Maggie's Farm

At the OJR.

Related, The 'Right to Health Care' Can Be the Right to No Care

Brokaw: ‘We’ll See’ if Obama Can Learn on the Job — He Didn’t Have Hard Political Experience as a Gov Like Reagan Did.

A good comment on that piece: "If Palin were a Black Liberal they would think she was extremely qualified."

Sad but true, at Slate. We would be ten years behind, with the rent-seekers and the power-seekers in control of it all.

The intertunnels are a lesson in what a truly free market and a free world can do. Watch all governments try to f- it up for their own purposes.

But don't worry. They care deeply about the common good. I have never met Mr./Mrs. Common Good, but I'm sure he, she, or it, is a very fine human being and deserving of special government attention and care.

Government, and government's client and business allies, are "special interests."

Heck, all I really want is some good free porn anyway. The world is full of Lonelyhearts and sometimes I am one of them. So sue me.

At Reason, including The Fight Before Christmas: A Reason Holiday Sampler: Joe Biden, Christopher Hitchens, Electric Football, & Peace, Love & Misunderstanding

I know everybody is doing their Christmas shopping today, but I have some links anyway if you have time. I am heading up to MA to see the family, with my sack of goodies for them.

Cal Thomas: What if the Christmas story is true?

Kimball: ’Tis the Season to Be Politically Correct.

If we cannot defend our culture, we are doomed to lose it.

Gerald goes to WalMart

Wind power? It's a scam. The rent-seekers are all over it.

Counterfeit diplomas

How Democrats gave up on religious voters

It’s official: Polar bear not an endangered species

He knows what is best for you. All about Cass Sunstein: A Czar is Born

45 people lynched amid Haiti cholera fears. Haiti's real problem is cultural.

Iran Just Shipped Missiles to Venezuela. Hello? Is This Thing On?

Buying up the entire Western world at discount prices: Fresh humiliation for eurozone as China says it will bail out debt-ridden nations


I can't wait to have some kids to teach to hunt and fish, but by then fishing poles will probably be banned. GUN CONTROL AS CHILD ABUSE

Malpractice costs and defensive medicine costs, in NY

Pajamas: American Leftists Refuse to See the Handwriting on the Wall in Europe -Our domestic lefties have been pushing for decades to turn us into the type of society that is now crumbling before our eyes in Europe.

Not All Global Warming Skeptics Are Crackpots?!?

Slate: Whose Internet Is It, Anyway?

Let's drive 'em all out of business: UAW’s King Announces 2011 Goals: Target Foreign-Owned Auto Plants. No, they'll just move their factories to Mexico. 

After predicting a mild winter, the British weather service is profoundly ­embarrassed by the current deep freeze

Uncle Sam Will Help Buy You an Alpaca - How the government produces negative unintended consequences

News Flash: Christmas is "Evil", "Depraved" and "the Path to Hellfire", According to Ultra-Tolerant British Muslim Group

Q&O: Is access to the internet a “civil right”?

Driscoll: Global Warming Died; Women, Children, AlGore Hardest Hit

Other McCain: Class Warfare vs. Economic Facts

Neptunus on ROTC:

Looks like it. Love it. Santa loves it, too, and we love Santa - so we give thanks for Globalistical Cooling.

We hate hot weather (well, some of us do, but our authorship has expanded well beyond chilly Yankeeland over the years). Warmth makes me feel lazy and unproductive, and that is not the Yankee Way Of Life.

Stolen in full (because it is so well-said) from Never Yet Melted's Van Jones Urges Young Supporters “To Pretend” EPA Regulations Are Needed:

Leftism originally created political movements by agitating the masses through a combination of flattering their desires and exaggerating their grievances, but Capitalism baffled the Left by transforming the needy Proletariat into a prosperous Middle Class, while Socialism in the countries where it fully achieved power impoverished everyone outside the Nomenklatura. Socialism consequently collapsed while Capitalism thrived, so the Left went back to the drawing board.

Absent economic grievances, the Left with remarkable ingenuity decided to hitch its wagon to the rising Environmental Movement, and to replace obsolescent economic themes intended to inspire animosity and class division with new, entirely imaginary problems requiring the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the State.

Van Jones, the Communist run out of his White House advisor position via the exposure of his political background by Glenn Beck, refers indiscreetly to trying “to pretend” that EPA interventions are required by market failure.

Rush has been making accusations about this for years, and so have we. It's good to hear somebody confess the scam in public. The innocent, ignorant, and sanctimonious Greenies are the useful idiots in this game.

At Pajamas, ‘Compliance’: The Word That Sunk a Million U.S. Jobs

Costs not related to the quality of the end product — costs created entirely by overbearing government — have destroyed our manufacturing sector.

It's not just cheaper labor - it's the hassle factor.

"Al Qaeda is said to be planning Christmas attacks in the U.S. and Europe. The U.S. sprang into action, telling Al Qaeda, 'You can't call them Christmas attacks. You have to call them holiday attacks' ... Al Qaeda threatening to disrupt Christmas. Who do they think they are, relatives?"

Jay Leno, via Sissy at Riehl

The first time I was exposed to the Pledge was in kindergarten. I had no idea what the words meant.

As this piece at Reason tells it, it was a late 19th Century response to large waves of immigration.

It's not really about a flag. It's about "the Republic for which it stands." It's a way of testifying that you agree to the American social contract. In other words, "I agree to this deal."

