Sunday, June 7. 2009
The week before and after the 4th. A good deal. Info here.
I tried to explain how the fun new plunder economy works to my friends the Republicans. Not interested, I guess.
I'll try once more. The only people listening to you, when you put on your tinfoil helmet and yelled as loudly as you could that Obama was closing only auto dealerships that belonged to conservatives, were other conservatives. They got the message. Just not the one you thought they would. Hey, here's a letter from Steny Hoyer and two other Democrats to President Obama:
Dear President Obama:
We are writing to express our concerns about General Motors’ and Chrysler’s decision to close profitable automobile dealerships across the country, and urge you to ask GM and Chrysler to delay final action on proposed closures pending further review of the decision to consolidate dealerships and the process by which Chrysler and GM selected the dealerships to close.
Closing these dealerships will put over 100,000 jobs at risk at a time when our country is shedding jobs at an alarming rate. We also question the criteria being used to determine which dealerships should be closed and the fundamental fairness involved in this effort. It is our view that the market rather than leaving it up to the manufacturers whose poor leadership contributed to their demise. Furthermore, we believe car dealers will be key players in any effort to revive the American auto industry...
Go on; speculate exactly how ***snicker*** Steny Hoyer knows these dealerships are "profitable." There's a bit more along this line in the rest of the letter. You can read the whole thing at Politico44. But allow me to translate for you:
Car dealers are all conservative, more or less. They've constituted a cash cow for the Republican Party up until now. They have now gotten the message that it's not safe to be a businessman and donate money to Republicans. They got that message from other conservatives. They've now showed up at Steny Hoyer's door, and pledged their fealty, and I'm sure cash, to become rock-ribbed Democrats from here on in.
There's an expression: Don't play checkers while the other side is playing chess. This is vaguely like that, except the right side of the blogosphere is playing checkers, and the Democrats are playing Kill the Man With the Ball. Keep it up, and you'll have the intellectual purity you seek. Intellectual purity is easy when you're all alone.
 The man who cried "Doom" - James Hansen. Also, Freeman Dyson takes on the climate establishment
Related: Scientists line up in DC to combat alarmism:
...the fiery madness is fueled by a number of complicit and self-serving groups. First and foremost, the thousands of scientists that depend upon government grants to fund their climatology research, which would disappear should they fail to find either a human connection to or some new negative impact of climate change. Then there are the environmental organizations that depend upon sounding the alarm to keep the donation coffers full. And the journalists who see a “free ride” to nab front-page newspaper positions by echoing the alarmists. And the Capitalists who see, well – capital, prompting huge corporations to jump on board to exploit renewable energy subsidies and R&D grants from the federal government. Meanwhile, politicians see a great opportunity to posture about “knowing something about science” and to appear concerned for the long term and about public health and environment. And that, explained Heartland’s president and CEO, is what we’re up against in battling the bad-legislation-breeding hysteria.
The O is getting a pass on the economy:
Double standard? Today's 9.4% unemployment rate "fueled hopes" that the economy was recovering, but 4.6% unemployment rates during the Bush administration were characterized as "job growth slowing to a crawl."
 Related: Hinderaker via The Corner:
Yes, that's Obama all right—"standing above the world." Good Lord. Reporters are often compared to teen-age girls with crushes on Obama, but, as the father of three present, former or about-to-be teen-age girls, I object to the analogy. I personally have never seen a teen-age girl make a fool of herself over a boy the way many—most—mainstream reporters have over Barack Obama.
Related, re jobs:
Total job losses in May were 345,000 which put the unemployment rate at 9.4%. You have to dig a little further to find out that there were 70,000 jobs created in May by the government, not the private sector. Private sector employment fell by 611,000.
How's that stimulus working out for you?
The only smiling statue in the Rotunda
Matthew Lesko does Free Government Money
Enhanced interrogation saved lives.
A lobbying frenzy re cap & trade
Upper image: A Wigwam (technically a Tepee) Village in Horse Cave, KY (story here, via Thompson)
Lower image: Stolen from Am Digest, where there are many good things
Psalm 139, a Psalm of David
1 O LORD, you have searched me
and you know me.
