Thursday, April 8. 2010
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, c.1420
 The Moonbat Left can never decide whether they are for free love, or whether all sex is rape.
Multiple census forms to some neighborhoods?
Moran: DON’T SLANDER STATES’ RIGHTS
Harsanyi on Michelle Obama's misguided war on childhood obesity
Michelle: True Confessions from America's Census Workers
Dr. Clouthier's slick new site: Liberty Pundits
Villianous asks how do you marginalize a majority?
Black conservative tea party backers take heat
The people who do not need to pay taxes. Related: Welcome To Vermont Where We Subsidize (Almost) Everyone. Related at No Pasaran: The Land of the Free Freeloader
Insty:
THE KEY BIT ON A VALUE ADDED TAX: “But politicians love the hidden aspect of a VAT as way of duping voters. To them opaqueness is a feature, not a bug.” And my chief objection.
Plus it's an easy way to tax the middle class and the poor.
Wiz: Massachusetts health care system killing insurance companies?
Wednesday, April 7. 2010
You cannot not love June Carter who, I am sure almost all of our readers know, was Mrs. Cash.
At Pajamas, excellent brief tragi-comic post on Jefferson Co, Alabama. One quote:
Maybe someone can stop Wall Street from corrupting the politicians by putting the politicians in charge of Wall Street. Find someone from Chicago who can do it. Or, if that doesn’t work, abolishing capitalism will get results so that in the first place there’s no money to corrupt anyone. Either more government or no business. That’s sure to work in the same sense that you can avoid cancer entirely by having all your organs removed.
 If there was ever a computer "good news, bad news" story, this is it.
Pictured: Average reader upon hearing the bad news.
Well, there's no sense in beating around the bush. Let's get right to the good news.
For a mere $49.95, it's possible that you could more than double your hard drive speed. That means everything would be quicker. Boot-up time, saving, converting, copying, formatting, rendering, transcoding, frameserving, demuxing, remuxing, bitmapping, raytracing, defragging, scanning, disk-checking...
Everything.
For a crummy 49 bucks.
Think that's impressive? With the mere flip of a setting, you might be able to almost double it again.
More info and official techie-type graphs & numbers are below the fol-
"But Doc, wait! What about the bad news?"
Oh, let's just keep that between ourselves. There are children present.
Continue reading "Doc's Computin' Tips: The IDE/SATA/RAID story"
Excessive Arctic sea ice endangers cute baby seals, Polar Bears, this year.
Hey! Where's my free medical care?
At Powerline, in praise of Merle with a great tune.
Which Side Are They On? American labor unions and how they got that way. It begins:
Labor unions in the United States were not always tied to the Democratic party and to a leftist ideological agenda. Once upon a time, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) stood at odds with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); the former resisted statist labor law changes and leftist union policies beginning in the 1930s and the latter supported them.
The AFL and the CIO united in 1955, but two decades before, William Green, president of the older AFL movement, denounced the CIO in terms familiar to present-day tea party critics of the Obama administration. On September 7, 1937, as reported in the Washington Post, Green assailed CIO leader John L. Lewis for “subordinating the welfare of workers to personal political ambitions .??.??. and encouraging communistic support.” Green warned that CIO ambitions could “pave the way to a fascist dictatorship.”
At Am Thinker. Readers know how I feel: I want the Feds out of education. Should be a local thing, in the hands of the local taxpayers.
Teaching should be a calling, not a government-unionized sinecure. What sorts of preachers would you get if you had unionized, government-employed preachers?
Or, for that matter, doctors?
 How has the American diet changed over the past 100 years?
Goldberg: How much taxation is enough?
They sent Volcker out to say it first
The Power to Regulate Commerce Across State Lines Is Also the Power to Regulate Non-Commerce Within a State
The guy who is going up against Barney Frank
The world's tallest building opens
Too late to short carbon stocks?
Current Senate race rankings
Gaming medical insurance in Massachusetts
Catch 22: Higher CAFE standards and more ethanol - but ethanol lowers MPG. And why ethanol anyway?
