Maggie's Farm

Today, he asks me to contact my senators about gun violence. For one second, I thought I might ask my senators to do something about urban handgun violence committed by crims with already-illegally-owned weapons, but I quickly decided it wasn't worth the effort because they don't care about that.

They only care about my legal firearms. I don't think the crims bother with background checks. My senators are hopeless and it's not worth the trouble to write to them.

Brandon Smith put a lot of time into this post: Are Individuals The Property Of The Collective?

It's a fundamental issue, isn't it? One of the things that stunned De Toqueville was the abundance of voluntary affiliations and organizations in the US. Of course, The Collective doesn't do voluntary. I hate the very concept.

Gosnell might be the worst serial killer in history. (Excluding government people like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, etc. The world of evil has two kinds of killers, the amateurs and the professionals.)

Good news: Women Now Empowered By Everything.

If gals get all of the empowerment, will there be any empowerment left for us guys?

Ben Carson steps down as Hopkins commencement speaker.

A sad day when somebody can feel unwanted for believing that marriage is for a man and a woman. Of course, it's their loss, not his.

Via Captain Capitalism's My Amazing Awesome Super Intelligent Friends, a big-time Millennial whine: My friends and I are in career purgatory:

By and large, my friends and my friends’ friends are all intelligent, educated, gregarious, and creative. They’re insightful and thoughtful. They’re critical and ambitious. So why do so many employers put them in positions that don’t take full advantage of what they’ve got to offer?

and

I’ve thought seriously about changing my LinkedIn profile blurb to something like, “My career goal is to gain a position that energizes, excites, challenges, and values me, so that I can continue to develop my skills and talents, and grow as a person.” I wonder if that would catch anyone’s eye?

Kate, we're all special, aren't we? But I think you're a little too special for my shop. Trust me, anybody who read that would gag.

Related, if you control for the obvious variables (hours worked, education, experience, etc), young childless women make more money than young childless men. So there is a wage gap, but it's not what people say it is.

Laugh or cry? Confusing Question of the Day - Obama Pardons The Sequester

Of course, this is LA.

Her 2006 piece here.

And this snippet from Andrew Sullivan, via Jacobson:

The Britain I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. It employed almost every doctor and owned almost every hospital. Almost every university and elementary and high school was government-run. And in the 1970s, you could not help but realize as a young Brit, that you were living in a decaying museum – some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete….

Perhaps in future years, her legacy might be better seen as a last, sane defense of the nation-state as the least worst political unit in human civilization. Her deep suspicion of the European project was rooted in memories of the Blitz, but it was also prescient and wise...

h/t Marginal Rev

King of Fearmongers, and masters of direct-mail marketing.

Peasant pheasant hunting in North Korea. They appear to be firing for effect instead of aiming to kill, which would seem to make no sense to me for the starving NoKos. Well, they do things their own Asian multicultural way, but I can see why they go hungry.

And yes, I am indeed shocked that they appear to have no controls over the use of assault weapons in an enlightened socialist country like theirs. One might have thought that they would have disarmed their happy peasants by now. As Joe Biden remarked, all you need is a 12 ga. shotgun.

OMG. He referred to the decorative function of females. What's the big deal? Wasn't part of his own political appeal his role as a Calvin Klein underwear model?

Pinata Marcotte: Sorry, President Obama, but Complimenting a Colleague's Looks Isn't Harmless.

Boo hoo. That 46 year-old lady Obama complimented is pretty hot for her age. I do not know what the pinata looks like. Is she a MILF too?

This is bad: People Not In Labor Force Soar By 663,000 To 90 Million, Labor Force Participation Rate At 1979 Levels

Government is broke, investors and businessmen are wary of the government (I don't believe this stock market, inflated by free $ and foreign $), the labor market is out of kilter, the EU is blowing up, etc. etc. The US is beginning to resemble France. Looks like a mess to me.

I'm happy to report that I am doing fine. I'm taking a date to the Blue Water Grill tonight. I made some fortunate but risky decisions. Now all I need is a good wife.

David Stockman: State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America

Q&O has some thoughts about Stockman's Op-Ed

From "Tyler Durden" on blaming the euro:

There are very few limits to what you can do to people in the modern interpretation of democracy. A version where only majority rule is required, but where there is no longer a respect for personal negative rights – as we know them from the American Constitution.

The easiest target will always be wealthy people, or even just working people and savers who did the right thing all their lives. As the bloated welfare states begin to collapse under their irresponsible promises, their crumbling value systems and their unsustainable demographics, it will be easy to convince more than 50 percent of voters that confiscating and stealing other people's money is OK for the greater good. Boston Consulting Group calculated that 28 percent of ALL private wealth is needed to meet just existing debts – not future obligations , mind you – and the money can only come from one place… Your pockets. Beware.

A lot of things have gone wrong over the past few years, but the seeds were planted many years ago. In the form of pressure for more people having the “right” to own their properties, even if they did not fulfill the traditional mortgage criteria – hence subprime. In the form of enormous “entitlements” to not just poor, but also middle-class people in the welfare states – hence ballooning deficits and debt. In the form of a Euro, a grand, political project with no practical foundation – hence crisis after crisis, with the dominoes stretching far into the distance.

For sure, a lot of financial institutions took advantage of the hands they were dealt. They are not without guilt and responsibility for the current mess. But the real problems lie not in people trying to take advantage of whatever conditions they operate under. The real problem lies in the framework that is created by politicians, preventing free markets to deal with excesses in the way capitalism always does.

h/t Theo

Warmist claims Anthropogenic Global Warming causes more polar ice. The pirate doesn't call it "HotColdWetDry" for nothing. (h/t, reader)

Indeed, it explains everything, and few theories have this sort of power to explain everything that happens outdoors - after the fact.

MORE FREE STUFF– FOR DEADBEATS!

As she asks, "Does doing the “right thing” even matter anymore, or does it just make you a doofus?"

The tragedy of the commons requires that fisheries be managed, somehow. The ways to do it can be debated, but there is no doubt that the conservation measures for Striped Bass have resulted in a remarkable resurgence of their populations (along with cleaner breeding waters in their rivers and bays).

In recent years, factory ships have, in just a few years, stripped the Northeast of our vast schools of Bunker (Menhaden) with the use of helicopter spotters. Those schools are foundational to our big fish.

The fishing industry of the Northeast US cleaned out the George's Bank populations years ago, pretty much emptied out the inshore Cod and Haddock populations, and is headed in the same direction with the Grand Banks. Furthermore, their trawls vacuum the sea bottom of every living thing, leaving a desert behind. Like strip-mining.

While I admire professional fishermen very much for their skills and daring, just as with hunting wild animals there have to be sustainable limits or the Cod would go the way of the buffalo and the Passenger Pigeon.

We posted about Atlantic Shad yesterday. Here's an article discussing why the once-great Hudson River Shad fishery was shut down a few years ago.

Image below: Atlantic Shad

Related: Bid to return salmon to Connecticut River ends

H/t People's Cube

Or, as Prof Jacobson puts it,

“Quick synopsis of every Jewish holiday: They tried to kill us; we won; let’s eat.”

"Hello" beat out "Ahoy."

That's a shame, in a way, for us nautical types. I mostly answer the phone with my name, no "hello."