Sunday, January 9. 2011
Well, that was easy.
The one big question after yesterday's horrific shooting was whether the mainstream media was going to blame Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, the Tea Party, Bible-thumpin' gun clingers everywhere, or simply Republicans in general.
Question asked, question answered.
Critics of Sarah Palin have already drawn a link between the shooting and the fact that the former Alaska governor put Giffords on a "target list" of lawmakers Palin wanted to see unseated in the midterm elections. - CBS News
“We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list,” Ms. Giffords said last March. “But the thing is the way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize there’s consequences to that.” - New York Times
Ms. Giffords was also among a group of Democratic House candidates featured on the Web site of Sarah Palin’s political action committee with cross hairs over their districts, a fact that disturbed Ms. Giffords at the time. - MSNBC
Afterward, she referred to the animosity against her by conservatives, including former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's decision to list Giffords' seat as one of the top "targets" in the November midterm elections. - USA Today
As of Saturday, Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' name appeared on a website titled "take back the 20" as part of a list originally issued by Sarah Palin of vulnerable House Democrats. A map on the site showed crosshairs over the contested Democratic districts. - CNN
Linking to a map of U.S. House districts that Sarah Palin's PAC wanted to "target" during the 2010 mid-term elections -- which sadly included crosshairs over Rep. Giffords' district (among others). DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas Tweeted, "Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin." - ABC News
What went unmentioned during this rampant outbreak of PDS was:
— According to the shooter's YouTube profile, two of his favorite books were Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. Now, maybe I'm just naive, but I doubt Sarah Palin has read either of those.
— And did you see the quote from Markos "Kos" Moulitsas up above? What also went unmentioned in the above articles is that Kos had a post up — now removed — referring to Giffords titled "My CongressWOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!" Giffords, a centrist, voted against Pelosi in the recent Minority Leader race and is hated far more by the hard left for that indiscretion than by Palin & Company simply because she's not a Republican.
So, let a Lefty use the word "DEAD" — in all caps, no less — in an article about Giffords and that's perfectly okay, but let a Righty put (gasp!) crosshairs over her congressional district, and you're one step removed from being the next Beltway Sniper.
In related news:
Bristol Palin Pregnancy: Is Sarah Palin’s 5th Child Really Her Daughter's?
Who is Trig Palin's Mother?
Kathy Griffin's Next Target: Willow Palin
Bird Dog did a pic dump yesterday, before the shooting, including this gem. Have you ever seen anything more timely?
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
Egypt's Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as "human shields"
Krauthammer via Protein:
Americans are in the midst of a great national debate over the power, scope and reach of the government established by that document. The debate was sparked by the current administration’s bold push for government expansion – a massive fiscal stimulus, Obamacare, financial regulation and various attempts at controlling the energy economy. This engendered a popular reaction, identified with the Tea Party but in reality far more widespread, calling for a more restrictive vision of government more consistent with the Founders’ intent.
White flight from the Dems
US jobs report an ‘utter mess’
The Distraction Of Birthright Citizenship
Shrinkwrapped: Sex and War; Political Correctness and Perversion
Surber: Believe in global warming, collect $2.4 billion
Related, via If it were only about the science:
What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies – and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis….
"Moral Pron"? Cool phrase.
Why the Left Loves the Lies of Climate “Science” - Climate science's only product is political because its only patrons are politicians.
Brooks on health care: Buckle Up for Round 2
WaPo blames Israel for Palestinian barbarity (updated: NY Times too)
Reason: Defending the Right to Offend
Truth in America: Am Spectator
Best of Left-Wing Hate From 2010
Saturday, January 8. 2011
Cold up here today. Love it, love that chill, but hate that stupid green logo for a macho ski area. Anyway, this is worth posting while I take a beer break to warm my fingers and toes: House Votes to Repeal “Job-Killing” Health Care Law 236-181.
It will go nowhere, with the Senate and the O's veto gel pen. Still, a strong message.
Hey - big par-tay here tonite. Readers invited, with toga or thong or whatever. Release those inhibitions! That is your News Junkie, down in front, locked and loaded.
