disaster averted

the hole has been plugged!

:D

black markets

the lesser of two evils

the ottoman empire...

...should not be here.

where the streets have odd names

the author of dustbury said that he's not worthy of a street that shares his name:

house link

i wonder if he's as worthy as feliks gwozdz:

map link

having driven past that street countless times, i always wondered who feliks gwozdz was and why he had a street named after him. after many years, i found out (via the newfangled inter-tubes) that he was the tarrant county medical examiner from 1969 to 1979 (the tarrant county medical examiner's office is on that street). the only other info i could find about him online was that (just months before his death) he refused to order the exhumation of lee harvey oswald. it's also *remotely* possible that he was a classmate of karol josef wojtyla, who later became pope john paul the 2nd.

do any other fort worth/tarrant county residents know anything else about mr. gwozdz?

roasting richard dawkins

both too late and prematurely:

"this whole "New Atheism" movement is only a passing fad-not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current "marketplace of ideas" particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally trivial that it has to be classified as just a form of light entertainment, and popular culture always tires of its diversions sooner or later and moves on to other, equally ephemeral toys."...

To be fair, the shallowness is not evenly distributed. Some of the writers exhibit a measure of wholesome tentativeness in making their cases, and as a rule the quality of the essays is inversely proportionate to the air of authority their authors affect... The whole project probably reaches its reductio ad absurdum when the science-fiction writer Sean Williams explains that he learned to reject supernaturalism in large part from having grown up watching Doctor Who.

read the rest (via viewpoint, again)

...and a somehow-related quote:

“Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are, and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world. It is the ultimate fantasy of the narcissist. And we’ve got whole generations of them, in control of our media and our government, all intent on ‘remaking America.’”

creating "life" in the laboratory

guess what? it was intelligently designed! ;)

sarah ferguson "controversy"

this sounds about right...

summarizing

islam and hussein

red blackberrys

Roger L Simon:

"Chicago is not as brutal as China, obviously, but in some ways it’s worse. Someone named Daley has been the city’s mayor since somewhere in the Early Paleolithic Age. Chairman Mao didn’t last as long. Being a Daley in Chicago is equivalent to being a Medici in Florence – with less danger of a violent death. The patronage system seems to extend from somewhere a few miles south of Canada to the northern reaches of Kentucky. Everyone here appears to accept this as part of the game... In Chicago and Beijing, Shanghai, etc., it’s not what you know, but who you know. And it’s been like that for a long time."

...and to paraphrase some of the comments:

Of course Chicago is not China. China is FAR more business-friendly than Chicago, and has a cheaper cost of living. There’s prosperity in China. The schools work in China. China lacks a useless, welfare dependent political class. The police forces are not as corrupt and ineffectual, and the food is better.

http://drawfortruth.wordpress.com/category/compalinsons/

http://drawfortruth.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/one-nation/

hay there's an idea!

to clean up the oil spill, use supertankers instead of hay (or any other ineffective method that's already been tried...)

waiting for rather

takes mere blindness

waiting for darwin

takes blind faith

how do you solve a problem like obama?

you can't just change the channel...

OBD, OBDah, OBD-II

funny how the check engine light goes on...

----

in a related story, i recently bought a beater pre-obdii van, and had to replace its computer. the cost of this van and its repairs are still less than half the cost next cheapest van i found in similar condition:

van: $1350
ttl: $200
cleanup, carpet & accessories: ~$400
computer, diags & labor: $450

total: $2400

a half-century ago

lileks:

Better Homes & Gardens (ads in the 1950's) are the American Testament of Happiness, and there was nothing like them before or since. The quantity of glee that could be purchased by fiberglas drapes... or formaldehyde-infused faux-pine paneling was quite remarkable, and stands as a merry, amused rebuke to the modern ads that have disaffected aging hipsters standing adrift in aloof antiseptic rooms with one carefully-selected brand-in-a-vase under a halogen light, setting off the abstract painting just so. The ads always have a little boy in a cowboy suit running around with a gun, being a boy.

i, for one, do not welcome our disaffected aging hipsters...

p.s. a deeper thought from his previous bleat:

"You may think you’re all that, but the ocean closes seamlessly over any ship once it’s sunk, big or small."

gotta post something...

how about this fun little game?

moog tapes restoration

contrary to urban legend, bob moog did not technically "invent" the synthesizer (see also...), but his many other improvements and inventions brought it into music's mainstream. there is now an effort to preserve his original recordings.

bumper stickers 0

If the red bumper sticker here is more suitable to your opinions, you may want to read all of this...