Kids cannot know what that deal is. It's quite a serious deal, really, because it can cost you your life, plenty of your property, and some of your freedom. It's freely given, too, if you're old enough to give it. You can always move somewhere else. Tom Friedman can move to China.

I don't care whether Rousseau's social contract theory is valid or not; it's an essential concept anyway because it makes it clear that a conscious choice of citizenship is meaningful and important - even if secular and not sacred.

I would not put this in the category of fun Christmas books, but it's an important book: The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life.

From the blurb:

One of the grim comedies of the twentieth century was the fate of miserable victims of communist regimes who climbed walls, swam rivers, dodged bullets, and found other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West at the same time as intellectuals in the West sentimentally proclaimed that these very regimes were the wave of the future. A similar tragicomedy is being played out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from third world nations pour into Western states, the same ivory tower intellectuals assert that Western life is a nightmare of inequality and oppression.

In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia’s love affair with social perfection and reveals how that idealistic dream is destroying exactly what has made the inventive Western world irresistible to the peoples of foreign lands. The Servile Mind looks at how Western morality has evolved into mere “politico-moral” posturing about admired ethical causes—from solving world poverty and creating peace to curing climate change. Today, merely making the correct noises and parading one’s essential decency by having the correct opinions has became a substitute for individual moral actions.

That is well-said. Conspicuous virtuous posturing is no substitute for private morality. But, I know - private morailty isn't hip. It isn't even groovy.

There is no escaping the mysterious allure of liberal fascism. It's a cult.

Mom (with a Lefty non-profit behind her) sues MacDonalds over Happy Meals.

It's obvious that parenthood is beyond her.

Remember this summer when Palin was mocked by the MSM and the Lefties for that statement? On this day, in 1773:

The intertubes seem to work just fine. I want no government hands stinking up my internet. I want it private. KERPEN: Silencing voices of Internet dissent.

 “This broad definition of the economic activity subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation” and is unsupported by previous legal cases around the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

Fed. Judge Hudson, here

CFA vs. MBA - or both?

This is not my personal dilemma, but I was chatting with somebody this weekend who was mulling it over. Her interests are more in the CFA area than in management areas.

Schwartz at Am. Thinker discusses. It's a funny piece. A quote:

What gives her the right to be happy, asks Wurzel?  Palin, who is "not very thoughtful, not very bright," is so darned ordinary that she doesn't understand the horrors of American life.  But Wurzel does, having first attracted attention with her New York Times bestseller chronicling the depravities visited upon her by the fruits of American exceptionalism.  You see, Wurzel survived the horror of being raised on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the shame of enduring the nation's best private schools, the depravity of having parents who paid for summer camps and Harvard -- small wonder she plunged into "catatonic despair, masochism, and hysterical crying."  Doesn't Palin know, Wurzel cries, that...America sucks?  Karl Rove knows, Keith Olbermann and Kathleen Parker and Elliot Spitzer and Barack Obama know -- that's why they're smart.

 

Still driving the Iranians nuts. This is not your ordinary worm.

Watts: More Than 1000 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims – Challenge UN IPCC & Gore. One sample - from a member of the IPCC:

We’re not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” — UN IPCC’s Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004 and listed as one of the lead authors and serves as the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium. 

Let's have a worldwide debate. I think it's all about money and power and politics, and that science has little to do with it. The Wikileaks confirm that. Over my years here at the Farm, I have become convinced that 99% of "crises" are trumped up. Always ask "Cui bono?"

That I believe that some warming would be great for the planet and for mankind has nothing to do with it. It's too cold in NYC today, and I don't have 150 years to wait and see.

At Big Government, it's all about the Pigford scam. One quote from a CSM piece:

...critics cite several concerns with the soon-to-be-law. One is that about 33,000 black farms were in existence at the time of Pigford's original filing, yet 80,000 claimants have filed for settlement. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) of Minnesota, for one, recently called Pigford II "a complete fraud."

"This is what happens when government rings the dinner bell, and it's an indication of just how loose the rules are for vetting past injustices, real or not," Investors Business Daily wrote Tuesday in an editorial.

Jimmy Dismuke, a black hog farmer from Arkansas, claims he's seen fraud first-hand in the Pigford process. In a recent story published at Big Government.com, a conservative website, Mr. Dismuke says he has counted more than 300 fraudulent Pigford claims in Arkansas alone, including a case in which people who kept potted tomato plants claimed to be farmers and got $50,000. He also claims that private lawyers made the rounds in black churches, enticing potential claimants with easy payouts.

"Pigford is the biggest rip-off this country has ever known, and there are lots of people in positions of power that know it," Dismuke writes. "Politicians are using it to buy votes. Trial lawyers are using it to get rich."

Yup.

From Powerline's Scott in a piece of the above title, mainly about Obamacare:

The economic "rights" asserted by Roosevelt in his second Bill of Rights differ and conflict with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They are claims on the liberty of others. If I have a right to medical care, you must have a corresponding duty to supply it. If I have a right to a decent home, you must have a duty to provide it.

The argument for the welfare state belongs in the same family as "the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." That's Lincoln again.

Lincoln memorably derided the underlying principle as "the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it."

It's too late now, but I'd like to see an experiment in which one state in the US would operate under the Constitution as it is written. See how it works out. See who would go there (me, for one) and see who would flee limited government power.