Friday, January 7. 2011
I happen to know two people who are venturing to Haiti next week, one acquaintance and one friend, to do good works, mostly of a medical nature. They do not know eachother.
Haiti is in a state of anarchy. It was anarchy before the earthquake, which is why it could not deal with an ordinary catastrophe. They tried socialism, but how do you do socialism without producers to take money from? There have been hundreds of NGOs in Haiti, and billions of dollars given, and it all goes into a black hole. Nothing happens. God knows where the money ends up. Switzerland or the Caymans, probably.
Haiti is the sort of disastrous place that draws people who want to do good works. As the whole world grows more prosperous, there are fewer and fewer outlets for such folks. For non-profit types, going to work in Haiti is analogous to getting your combat medals.
In my view, Haiti's problem is the culture - not earthquakes or cholera or the endemic rape or Voodoo or hurricanes. The Dominican Rep, next door on the same island, is flourishing, lovely, and generally civilized and safe despite their rural poverty.
- How do you transplant a new culture to a population of 10 million poor people?
- How do you persuade businesses to invest in a totally corrupt and violent place?
- How do you create an honest and well-intentioned government in an anarchic place where flagrant corruption and violence are the rule?
- And who asked you to do that, anyway?
I advised these folks to read Graham Greene's classic The Comedians, but they had done that already.
So I advised them to watch Masked and Anonymous.
 At Washington Times:
What was most remarkable about this was the almost hysterical opposition from congressional Democrats and left-wing commentators. In what should have been a united celebration of the nation's foundation document in a period of partisan rancor, liberals instead reinforced the view that they are profoundly uncomfortable with the essential truths underlying American freedom.
I hate to say it, but it appears to be so. If it is so, I say it's a big deal. The Constitution is our secular Bible, and designed to protect us citizens from State power. It was - and remains - radical and revolutionary.
Statists and elitists hate it, and prefer to forget why it was written. They think they know how I should arrange my life and feel somehow anointed to do it for me. I resent their attitude immensely.
 Barack Obama - Either Doing His Best In One of The Most Difficult Times In American History, Or Hitler
Everything about Bedbugs
Maine Family Robinson: It's Time To Be Interested In Houses Again:
I dare you to go to the library and read House Beautiful from 2000. You won’t even be able to stand looking at the typefaces on the pages, never mind the pictures of the houses. It is unwise to set fads into mortar.
How can there be a right to health?
Health? No. In fact, terminal disease is our definite fate - barring horrible accident.
Via Ace's The Illusion of the "Professional" Class and the Rise of the Liberal Aristocracy:
I've long believed that a key failure of modern society is the widespread disdain for honest labor. There should be no shame in doing a "regular" job and doing it well. However, among many there is the assumption that any person who doesn't work in data or abstractions is a dullard.
Ten dumbest tech predictions
Dr. Helen: "Pretty sad when something all teen males fantasize about happening to them is considered a crime."
Via Insty:
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The New Sophists. “In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration — Peter Orszag, Larry Summers and Christina Romer — assured us that record trillion-plus budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an addition $3 trillion in national debt. All three have quietly either returned to academia or Wall Street. . . . The public might have better believed the deficit nostrums of former budget director Peter Orszag had he not retired after less than two years on the job to position himself for a multimillion-dollar billet at Citigroup — itself a recent recipient of some $25 billion in government bailout funds. Are we to wonder why an angry, grassroots tea party movement spread — or why it was instantly derided by our experts and technocrats as ill-informed or worse?”
AVI has a comment for some of our commenters
Rubin: What would it cost to repeal ObamaCare?
Tanner: What Republicans Can -- And Can't -- Do about ObamaCare
O'Rourke on "Gimme rights" and "Get out of here" rights
Bob Parks: The New York Times: Three-Fifths Of A Newspaper
Bookworm: Reading the Constitution in Congress
Two books I want to re-link:
Vedder's Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much
Minogue's The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life
Art above by our friend Elissa Gore
Thursday, January 6. 2011
Hennessey: The ten most important American economic policy issues of 2010
Pethokoukis: ‘Cut and grow’ is really the only way forward
Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving
McArdle: Commercial Real Estate on the Mend?
