Sunday, November 14. 2010
h/t, Theo
Lib Walter Russell Mead does some introspection. A quote:
Give us more power because we understand the world better than you do, was the message. We are so smart, so well-credentialed, so careful to read all the best papers by all the certified experts that the recommendations we make and the regulations we write, however outlandish and burdensome they look to all you non-experts out there, are certain to work. Trust us because we are always right, and only fools and charlatans would be so stupid as to disagree.
Readers know that Soros really bugs me. He has the freedom to buy political speech, etc., if he wants, but I just can't stand the guy.
At Am Thinker, Soros Forgiven, Pope Not So Much.
Saturday, November 13. 2010
Is this image via Moonbattery fair, or just a cheap ad hominen shot along the lines of "Bush is retarded"? Name-calling.
As I understand it, "narcissism" covers a spectrum from wholesome self-respect (which must be earned), to dangerous sociopathy (manifested by an inability to care about, or even to deeply recognize, the existence of others except as tools).
The Wiki piece on Malignant Narcissism says this:
"The malignant narcissist is presented as pathologically grandiose, lacking in conscience and behavioral regulation with characteristic demonstrations of joyful cruelty and sadism."
That sounds pretty bad. To understand these things, one really needs to understand in detail how a person relates to others and what they mean to him. You can't do that by watching somebody on TV.
Here's a post on the topic: Narcissism in High-Functioning Individuals – Big Ego or Severe Disorder?
Friday, November 12. 2010
Leaving this morning for an out-doorsy weekend. This pic made me notice how filthy my keyboard is. I need to run it through the dishwasher.
We discussed the rise of the black middle class earlier this week. Here's one piece on that. A quote:
Larry Tye helped answer an ages-old question: How did a high percentage of black people, who toiled as slaves and suffered under Jim Crow laws, shed that oppression to live middle-class lives and enjoy the American dream?
Telegraph: When people stop believing in God they start believing in Big Government and Obamaism
TIME: Happy Meal ban doesn't go far enough.
It's a wonder we can ever feed ourselves.
Driscoll: NYT Editor: Our Subscribers are Such Morons!
Not hot dogs for you.
This guy is an American hero
Everybody talks about the housing crash.
It has been no "crash." It's just the return from a bubble to the normal trend line.
Air power in Afghanistan.
Repub health care ideas are genocide
Another view of the deficit commission, from Mother Jones
More on those Russian spies
Map narrows for Obama reelection
VDH: The Obama Fabulists
Thursday, November 11. 2010
If not, Powerline linked a good essay by James Ceaser. A quote:
For many Republicans, and especially for the allies in the Tea Party movement, the issues of economic policy were also linked to a deeper concern. The size of government and the extent of the federal debt represented not only a burden on future generation and a threat to American power, but also a violation of the spirit and letter of the Constitution. The Tea Party in particular, with its belief in Jeffersonian ideas, has been responsible for re-introducing the Constitution into the public debate, a place that it has not held in the same way for over a century. This theme is what connects the Tea Party to the American tradition and makes their concerns matters of fundamental patriotism
 Triceratops never existed
CATO: Fixing Transit: The Case for Privatization
Olasky: What's healthcare like for the poor?
NRO: Best Presidential biographies
Deficit panel's Rx: 'Cancer' surgeryBudget scalpel draws blood, howls
Is this bipartisan thing DOA?
Hugh Hewitt: No more time for California dreamin'
Pajamas: Back to the Future with Jerry Brown at the Helm in California
Jeffrey Lord: Mark Levin's book changed America
Is Mark Levin our Tom Paine?
Connecticut Residents Are Tops in Well-Being
Amusing football trick play
Bob Kerrey: Obama is so Incompetent He Needs Someone to Do His Job for Him
From CVS, of course
BAD NEWS: ‘Jaw-Dropping’ Data on Black Male Student Achievement. “According to the report, poverty levels are only part of the equation because poor white boys (defined by eligibility for subsidized school lunches) are doing as well as black boys who do not live in poverty.” It’s about the culture.