2 You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar.
3 You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.
4 Before a word is on my tongue
you know it completely, O LORD.
5 You hem me in—behind and before;
you have laid your hand upon me.
6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
too lofty for me to attain.
7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
11 If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,"
12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16 your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand.
When I awake,
I am still with you.
19 If only you would slay the wicked, O God!
Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!
20 They speak of you with evil intent;
your adversaries misuse your name.
21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD,
and abhor those who rise up against you?
22 I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
Saturday, June 6. 2009
Tomorrow is (obviously) Sunday, so we thought you might want to know before you go to church that Newsweek has declared Obama to be God. Silly me to imagine Newsweek to be a secular humanist rag, when they are seeking a god like everybody else.
I doubt that the O is God: he seems too ignorant to be God but, on the other hand, he does resemble a dark Narcissus. He might be a naiad or one of those Greek metrosexual things that skitter through the forest.
Auster discusses: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/013362.html
Another quote from the John Rawls book review we linked this week:
What makes belief in inviolable or natural rights reasonable? It is not enough to argue that each individual possesses an inalienable inviolability because all are, as Rawls holds in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, free and equal persons. Or that our inalienable inviolability flows from our moral capacity to form and act on rational life plans. Neither our natural freedom and equality nor our capacity to form, choose, and act on rational life plans rules out that conquest and dominion over others represents the best use of our freedom.
When all is said and done, the mature Rawls’s epic intellectual labors do not illuminate this fundamental perplexity. Indeed, those labors obscure the perplexity, even as the difficulties are diminished — though they are far from overcome — by the young Rawls’s theological doctrine. Inasmuch as it conceives of man as in but not entirely of the natural world, and possessing a spiritual dimension or soul for which he is not responsible but which is of ultimate worth and allows him to transcend determination by nature, the young Rawls’s doctrine fortifies a liberalism whose guiding thought is that of an inalienable inviolability possessed by all individuals.
Such considerations provide more than ample reason for scholars to vigorously open or reopen the question of Rawlsian liberalism’s — and the larger liberal tradition’s — religious roots.
There are more than two defense attorneys for each Guantanamo detainee, many from the US’ most prestigious law firms providing free services. Have they accomplished an extended rule of law, or have they degraded it? They’ve tied the US in legalistic knots, delaying justice, defamed the US before the world, and reduced respect or fear of penalty for those who terrorize and seek our destruction.
Arthur Herman writes in Commentary about “The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard”:
The enemies of Bush and Gitmo have succeeded brilliantly. But in so doing, they have done grave violence to the truth about the Guantánamo Bay facility, have aided in the release of prisoners who have since committed acts of terrorism outside the United States, and may yet succeed in having Barack Obama’s government release young men with terrifying ambitions for murder and mass destruction onto the soil of the United States.
I just started reading my friend Gordon Cucullu’s intensive first-hand study of Inside Gitmo. (Cucullu also has a website about the matter.)
As Cucullu says, read the truth and decide for yourself whether Gitmo has been and is the right way to deal with enemies sworn to murder and to abet our downfall.
The Gitmo detainees have able counsel from our lawyers, and liberal allies in our and the world’s media, to trumpet manufactured or exaggerated grievances, claims and rights. But, you are really the jury. Herman sums up for you: “the entire Gitmo myth…was constructed to ruin the Bush administration and blacken the reputation of the United States.” They got what they wanted, and now “However, human-rights groups and lawyers are just getting warmed up. They are now laying the ground for a similar legal assault on the American detention center at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, which they call Gitmo with a different zip code.”
Who is defending your zip code?
We linked this fine brief talk during the week, but here's the YouTube if you missed it:
 It is anniversary season for many. I recommend some nice diamonds for the gal - especially if she hasn't let herself go because she is sick and tired of you and your dirty, stinky socks, your selfishness, your unromantic, piggish ways, your roving eyes, your cocktails and ceegars, your crappy personality, and your inadequate income.
It's a husband's duty and pleasure to remain manly, strong, productive and firm (even if it requires the humiliation of the little blue pills) and to never show physical or emotional frailty.