Via Neptunus:
"The New York Times is just basically being a mouthpiece for political correctness,” King said, later adding: “These are very legitimate hearings.”
Miller begins:
Feminists began to embrace and promote the legacy of author Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) in the 1970s, starting with an article by Alice Walker in Ms. magazine. This rescue effort was necessary, according to a pair of Harvard professors in the Chronicle of Higher Education, because Hurston had lapsed into obscurity “probably due to her political views.”
Reb recalls The vicious lie behind the global warming scare
Russian News Discusses Rise of Communism in New York City
Television Losing Ground to the Internet as a Main Source of News
No Pasaran:
...the percentage of the world living poverty is shrinking, and no-one sought Europe’s permission for that to take place.
Volokh: District Court Upholds Stolen Valor Act Again First Amendment Challenge
The value of Facebook: Take the money and run
Anonymous on the internet: Schniederman
Watts: Are huge northeast snow storms due to global warming?
Wednesday, January 5. 2011
At The American, Living in the Political Wake of the Bubble. A quote:
One of the biggest causes of the bubble and financial crisis was the government itself. How will this highly political body be able to criticize the government? Let us recall the excellent question posed to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke by Senator Jim Bunning: “How can you regulate systemic risk when you are the systemic risk?”
Tuesday, January 4. 2011
I see Oil price ‘threat to recovery’.
Crude oil pricing is fascinating to me, but I know little about it. I do know that OPEC controls the big spigot, and thus controls global supply and global pricing. (Pricing is global, not local, and I do know that it is determined, in the final details, by global commodities exchanges.) But, in an interesting and rather cool feedback loop, if oil is too high, it can begin to strangle economies, reducing demand and thus reducing the prices the oil producers can get.
I also know that the American oil companies are, sadly, rather small players on the world scene, nowadays:
We probably have readers who can explain the vicissitudes of crude oil pricing, from the producers to the pump. If you can, please do. In 100 words or less (or is it "fewer"?).
How Obama Gets to 270 in 2012. "It's all in the math — and the numbers aren't looking good for the GOP."
 Image from Don't Touch My (Area of government intervention Here) Junk
As frustration grows, airports consider ditching TSA
Earthquakes and climate change: Stupidity of the day
Intelligence is for stupid people
Insty noted this Harry Stein 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 [Paperback]
Synthstuff reports from the small biz arena
The Alexandria Church Bombing: The Plot Thickens
Iconoclast: Don't blame the West - The 'root causes' of Islamist terrorism do not lie in poverty or western imperialism
In The Arena:
D-Day is coming for Republicans. They can't keep this charade of being the party of fiscal discipline much longer without showing America their plan for cutting the deficit. The won an election without doing it but they can't govern without doing it. They have been big talkers up to this point but no specifics. America awaits how they plan on cutting spending and taxes at the same time and making a dent in the deficit. Maybe it is not their D-Day but their Waterloo.
Reason on Obamacare: The law will penalize doctors to pay patients and penalize patients to pay doctors. A quote:
... the administration is defining Medicare fraud down to include “unnecessary” and “ineffective” care. And to root this out, it plans to make expanded use of private mercenaries—officially called Recovery Audit Contracts—who will be authorized to go to doctors’ offices and rummage through patients’ records, matching them with billing claims to uncover illicit charges. What’s more, Obamacare increases the fine for billing errors from $11,000 per item to $50,000 without the government even having to prove intent to defraud.
This is utter insanity. And it has been caused by the transformation of health care into a government-controlled industry where the natural, self-regulating forces of the market have been badly subverted.
George Will: Sarah Palin Cannot Be Elected President
If she tries to run, she will damage her brand. She's a fine spokesperson, for now. She should run for some other office if she wants to be a pol. I think she's better as a voice in the wilderness.