France is a dying nation
Irony: AARP blames ObamaCare for increased cost of employee health coverage
...an essential feature of successful presidents is that they find ways to broaden their coalitions. Doing the opposite—pursuing policies which shed support, but keep just enough of it to maintain a majority—is a very difficult needle to thread.
That's civil war.
Calvin Coolidge once said, "The chief business of the American people is business." The Democrats just lost America because they forgot that.
On second thought, you can't forget what you never knew. The Democrats running things the past two years proved they have no clue about the business of business. In their world, the real world of the private economy is an abstraction, a political figment.
Wednesday, November 10. 2010
From Dan Gardner's So is the world predictable or not? The environmentalists' contradiction:
I recently wrote a book called Future Babble (to be released Oct. 12), which is about expert predictions, why they fail, and why we believe them anyway. The experience of sifting through heaps and heaps of failed predictions has made me quite sympathetic to Suzuki's first theme of humility. We truly are awful at foreseeing what is to come. And there's little reason to think we'll get much better. Indeed, key properties of complex systems make prediction inherently impractical or even impossible. We really should be humble. And cautious.
But how can a humble and cautious man say we are "past the 59th minute"?
In a review of Gardner's new book, Steven Pinker says:
“It’s rare for a book on public affairs to say something genuinely new, but Future Babble is genuinely arresting, and should be required reading for journalists, politicians, academics, and anyone who listens to them. Mark my words: if Future Babble is widely read, then within 3.7 years the number of overconfident predictions by self-anointed experts talking through their hats will decline by 46.2%, and the world will become no less than 32.1% wiser.”
– Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought
I had a tough time deciding what to link on this glorious autumn afternoon, but decided on Mona Charen's Is Obama Trapped? The president has lost the means for Clinton-style triangulation. One quote:
Ironically, Republicans might be the president’s lifeline. If they succeed in defunding or otherwise hobbling implementation of Obamacare; if they succeed in maintaining the current tax rates on all earners; and if they are able, through oversight functions, to prevent regulatory agencies from further intimidating businesses, the economy might improve. And to whom would credit for improved conditions flow? Yup, to Gandhi’s most important acolyte.
Via Bloomberg. It begins:
The co-chairmen of President Barack Obama’s debt-reduction commission will propose cuts to Social Security and Medicare, as well as reductions in income tax rates in exchange for curbing tax breaks, according to a Republican aide who attended the meeting.
Expense cuts and tax increases. Yawn.
Tuesday, November 9. 2010
Christians are oppressed, persecuted and murdered in many countries. Most of those countries are Muslim. Some are communist, as in North Korea and Vietnam.
There are few who speak out for them. Most Westerners ignore their plight, often in pursuit of trading profits, more often out of the same self-delusions that excuse tyranny but attack minor flaws in allies. Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary's Contentions blog calls it Human Rights Policy Gone Mad. "There is no better example of the cul-de-sac of leftist anti-Americanism — that insatiable need to paint the U.S. as the source of evil in the world — than Obama’s human rights policy, which is, quite simply, obscene."
A new organization, Open Doors USA, is formed to combat the festering ploy by the enemies of free observance of religion to have the United Nations, in effect, endorse their suppression of free observers.
The Defamation of Religions Resolution, introduced in the UN, seeks to criminalize words or actions that are deemed to be against a particular religion, especially against Islam. Although proponents justify the “defamation of religion” concept as protecting religious practice and promoting tolerance, it really promotes intolerance and human rights violations of religious freedom and freedom of speech for religious minorities in these countries.
Why: The Defamation of Religions Resolution has the effect of providing international legitimacy for national laws that punish blasphemy or otherwise ban criticism of a religion.
Here's their introductory video:
Here is the link to the Open Doors USA website. At the site is listed the countries in which the worst persecution of Christians occurs.
 How to tell if Al Qaida has sewn a bomb inside your dog.
Is pain "God's megaphone"?
I hope not...
Is Economics a Science?
Economics and finance might be science, if it weren’t for people.