It's a wife's duty and pleasure to remain lovely, cheerful, supportive, feminine and desirable, and to never nag or complain (and to use that estrogen stuff if you're over the hill).
Anything less is a de facto rejection, and rejection is deeply hurtful and damaging to the soul.
 Today is Canada's Tax Freedom Day
Viking:
The big one – The Corner: "On Tuesday, President Obama sent a letter to Senators Kennedy and Baucus outlining what kind of bill he wants and will support. And what he wants is a government takeover of American health-care, plain and simple." This will be the largest expansion of entitlements since Medicare and Obama doesn't have the slightest idea how to pay for it.
Extra - More on the health reform cramdown at Patterico.
Related: Fools rush in
Can there be Peace Through Weakness?
Pols as loan brokers. Driscoll
AOL reporter fired for reporting the obnoxious Playboy news
Major O supporter threatens to move jobs overseas
Goldman: Oil to $85
The Left loves diversity, except in ideas:
...the leftist bon mot “respect diversity” is but a twisted joke. The radical’s concept of diversity is limited to encountering someone of a different sex or hue who feels exactly the same way about politics as they do.
To the left there is no such thing as a loyal opposition. Any contact with conservatives must be avoided. We are morally unclean and they fear contamination via exposure to our speech.
Their malignant mindset poses serious obstacles for those who work alongside them. Political correctness and the sanctimoniousness of Democrats have made interactions with them a truly nauseating experience.
In Chicago, there’s no getting around all the pseudo-liberals. Despite dwelling in a city and state rendered broke and dysfunctional by a corrupt Democratic Party machine, statists remain as ubiquitous as broken glass on the sidewalk.
The same can be said about New York City, a place in whose environs Harry Stein, a contributing editor at City Journal, has lived the majority of his life. Perhaps a desire to commemorate his fellow sufferers is what caused him to pen his latest book, I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous.
 From S.L.A. Marshall's First Wave at Omaha Beach, in the November,1960 Atlantic:
Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, center file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot.
Friday, June 5. 2009
Actually, what I am listening to in the car: Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer.
Not a new Nail Gun by DeWALT.
It can drive a 16-D nail through a 2 X 4 at 200 yards. This makes construction a breeze. You can sit in your lawn chair and build a fence. Just get your wife to hold the fence boards in place while you sit back, relax with a cold beer and and a smoke and, when she has the board in the right place, fire away like William Tell.
Mr. Free Market would want one, I am certain.
If you have had trouble accessing Maggie's, it is because we are blocking virus-laden machines which are attempting to assault us at a rate of 10,000 every two minutes.
We are slowly trying to open the door without being overwhelmed by these viral attacks.
MSG, NYC, 1992
The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.
John Updike, from Author's Guild Bulletin, Winter 2009 p. 39
 Kealey's talk which we posted yesterday is a wonderful revelation. It confirmed much of what I suspected in the back of my mind but never focused on or thought through. I would like to read his book.
Many things become sacred cows without any evidence for their benefit. Most famous example: the incredibly expensive Head Start program, whose benefits disappear after a year. The rug rats would be better off banging around the neighborhood or the fields and swamps, learning how to educate and entertain themselves. Just get rid of the damn TV.
These "programs" become sacred cows via their income constituencies and their penumbra of virtuousness - not their effectiveness.
The infantile fantasy of government as source of virtue is an insidious one because government is only about one thing: power, and the mediocrities who seek it and the money that accrues to it to maintain that power.
Is government funding for research little more than welfare for PhDs? Possibly. In my field, you would be amazed by the stupidity of most of the government research grants which are paid for by the taxes of modest, hard-working folks who would rather worry about their families than seek power over others. Must be fun to appear benevolent with OPM.
Cui bono?
In the Q&A, Kealey astutely points out that people seek ways to proclaim "I am a good person," and that being concerned about global warming is (or was?) today's fashionable version, just as eugenics was at the turn of the century, socialism in the 1930s, being a Dem during Reagan, and flag pins and bumper stickers after 9-11. Symbols and attitudes as effortless, non-sacrificial fashion statements.