Salcedo: The Spaghetti Strategy: Advice to Republicans - A strategy to advance freedom by keeping President Obama and his radical appointees on the defensive
Gateway: Russia to Lay Off 200,000 Federal Employees, Cuba to Lay Off 1,000,000 Federal Employees, Obama Hires 25,000 More Federal Employees
Europe starts confiscating private pension funds
Monday, January 3. 2011
 It's Back To Work Monday. Back To Grim Reality, and Back To The Gym At 5:30 AM. If you are just back to Maggie's, and have a moment, please scroll down and catch up on our posts from the past week.
We saw The King's Speech last night. Good stuff. Logue basically functioned as the King's psychotherapist. A fine friendship. It's a shame that the King died so young. His docs advised him to smoke, "for his nerves." Lung cancer.
Mobile phone radiation linked to people jumping to conclusions
NYT: Public Workers Facing Outrage as Budget Crises Grow
FrontPage’s Person of the Year: The Tea Party
She was the single mother who claimed her town was poisoned by its water supply... but was Erin Brockovich wrong?
David Warren: Is history bunk?
VDH: I, I, Me, Me, My, My — for Pacifism!
The Olive Tree Initiative: A Fig Leaf for Anti-Semitism?
Disposing of a new light bulb in Maine — this is not a joke
Spot the political haters
Just Another Radical Obama Appointee
Cathy Davidson, nominated for the National Council on the Humanities, is another in a long line of highly questionable Obama appointees.
Barone: Personal Well-Being Overshadows Income Inequality
...there's little evidence that most Americans begrudge the exceedingly high earnings of the likes of Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg or J.K. Rowling. We believe they have earned their success and don't see how taking money away from them will make the rest of us better off.
Free markets are great for the creative, ambitious, and energetic. Who would want to de-incentivize those folks? We regular people are in their debt for what they add to life.
Sunday, January 2. 2011
 FYI, at Thompson. Still, not cheap.
Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times sums up the best that liberals can come up with for reducing income inequality: better education for the poor, to reduce The Upward Mobility Gap. He correctly points out that this goal is one of the few that Democrats and Republicans can agree upon. And, then he stops.
The goal is fine but how to get there is the question.
McManus says, “Opportunity in America isn't what it used to be.” Liberal nostrums fail to mention the biggest barrier to reducing income inequality – if considered needing reduction -- is government, whether one advocates more or less government programs.
To now, more government programs actually create more government workers, their pay and benefits unaffordable while diminishing basic public services. Less government programs tend toward wholesale cuts in unaffordable welfare and government worker benefits, while failing to refocus funding on productive education and related infrastructure.
As well, McManus passes over the “moral” or lifestyle elements that are necessary to taking advantage of educational and employment opportunities as being difficult to measure. Yet, these are crucial.
Three of the ways that the poor found rungs on the ladder of upward mobility, manufacturing jobs and small businesses, are under continuing pressure, while illegal immigrants reduce even sustenance jobs for citizens. US manufacturing employment has shrunk for repetitive tasks while requirements for technical education and skills has increased, overall production holding its own. Lesser costly environmental and workplace regulations, along with lower wages, has drawn much lower skilled manufacturing abroad. More government regulations and greater competition due to reduced transport costs and increased imports of staples has made small business less able to survive or thrive. Illegal immigrants – mostly uneducated -- mostly impact manual labor opportunities for the poorest American citizens, while consuming much government funding that could otherwise, maybe, hopefully, be redirected toward support and education foundations for poor American citizens.
Government programs that focus on useful job skills are un- or underfunded, in favor of expensive contemporary elite culture curriculums, especially victimology humanities. Legal immigrants – thankfully -- fill our sciences. Government programs that sustain or increase welfare dependency, and regulations that discourage risk taking, perpetuate a permanent lower income class. The virtues of stark choices may be overrated, but elimination of such choices is less virtuous. Corruption and self-dealing, either financial or ethical, is unacceptable. Fish stink from the head. The same standards must apply to chieftains of government as to of business. Lack of performance must not be tolerated in government any more than it is in private enterprise.
Two examples of the difference culture makes, my father and my son. The common thread, across the generations, is work habits, learned young, family emphasis on useful education, and behavioral skills and focus.