Right and wrong types of Hispanics.
For the Dems, the right sort are those who seek dependency and entitlement.
He hails from where the civil war began, but this black republican tea party favorite doesn’t want to be a leader on race.
This narcissitic absurdity mocks the very serious, necessary, and important work of Gender Studies, Italian-American Studies, and Skinny Studies.
Make my day, Ted Rall. My life needs a little more violence these days.
As demonstrated by the legal battle blocking power lines to wind farms in Kansas, environmental groups are increasingly against all forms of energy production.
Via Betsy (a teacher herself), in Boo hoo! Start the pity party for the teachers unions:
Considering that the traditional system of near-lifetime employment, degree- and salary-based pay scales and seniority privileges have done little to improve the nation's woeful public schools or attract talented people into teaching, the NEA and AFT will have difficulty defending the status quo.
Unionization is an insidious thing. It trades security for spirit and heart, changes opportunity and a sense of service into time-serving drudgery. In a rougher era, they were needed. They are obsolete now, and dying a slow death - except for the government employee unions. I blame the supposedly-sainted JFK for that dumb move.
Monday, November 8. 2010
 All about Rubio, at Weekly Std.
Move over, Sarah. This guy's the next big target.
Dino: ...the Chinese have been laughing at this administration for quite a while now
Am Thinker: Time to Tackle Right to Work
A little credit to the RNC
They did very well.
Fun with bureaucracy: What It Takes To Build a House
Allen West:
"I plan on joining, I'm not gonna ask for permission or whatever, I'm gonna find out when they meet and I will be a member of the Congressional Black Caucus," West, one of two black Republicans elected to Congress last Tuesday, told WOR radio. "I meet all of the criteria, and it's so important that we break down this monolithic voice that continues to talk about victimization and dependency in the black community."
He will no doubt be welcomed with open arms.
Ilya on the constitutionality of Obamacare:
In his decision in the Michigan case, Judge Steeh argued that the mandate is constitutional under the Commerce Clause because deciding not to purchase health insurance is an "economic decision."
"Economic decisions," he reasoned, include decisions not to engage in economic activity. This approach would allow the Commerce Clause to cover virtually any choice of any kind. Any decision to do anything is necessarily a decision not to use the same time and effort to engage in "economic activity."
If I choose to spend an hour sleeping, I necessarily choose not to spend that time working or buying products. Under Judge Steeh's logic, the Commerce Clause authorizes Congress to force workers to get up earlier in the morning so that they would spend more time on the job.
At Moonbattery:
Opposition politician Julio Borges accused Chavez on Sunday of trampling private-property rights and steering Venezuela toward Cuba-style communism.
Borges told a news conference that Venezuelans don't want to live in "a country of slaves, where the government is the owner of everything and the people aren't owners of anything."
Good thing Borges isn't American; the media would denounce his views as extremist and call him a racist and a "teabagger."
Has Obama alienated almost everybody?
Driscoll points out that American whites have achieved the same levels of unwed motherhood that Moynihan was alarmed about in blacks
The U.S. as U.N. Punching Bag
Nobody loves or respects you just because you volunteer to receive abuse
My pal, recently of Israel, sends me this email:
The separation fence made a huge difference in civilian fatalities. A good example of when a government responds well to the fundamental safety of its citizens.
When I think about the fence and the screening of Arabs who want to enter Israel, it is a hardship. Just as trying to get onto a plane today is for so many people. It is a hardship precipitated by a small number of murderers that affects millions of innocent civilians. Same for trying to get into the US today: if you're an alien, the process is more difficult. (An Israeli friend described his "reception" in US recently. Very unpleasant. Yet, he does not hold it against the Americans.)
It is shortsighted to blame the government for doing somethings that protect its citizens (and adversely affects both foreigners and its citizens (Israeli citizens go through unpleasant, routine checks of car, body, etc... when entering any public hall or private facility).
The other side of this is how really effective this terrorist tactic is: make the lives of millions miserable with relatively little effort and cost.