 Lefty: Maybe it's OK to hate f- Michelle Malkin. Good grief. The hatred is unbelievable.
Vanderleun on prayer.
50,000' thunderheads! The possible last 14 minutes of the Air France flight
Benefit spending is soaring. Who's supposed to pay for that? Little ol' me?
What did you expect? Congress is already running GM, for its own advantage
The teacher's unions strike back against school reform. Crickets chirping, as we used to say.
No relationship between CO2 and climate warming.
How the Admin controls the WH press
The domestic cat is no more "natural" than a cow in a field. Why wildlife-lovers hate house cats:
People who wouldn’t dream of taking a shotgun and blasting a bird out of a tree let their cats outside, which accomplishes the exact same thing but in a slower and more horrifying way. The cat doesn’t need to tear the bird to pieces, either: one tiny nick will of a cat’s claw or tooth will subject the bird to enough bacteria to kill it, only it will take the bird one or two days to die. If the bird is a single parent feeding nestlings, they will all starve to death.
Precautionary measures simply do not work. During an 18-month period, a single cat roaming a wildlife experiment station killed over 1,600 birds and small mammals. A study in England showed that cats wearing bells killed more birds than cats without them; during a study in Kansas, a free-roaming declawed cat killed more birds than the cats with claws.
How Hillsdale College beat Harvard. Related: Jules on Gen. Petraeus at Harvard. I though Jules' family padlocked his computer...
The O visits the Arabs. He really buttered them up. However, via Classical,
The president's error is in attributing "Islam" to the accomplishments of the Arab world of a thousand years ago. The president couldn't be more wrong.
It was Arabs qua Aristotelians and not Arabs qua Islamists who are responsible for the accomplishments described by the president.
Boob bait for the burkhas?
Also, what's with the moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the Palis? "on the other hand..." That isn't buttering them up - it's bending over, dude.
Related: Is the O our first female President?
Thursday, June 4. 2009
I got 'em all correct, but I'm a good speeler. Fact is, if you write a lot you tend to begin to speel 'em right.
From the Oxford Libertarian Society, the remarkable Prof. Terence Kealey - author of Sex, Science, and Politics (h/t, Samiz). A wide-ranging and fascinating talk, with wonderful Q&A. The guy is a genius. Please watch:
Terence Kealey - 'The Myth of Science as a Public Good' from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.
I've gotten around a bit.
I've rubbed shoulders with all sorts of kooks. True believers of the believingest kind, without much truth discernible in the final recipe. Holy rollers; snakehandlers. A few animists. Dopers, Buddhists, straight-up Leninists soldiering on long after Lenin lost interest. Knights of Columbus. People that wouldn't eat meat on Friday all the way to Sikhs that would stab you with their little dagger if you lit a cigarette next to them. People that speak Klingon.
But in all my travels I've never encountered a bigger bunch of intellectual anti-matter apocalyptic paranoid delusional wharrgarbll cult nonsense than this item from ABC News. Think about that. If David Koresh and Ted Kaczinski got married and started sharing notes, they couldn't come up with a less reasonable worldview than one of the three major networks serving as a news outlet to the american continent. ABC must be hiring interns from The Onion, because this is listed under Science and Technology:
It's an idea that most of us would rather not face -- that within the next century, life as we know it could come to an end. Our civilization could crumble, leaving only traces of modern human existence behind. It seems outlandish, extreme -- even impossible. But according to cutting edge scientific research, it is a very real possibility. And unless we make drastic changes now, it could very well happen. Experts have a stark warning: that unless we change course, the "perfect storm" of population growth, dwindling resources and climate change has the potential to converge in the next century with catastrophic results.
Well, they got it partially correct. I indeed "would rather not face" these "ideas," in the same way I don't want to face the ideas being yelled at passing cars by men who sleep on park benches and wet themselves regularly.
So people with misspelled signs, unkempt beards, and who wash themselves in the bubbler in the public park are my go-to guys for such apocalyptica. Who are the "experts" that ABC News goes to for their volcano-maiden advice?
Continue reading "Got Apocalypse?"
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