My father, born 1920 in Detroit, from a large poor immigrant family, dropped out of high school, did manual labor and worked for local retailers, then went to trade school to become a tool & die maker (others in the family had similar life-stories), thereafter earning a decent worker’s income. His choices were stark, the path up clear.
My son, born 2000 in California, from a middle-class family, is an A student. The caliber of primary education in his school district is high, the primary differences among schools and their scores being the lesser parental involvement at the schools in the poorer areas. My wife and I are pretty demanding and involved. There are almost no manufacturing jobs locally, the few being highly technical. There are few local stores, and laws forbid he being hired for anything. Anyway, what retail jobs there are go to otherwise unemployed humanities college graduates! New Years eve he watched MTV’s Jersey Shore revelry, before getting bored and going to sleep. Last night, he watched Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees. After the movie, he said to me that people used to act nicer. On one side of my house are the two, contemporary culture, lazy 20s boys taking four years to complete two-year AA degrees, their courses being weak humanities type. Their father had gotten them manual labor construction jobs and, though they are big and strong, the illegal immigrants outworked them. On the other side is a former Eagle Scout, majoring in a technical field at a top college.
Today’s choices are no less stark than they once were. The only real difference is between those who recognize that and those who avoid the choices or enrich themselves by sheltering those who would otherwise benefit from starker choices.
 iPhone pic of the light show at Saks Fifth Avenue in NYC yesterday, emailed by a friend.
To keep things fair and to level the playing field, there should be a law that all photos in the US must be taken with iPhones. Not fair for some to have better equipment.
The end of Kodachrome (with the song)
Coffee-spew warning - and strong language warning, but it's all in a good cause.
Sheesh. Sounds just like my 7th Grade English teacher.
The Englishman's 7 steps to health in 2011
The most important book of 2010?
Mead takes on the Trinity: Yule Blog 2010: Meaning in Three Dimensions
God is beyond our petty distinctions, boxes, and categories.
Black Bears: This guy is insane
Reckless denial of what "wild" means.
Q&O: The usual "self-absorbed baby-boomers" article
King Coal: The Future Looks A Lot Like The Past
At No Left Turns:
...the American people are in the midst of a serious struggle to figure out what it is that they stand for--what it means to be an American. Obama, Pelosi and Reed have performed the extremely useful service of clarification. We may not fully know what we are, but it is pretty safe to say that after 2010, we certainly know what we are not.
Two Americas: the Americans who want to be given free stuff, and the Americans who do things and make things. The latter just barely out-vote the former - which is to our credit.
How Libs Explain Bush Book Success: It’s Because “He Was So Hated”
Must be why Sarah's books sell so well too - and O'Reilly's.
Via Ross:
By examining ice core samples for the past 10,500 years we learn that approximately 9,100 of the past 10,500 years were warmer than 2010... Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.
Related at Powerline: Relatively Speaking, It's Still Cold
Ron Paul: 'Moral hazard' to keep the scope of big government programs
Via NYM:
Where do I apply? I want to return wampum for Manhattan.
Last Psychiatrist: Taboos Are The Ways Christians Try To Control Us
Timing matters. Burst bubble, and return to normal trendline. Via theo:
97% of climatologists think what?
Radosh: The Second Time is Farce: Frances Fox Piven Calls for a new Cloward-Piven Strategy for Today
From a comment at B&R on Sadie Hawkins online dating:
Here’s my profile: 30 years old; tall 6’3″ male with Doctorate in Finance; recently inherited a substantial sum from my uncle; I’m a loving and caring man who has three shelter dogs and spent his weekends caring for his sick uncle; picked in High School as most likely to succeed in a campaign run exclusively by female students; I’m extremely fit and have continued in sports after winning acclaim at college; I desire an intelligent, progressive minded female; who’s unconcerned with money and seeks to make this world a better place using my base of substantial assets.
Pajamas: The Environmental Protection Agency’s End-Run Around Democracy
Medical care by bureaucrat
For our own good
Insty: More on the higher education bubble
From the drippy Archbishop of Canterbury:
"Whether you're a Christian or belong to another religion or whether you have nothing you'd want to call religion at all, some kind of big picture matters."