Here's the chart of terror in Israel, before and after. - Fixed
 Some climate scientists plan to go full-bore political.
That ain't science. That's politics. Idiots, too: who wouldn't enjoy some balmy weather in hunting season? It's sleeting here, this morning. More:
John Abraham panics, apparently he and the AGU are forming a “Climate rapid response team”
So maybe it's war, not politics.
Luntz: Republicans won the midterm elections. Now can they survive?
Doubt it. They're the Stupid Party.
Let Them Eat Biofuels: Enviros Largely Responsible for Worldwide Food Price Increases
Kill people. Gaia likes that. Gaia likes dead people.
Germany attacks US economic policy
Federal Government Fights Obesity, Pushes Cheese
That would be Government Cheese, I believe. I prefer the imported black market unpasteurized stuff, and not in moderation either.
72% OF BLACK BABIES BORN TO UNWED MOTHERS
That is very Progressive and Advanced. Moynihan was just too uptight and bourgeois.
Jacobson: Jewish voting is irrational.
No, it's Progressive and Advanced.
Matthews: Obama’s Travel Expense Questioned Because Of His Race
Obviously. They never would have questioned it with Bush...
The man who saved the whales. h/t, Coyote
Hint: It wasn't Jacques Cousteau. He just annoyed them.
Insty:
CHANGE: Janet Daley: The West is turning against big government – but what comes next? “So a generation after the collapse of totalitarian socialism, its democratic form is finally crumbling as well. And, oddly enough, the latter may take longer than the former to unravel.”
Via a Vanderleun post:
Sunday, November 7. 2010
 Nice place for sale: Hedge Fund Billionaire Selling the Farm
And here are some $1000 homes
The Berkshires: Saving Where the Wild Trout Are
How the rich stay rich: Using a Family Trust Company to Secure a Family Fortune
Gotta get me one of them.
University of Virginia Eliminates All Speech Codes, Earning FIRE's 'Green Light' Rating
GOP to Use Debt Cap to Push Spending Cuts
That won't work
Politico: The ego factor: Can Obama change?
The Dems lost a battle, won the war
Taranto: ObamaCare, a Catastrophic 'Success'
A Nation of Slack-Jawed Yokels?
That's me.
"I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary."
I wonder what that feels like.
Via Nyquist:
...we find, at our local Borders book store, a small paperback titled The Anti-American Manifesto, written by Ted Rall. In this book the author says that America is collapsing. The U.S. is going to end soon. According to Rall, "There's going to be an intense, violent, probably haphazard struggle for control. It's going to come down to us versus them." Rall is a Communist in Chambers' sense of the word. He warns the "downtrodden and the educated" that the hardcore uneducated fundamentalist Christians are preparing to seize power. According to Rall, "They can't wait to unleash their venomous hatred on the city-dwelling commie hipster fags they despise. They are armed. They recognize that the system is doomed. They've seen this coming." He names the Tea Party as the main decentralized organ of the enemy. "A war is coming," he says. "The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. Are you going to fight back? Will you do whatever it takes, including taking up arms?" He basically suggests that the Right is coming to exterminate the Left, so the Left had better get ready. The book is basically a call to civil war -- American versus American.
Saturday, November 6. 2010
 CT is running counter to national trends. Not a single Repub Congressman or Senator, and a State House controlled by Dems with the first Dem governor in 24 years. No brakes.
Watch your taxes, middle class suburbs and quiet farming villages, because they are coming after your money. The unions want a state property tax and a state income tax increase, and Malloy is now owned by the unions.
Even my Dem friends are talking about setting up Florida residence. Vote and run.
Good source for my state's news: Connecticut News Junkie.
This good old independent Yankee state is now entirely in the pocket of the unions - especially the government unions - and the three corrupt urban train wrecks which, instead of being the dynamic centers of job and wealth creation that they once were, have become insatiable sponges for dollars: Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport. Their declines have been dramatic: In the late 1950s, Hartford was voted the most pleasant medium-sized city in America to live in - higher than Boston - and I was told about the lines of limousines parked in downtown Bridgeport.
