel oversees (on Ways and Means) U.S. tax policy, but is himself a tax offender, among other, far greater charges and allegations about his behavior and character. Sen. Dodd simply cannot tell the truth about his cut-rate, quid pro quo mortgage deals. His actions and the Barney Frank-Franklin Raines exchange are metaphors for the entire subprime mortgage crisis. It would take a genealogist to sort out all the tribal ties, inside pay-offs, and pay-for-play deals involved in the selling of Obama's Senate seat; meanwhile, we await the tapes of Jesse Jackson Jr., Rahm Emanuel, and co. Al Franken simply relied on Minnesota Democratic officials to keep counting until they came up with the right result. On matters of nepotism, entitlement, and insider favoritism, Democratic egalitarians will probably anoint Caroline Kennedy as senator from New York. Bill Richardson didn't even try to pull off being secretary of commerce. Nowhere is there anyone on the Democratic side to decry the culture of corruption as in the days of Duke Cunningham and Ted Stevens.
Crickets chirping, as they used to say.
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