Electric cars: The Coal-Powered Car And Its Discontents
A (Teddy) Rooseveltian concept: limit the size of banks. My question of the day, though, is this: Is KKR "too big to fail"?
The chutzpah here is something to behold. Having passed the largest entitlement expansion in half a century, in the most partisan manner imaginable, the president now wants Republicans to provide political cover to Democrats as they search for ways to finance the welfare state of their dreams.
The Case for Common Educational Standards. In 1950, 60% of the jobs required no particular skills. The world has changed.
UPDATE: Related, from Clarence Page: “President Barack Obama’s election has inspired a record number of African-American candidates to run for Congress this year. What’s surprising is that they’re running as Republicans.”
Liberals have a narrative: Tea Parties are fringe, violent racists.
There is not a mirror big enough to capture the liberal hatred at their rallies.
Tuesday, April 6. 2010
"Professor Arkes discussed the Four Horsemen, four conservative justices on the Court during the 1930s who tried to block many of President Roosevelt's New Deal programs. He examined many of the Supreme Court cases from the Roosevelt era."
Those four guys saved us. Says the Prof: "We are the beneficiaries of the world that Sutherland and colleagues preserved for us."
Video from 1996. (h/t, No Left Turns)
 A friend of mine was recently pulled over for speeding. The constable, ambling over to his driver's side window asked "Are you carrying, Mr. Smith?"
"No, sir. I am not carrying today. But why do you ask?"
"I ran your plates. Have a good day, sir, and watch your speed."
The cops around here know that if you have a carry permit, it means you've been well-vetted by the local PD, the State Troopers, the FBI, and who knows who else - and that you have been found to be a solid citizen.
 White & guilty: ‘Whiteness’ workshop helps expose your inner racist
Will you still need her, will you still feed her, when she's 64?
Next Bailout - Hospitals Hurt By Obamacare
From Tiger: Thor Heyerdahl meets recycling: Follow the voyage of the Plastiki.
Surber on academic idiocy:
...let me get this straight: A 15-year-old can have an abortion, no problem.
But a 22-year-old cannot have sex with another adult.
Many grow happier with the years, experts say. And then you die.
Chris Currey: How the GOP Purged Me
Update: A Complete List Of Bad Things Attributed To Global Warming
 Story here.
Up here in Yankeeland, many people read Town & Country to keep up with what's going on socio-culturally.
Garden & Gun may become the Southern version of T&C, but we enjoy it very much also.
Our friend Anchoress emailed me this piece from a Lutheran, The dictatorship of relativism strikes back—and goes nuclear. It begins:
The secular press has had it in for Joseph Ratzinger for going on three decades. Before his election as Pope in the spring of 2005, he was routinely derided in his homeland as the Panzerkardinal (“tank cardinal”) and caricatured in North America as the “Enforcer” or even the “Rottweiler.” The roots of this negative reputation stretch back at least as far as the book-length interview he granted to the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori that catapulted him to global fame when published as The Ratzinger Report in 1985. Prior to that juncture, as a heavyweight German academic who had leapfrogged over a major episcopal see (Munich-Freising) to become a leading official in the Roman curia (as cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) under the still new John Paul II, Ratzinger’s was hardly a household name.
Found these at the Bass Pro Shop in Nashville a couple of years ago. In my case, their message happens to be true. Yes, there are still some Farmalls in New England, and my Grandpa's is still running fine even though he stopped running long ago.
The ones with the close-together front tires creep me out on Massachusetts hills, though. I prefer a "wide stance" on the hills.
Monday, April 5. 2010
 California Voters Support ObamaCare. They eat Unicorn meat out there (image via Surber).
An atheist: Secularism's Ongoing Debt to Christianity
Outsourcing grading
Dr. Helen: Is Control over Porn Really about Control over Men’s Sexuality?
From Back to the 1970s: Let’s Get Small!
Whatever the new problem—resource depletion, air pollution, acid rain, the ozone hole, or global warming—we always end up back at the same old “solutions”: stop population growth, stop economic growth, stop consuming things, redistribute wealth, go back to small village living, and we’ll all sing Kumbaya. No matter how many times green gloom is discredited (i.e., the Simon-Ehrlich wager), lapsing into the old eco-fundamentalism is just too irresistible.