I cannot explain how that happened, but I do know that people migrated north just before the jobs moved south (to avoid the unions, the high wages, and the taxes). Business has feet: it can move easily to Texas or to India.
CT still has the highest per-capita income in the country, but that is mostly because of New York City's prosperous suburb, Fairfield County (where the O likes to go frequently to mine for gold - Greenwich for the real gold, Bridgeport for the votes). If they over-tax those folks, they will move away. They ain't stupid. You can run a hedge fund from anywhere.
I see that CT is already ranked the fourth-worst state in which to do business. With the new team, I'm sure we could get higher on that ladder without too much effort. It's a damn shame.
The only consolation is that we still have open carry and, of course, readily-obtainable carry.
Deirdre McCloskey, author of The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, has a new book: Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
Anchoress discusses Palin.
Love is not enough. (Not enough reason to vote for somebody)
Global Geoengineering Moratorium
Good to see a hint of sanity
Nor should Republicans overinterpret their Tuesday mandate. They received none. They were merely rewarded for acting as the people's proxy in saying no to Obama's overreaching liberalism. As one wag put it, this wasn't an election so much as a restraining order.
The Republicans won by default. And their prize is nothing more than a two-year lease on the House. The building was available because the previous occupant had been evicted for arrogant misbehavior and, by rule, alas, the House cannot be left vacant.
I think Dr. K underestimates the force and speed of this return to normal.
The economy: Gridlock's not enough. A quote:
The problem is that Obamanomics has placed the US economy in a hole so deep that it will take more than easy money coupled with political gridlock to fix. To lower unemployment in a meaningful way, Washington needs to unwind the trillions of new debt, higher taxes and new mandates that it's given us over the last two years. The GOP's gains this week aren't enough to make that happen.
How do I know this? It's the assessment made by just about every businessman I spoke to before and after Tuesday's voting. (Almost no one speaks on the record these days, for fear of political retribution. But that's another column.)
Stratfor on the election, via SDA
Friday, November 5. 2010
The Lib Zuckerman doesn't have my politics, but he's always interesting. America's Love Affair With Obama Is Over:
He came across as a young man in a grown-up's game—impressive but not presidential. A politician but not a leader, managing American policy at home and American power abroad with disturbing amateurishness. Indeed, there was a growing perception of the inability to run the machinery of government and to find the right people to manage it. A man who was once seen as a talented and even charismatic rhetorician is now seen as lacking real experience or even the ability to stop America's decline. "Yes we can," he once said, but now America asks, "Can he?"
And
The open purchasing of votes through the provision of special exemptions for five states and for unions, and concessions to many of the special interests in the Democratic Party, especially trial lawyers, symbolized the corruption of our politics. The 2009 omnibus spending bill alone contained 8,570 special earmarks like those that had so enraged the American public in the past. When lawmakers had no time to even read the bills, it gave the impression that what was important was passing anything, no matter how ineffectual. Obama had promised he would change "politics as usual." He changed it all right, but for the worse. The list of his additional programs only provoked the public's distaste for big government, big spending, and big deficits.
Yeah, read the whole thing.
Image above from post at Watts.
All sane people hope for globalistical warmening. It's too darn cold.
Litotes? Litotes.
FOF: Avoiding and Ending an Affair
Nobody listens to those bozos.
Maybe not so evil, but I hate change of any kind.
Insty:
ROBERT GIBBS: Efforts to repeal ObamaCare won’t get past the Senate. That’s okay. Make ‘em vote for it again.
What a loss for the ignorant peasants.
That's a good thing.
It could be—it seems just possible—that the “truth and science and facts” that these Democrats talk about are really only schoolhouse theories that have no bearing on reality; that they are tried-and-failed progressive fairy tales that could only continue to be believed by people who have spent most of their adult lives glued face-first to the public tit. It’s possible that the best-informed populace in history has risen up in a truly spontaneous grassroots movement deeply connected to the nation’s founding principles and prudently given the heave-ho to a bunch of spendthrift, incompetent, supercilious, and self-deceived buffoons who mistook their college degrees for wisdom.