Friday, December 31. 2010
Our family likes de Kooning, so we'll probably go to the the current show at the MOMA. Here's a brief review of Abstract Expressionist New York. I am still annoyed that we missed the Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim - lines to get in were always too long for me.
Even if I don't really get Jackson Pollock, we'll get a very good lunch someplace.
Thursday, December 30. 2010
Via Bernard Goldberg's Trials and Errors:
Radio talk show host Dennis Prager posed the following question: What’s the difference between the voters in California and the passengers on the Titanic? The obvious answer was that the poor souls on the doomed ship didn’t vote to hit the iceberg.
 Am Thinker: Snow Blind at the NYT
At Watts, Terence Kealey: What Does Climategate Say About Science? It's a good brief history of how science works. A quote:
...scientists are not disinterested, they are interested, and as a consequence science is not dispassionate or fully transparent, rather it is human and partially arcane. As I argue elsewhere, science is not the public good of modern myth, it is a collegiate and quasi-private or invisible college good. That means, by the way, that it requires no public subsidies. More relevantly, it means that individual scientist’s pronouncements should be seen more as advertisements than as definitive.
Peer review, too, is merely a mechanism by which scientists keep a collective control over access to their quasi-private enterprise. One the e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia included this from Professor Phil Jones, referring to two papers that apparently falsified his work:- “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
 You're with Stupid (meaning yourself)
A Plague of Pigs in Texas - Now numbering in the millions, these shockingly destructive and invasive wild hogs wreak havoc across the southern United States
Via Hot Air, Delaying Sex Makes Better Relationships, Study Finds
Hewitt: Obama's EPA and the 2012 Elections
Rauh and Novy-Marx: The crisis in local government pensions in the US
NYC babies complain about the snow: "I'm Angry Too": Mayor Mike on City's Snow Response
Reason: Carbon Rationing By Other Means
Examiner: As governments go broke, public employee unions must share the pain
GREEN SCOTLAND Relies on French Nuclear Power During Deep Freeze
Via Insty, Lunchbox mix-up leads to charges for Sanford teen
Stossel: Please Stop "Helping" Us
Via Powerline:
Mayor Bloomberg may be receiving an unfair amount of criticism for his lackluster performance in coping with Mother Nature, given the almost unprecedented nature of the storm, but the unplowed city streets provide a metaphor for the nanny state: It can order us to do anything, but it can't take care of the basic obligations of government.
Examiner: A truce in culture wars as voters focus on economy
Voters flee to states with less government intrusion
Am Spectator on government medical care: Is It a Right or Isn't It?
Michelle: Un-merry Christmas from the ACLU
The ACLU was co-opted by the radical Left years ago. Sad.
Global Warming Skeptic Predicts Brutal Winter, Warns “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”
Wednesday, December 29. 2010
Dyson uninvents the vacuum cleaner
Social Security: The Chilean Model
Sarah serves S'mores!
The Utter Futility of Reducing Carbon Emissions
Dalrymple: When Predators Don’t Prey - Another good word bites the dust.
The Death Panels are back.
Mead: Give The People What They Want. A snippet:
Twentieth century liberalism started with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson; FDR rejiggered it somewhat for the New Deal. In the 1960s and beyond liberalism continued to build on the basic concept that a powerful federal government was the friend rather than the enemy of individual liberty, and that the truly liberal thing to do was to help that government grow and take on more missions. While I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, it does seem to me that this road has reached the point of diminishing returns.
On both the left and the right today there are many people who believe that the real ideological contest in America today is between liberalism 3.0 (the more individualistic, laissez-faire kind of liberalism that dominated 19th century thought) and the more state-oriented, collectively minded liberalism 4.0 of the 20th century. 3.0 liberals denounce 4.0 liberals as betrayers of the liberal legacy who’ve taken a philosophy grounded in individual freedom and limited government and turned it into a charter for Big Government. 4.0 liberals respond that 3.0 liberals are simple reactionaries who don’t understand how the complexities of modern life make the outmoded, simplistic pieties of liberalism 3.0 wholly inadequate to the problems we face today.