Can Christie save New Jersey?
Wilkinson: Glen Whitman and the Rise of the New Paternalism
Insurers not demons, just messengers
Containing Mexico
Switzerland as an example for the world
From Mead's Liberal Internationalism: The Twilight of a Dream:
These days, liberal internationalism is a solution in search of a problem: it is an idea whose time has passed. Liberal Wilsonians must take a long hard look at a world that is not moving toward global governance in any serious way and think about how the values at the heart of the Wilsonian vision can be advanced in a new century.
AVI: America is a Pacifist nation
Is the O eloquent no more? Related: What do some Democrats say in private to each other?
Powerline: Why can't they just forgive and forget?
Rahe: Global warming, RIP
Guy at the NYT thinks he understands me:
Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.
Hence their anger and frustration...
Plain cruel: The O's sissy pitch
Classical liberals should support open borders. It is a debate.
80% of professional (!) philosophers believe in the independent existence of material objects (but only 7% in God). What do philosophers believe?
I am not a philosopher, but I sometimes play one at Maggie's Farm. I sometimes muse that life is a dream of God.
Juan Williams gets quite a few facts wrong but he is beginning to get it.
AP’s Fournier: Relax, it’s just a Tea Party
Whoa… 4 in 10 Tea Party Protesters Are Democrats or Independent
Rep. Cleaver backs away from spitting claim
Neoneo: It is difficult to demonize tea partiers.
Indeed it is, neo. My pup's scarey violent Tea Partay (with potentially lethal croquet) a couple of years ago:
 From Dr. Bob:
In truth, why would anyone choose to go into this profession today? Why would any sane man continue to practice medicine in this environment? Why, indeed, do I continue in this insanity?
I have heard such from many colleagues lately.
Related at American Thinker: What Obamacare will cost doctors.
Shamefully stolen from Samiz. It's about the Americans the Left has never met, and does not know:
I am not going to talk about religious beliefs but about matters so obvious that it has gone out of style to mention them. I believe in my neighbours. I know their faults, and I know that their virtues far outweigh their faults. "Take Father Michael down our road a piece. I'm not of his creed, but I know that goodness and charity and loving kindness shine in his daily actions. I believe in Father Mike. If I'm in trouble, I'll go to him. My next-door neighbour is a veterinary doctor. Doc will get out of bed after a hard day to help a stray cat. No fee - no prospect of a fee - I believe in Doc. I believe in my townspeople. You can know on any door in our town saying, 'I'm hungry,' and you will be fed. Our town is no exception. I've found the same ready charity everywhere. But for the one who says, 'To heck with you - I got mine,' there are a hundred, a thousand who will say, "Sure, pal, sit down." I know that despite all warnings against hitch-hikers I can step up to the highway, thumb for a ride and in a few minutes a car or a truck will stop and someone will say, 'Climb in Mac - how far you going?'
I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime yet for every criminal there are 10,000 honest, decent, kindly men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Business could not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses and the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land. I believe in the honest craft of workmen. Take a look around you. There never were enough bosses to check up on all that work. From Independence Hall to the Grand Coulee Dam, these things were built level and square by craftsmen who were honest in their bones. I believe that almost all politicians are honest. . .there are hundreds of politicians, low paid or not paid at all, doing their level best without thanks or glory to make our system work.
If this were not true we would never have gotten past the 13 colonies. I believe in Rodger Young. You and I are free today because of endless unnamed heroes from Valley Forge to the Yalu River. I believe in - I am proud to belong to - the United States. Despite shortcomings from lynchings to bad faith in high places, our nation has had the most decent and kindly internal practices and foreign policies to be found anywhere in history.
And finally, I believe in my whole race. Yellow, white, black, red, brown. In the honesty, courage, intelligence, durability, and goodness of the overwhelming majority of my brothers and sisters everywhere on this planet. I am proud to be a human being. I believe that we have come this far by the skin of our teeth. That we always make it just by the skin of our teeth, but that we will always make it. Survive. Endure. I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure longer than his home planet - will spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.
R. A. Heinlein.
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