Somebody is crazy angry: Tim Wise at Daily Kos (h/t. Q&O)
I think this guy wants to have me shot. Make my day, weenie. He cannot wait for the demise of the USA - and says so. Where does this sort of anger come from?
For a moment, I thought somebody photoshopped Obama into this Drudge pic:
Readers will be happy to know that we replaced our old server today:
Two competing programs are proposed to Congress from the left and from America�s manufacturers. One protects domestic unions while further burdening US manufacturers and consumers. The other grows US competitiveness.
The Nation, in its inimical leftward way, analyzes the problems with �free trade globalization.� Its National Affairs correspondent, William Greider, longtime journalist, describes �a huge hole in the world�a massive loss of demand. Think of the trade wars as the largest producers fighting over an abrupt shortage of buyers.
The situation, as Greider sees it: A Wall Street Journal poll found that 53 percent (including 61 percent of Tea Party adherents) think free-trade globalization has hurt the US economy. Only 17 percent think it has helped. But the trouble with Americans claiming injured innocence is that it blinds them to the complexities of the predicament. The fact is, the United States and China, motivated by different but mutually reinforcing reasons, collaborated to create the unbalanced trading system. American multinationals eagerly sought access to China's market. The Chinese wanted factories and the modern technologies needed to develop a first-class industrial base. American companies agreed to the basic trade-off: China would let them in to make and sell stuff, and they would share technology and teach Chinese partners how it's done. Not coincidentally, US corporations also gained enormous bargaining power over workers back home by threatening to go abroad for cheaper labor if unions didn't give wage concessions.
Greider points out, correctly, that multinational corporations, clever devils, have profited from US subsidies but, anyways, shipped production overseas for less costly labor and regulation.
Greider�s prescription is to impose more regulation and taxes upon multinationals that ship production elsewhere. Greider does not even suggest that unions negotiate less costly labor contracts or that our government reduce its regulatory burdens upon domestic manufacturers.
Greider, finally, does admit that his recommendation �would raise prices for Americans.� US manufacturing unions, however, would � though still likely to hemorrhage jobs � keep high wages and benefits for their remaining members, and dues flowing for contributions to Democrat political campaigns.
By contrast, the National Association of Manufacturers just issued its Manufacturing Strategy for Jobs and a Competitive America. Some recommendations are clearly self-serving, like not taxing foreign earnings, but most make much more sense than Greider�s � get ready for this euphemism � �national loyalty program.�
Continue reading "US Consumers Vs Unions: Which Program For Congress?"
Bag of uncounted ballots discovered in Bridgeport.
Sounds like Bridgeport. They always have bags of stuff, when needed.
Powerline: Annals of the welfare state
E-mail shows illegal activity in Reid's campaign
What happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas.
Bishop Tutu and "Israeli Apartheid"
Krauthammer's take at NRO. Electric cars?
Somebody told me yesterday that electric cars will save the human race from extinction because they have no emissions. What can you say to people like that? I am not kidding: She said electricity comes from the wall outlets. College-educated.
Democrats have to be more competitive in states that dont touch an ocean if they want to bounce back.
Must be the toxic ozone from the salt water. Ban the oceans, along with the Happy Meals.
Driscoll: How the Gray Lady Became Margaret Dumont
Nancy Pelosi Seriously Considers Staying as Democratic Leader
Goody.
More good links later today, when I find the time to post them.
Our antique server broke down. Nothing a little duct tape and baling wire couldn't fix. Sorry.
This from Dick Morris on Why Triangulation Won't Work This Time:
Obama's programs have been so far-reaching and fundamental that any compromise would leave the nation far to the left of where it's always been and wants to be. When he took office, government (federal, state and local combined) controlled 35 percent of the US economy -- 15th among the two-dozen advanced countries. Now, it controls 44.7 percent, ranking us 7th, ahead of Germany and Britain. So where's the compromise -- leave government in control of, say, 40 percent?
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