Tuesday, December 28. 2010
Sunday, December 26. 2010
 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.
We reportedly have a blizzard arriving today on the Snowball Express. That's fine with me, except that the Lad and his charming Mrs. are airport-stuck in Birmingham (with the Memphis Blues again?). Well, not really stuck - they are there with loving family.
Don't be surprised if we lose power, though. We usually do, with good strong storms. This one looks to be a winter Nor'easter. Think I'll feed the birds this morning.
Lovely winter post from The Englishman:
Mrs E awoke me at 2:30 to alert me to the ducks quacking outside the window. We lost one to Mr Fox a week ago when he crept across the ice to them. So it was on with Uncle Percy's overcoat over the dressing gown and out I went with the Marlin underlever to try and deliver some 357 Magnum 125 Grain Full Metal Jacket Flat Christmas Cheer to our visitor.
He scuttled off the through the fence too quickly and by the time I was over the road he had headed for the hills. But the moon was out, the snow was crisp and his tracks were trackable.
I failed to catch up with him but the armed stroll up onto the downs on such a night was worthwhile. Not a soul apart from me was stirring, miles across the valley street lights sparkled but otherwise I was only in the company of the friendly ghosts who have trod these ancient hills on thousands of winters in the past pitting their wits against the weather and wild animals.
Prager: Want To Raise a Good Person? Stop Nurturing Your Child's Self-Esteem
A cheerful humility is the best and most realistic attitude.
EPA moving unilaterally to limit greenhouse gases
An attempted end run around Congress
Hands-only CPR. You need to know this.
But a medical friend of mine saved a 90 year-old lady who had cardiac arrest on the sidewalk. She got a lawyer to sue him. She claimed her time had come, and that she should have been left alone. He was protected by Good Samaritan legal protections, but his legal costs to get to that point were considerable. You can be sued for not helping, too.
A new website to me: Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership
Green Lake, Austria. Cool vid
KUHNER: Radical Islam vs. Christianity - The cross is near extinction in the ancient lands of its origin
Environmental groups sue to block wind farm
I'm with them. Wind farms are a scam on the taxpayer - regardless of the bats. Did I say "bats"?
Voters elected Republicans to end Obamaism, not expand it
School food Nazis:
Evidently the message is that children’s bodies are a collective resource that needs to be managed by agents of the state for their own good and the good of society, regardless of what they or their parents think.
It’s not like schools have anything better to do.
I can understand parents' not wanting schools to feed their kids candy, but what's with the salt?
Basic instinct: Women take just three minutes to make up their mind about Mr Right
Driscoll: Where Unions Are, Americans Aren’t
Ice Age 6
We have been warning about this apocalypse for years.
Those who blame the U.S. for all the world’s ills
It would take serious shrinkology to understand why somebody would hate as free and noble a nation as the USA. Probably displacement from conflicts with Mom, right? It's always the Mom, right?
The Year of Stupid: Potsdam Climate Institute Now Says To Expect “Warmer Colder” Winters!
San Francisco May Vote on Circumcision Ban Next November.
Abortion OK, Briss not OK. Why Christians do brisses is beyond me. But a hand on my boy's dick? That is definitely the domain of a San Francisco government...
Speaking of brisses, more on Tutu and the Jews
Taxes and the Top Percentile Myth - A 2008 OECD study of leading economies found that 'taxation is most progressively distributed in the United States.' More so than Sweden or France.
Muslim moderation in Britain:
Around a third of young British Muslims favour killing in the name of Islam, according to a survey revealed by the WikiLeaks' publication of U.S. diplomatic cables.
A survey of 600 Muslim students at 30 universities throughout Britain found that 32 per cent of Muslim respondents believed killing in the name of religion is justified.
Just like the IRA...but not.
Do you think your taxes are too low? Make a contribution to the US Treasury.
Byron York: Smiling Dems will soon cry 'Washington is broken'
It's "broken" when they cannot do whatever they want.
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The World's Worst Invasive Mammals
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