I'll wait...

Back yet?...

Though I disagree generally with both the review and the book itself, some things stood out to me - the most obvious being:

"Sagan believes that scientists reject sprites, fairies, and the influence of Sagittarius because we follow a set of procedures, the Scientific Method, which has consistently produced explanations that put us in contact with reality and in which mystic forces play no part."

Notice the first two words - "Sagan believes". If his materialist worldview is true, there is no reason I should believe him.

(edit: i started to expand on another few points in the article, but later decided to write "upwards" instead of "sideways"... )

I have considered many possible explanations to explain the body of evidence before me. I have considered the possibility and consequences of a large number of -isms, and concluded (like Ferris Bueller) that they are not good. I have not accepted anyone else's "grand unification theory" either blindly or wholeheartedly.

The worldview that best explains the reality I have seen is that the God Jehovah of both Old and New Testament is the only true God, the Creator of every thing, the Author of life, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and spoke our universe into being just as His Word says. He is love, full of grace and mercy, and still loves us despite how horribly we have all treated Him. He is slow to anger, and is saddened more than we could possibly understand when He grants sinners their desire that He have nothing to do with them.

Despite some slightly more difficult bits, I have read, seen, or heard nothing that could be better explained under another -ism.

small thoughts

two things recently occured to me:

1) was obama's homebuyer tax credit a tacit admission that reagan's trickle-down economics works?

2) i don't understand what the big deal is about having your name on a terrorist watch list. apparently if your name is on it, you can still pack explosives and get on the plane while the tsa is busy scanning granny's shampoo bottle.

bumper stickers 1

good ideas all

new translation

i just found out that "piñata" is spanish for "taxpayer".

what bias?

have you ever driven behind someone who had their right turn signal blinking for no reason?

failed computer models

this disaster brought to you by the same people who programmed the global warming scam

events!

IGST

Yulia Latynina on the European unraveling:

It is not just Greece or the euro that is coming apart at the seams. We are witnessing the unraveling of the whole philosophy of European bureaucratic socialism, which by some unfortunate misunderstanding considers itself a democracy.

Takuan Seiyo on unsustainability:

...Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Japan, United Kingdom, Baltics, Belgium, France, United States... All are pigs that have been trifling with basic rules of common sense reality, bequeathing a crumbling global Babel to their subjects jointly and severally... Wherever one looks in the global economy, one sees nothing but a trail of erroneous premises and fraudulent promises – 45 years of rule by (criminals, utopians, and crooks)... careening toward the immutable majesty of Reality.

According to Mr. Seiyo, the model is this:

• coddling of workers unions,
• shafting employers,
• tolerating a slack work ethic,
• granting generous unemployment and retirement benefits,
• providing public health care,
• embracing high taxation,
• enlisting a crushing burden of bureaucracy, and
• at all times ignoring the disincentives to entrepreneurship inherent in all of the above.

And this model is essentially a cancerous growth.

read the rest

think about it

the only thing we have to fear is stupidity:

Many liberals know how inadequate they are, whether at hunting their own meat or throwing a baseball. It's generally the conservative they'll call on to build a fence or rewire their house or protect their families. Without conservatives, they are rendered absolutely helpless.

This may be a hidden reason for liberals' contempt for conservatives: They know that you can do stuff they can't, that you can survive when they'd croak, and that you don't need the government -- and they do.

Many conservative women -- like the intrepid Sarah Palin -- are more capable, more powerful, and yes, more a "man" than some of the liberal XY specimens. And the utter shame of this makes them despise you -- and want to render you helpless, too.

read it all

sloganeering

imao's truth in advertising for democrats:

• We don’t need to read a bill, we just need to know whether it makes the government bigger.
• Iran can have nukes, but you can’t have salt.
• Shape up voters, or we’ll get a cheap replacement for you from Mexico.
• You work so hard for your money; you really should try and enjoy watching us spend it.
• Aggressively useless.
• The Founding Fathers shot British people for less than what we’re doing.
• We’re really smart; the New York Times told us so.

and there's more!

NJ Senate confirmation hearings

"The state's top Democrat said he will not allow anyone to fill Wallace's seat on the New Jersey Supreme Court (until) the mandatory retirement age for justices."

Sweeney's move protests Gov. Chris Christie's unprecedented decision to not renominate Wallace, the only black member of the state's highest court...

Although Christie has the power to nominate top government officials like Supreme Court justices, as Senate president Sweeney controls which nominations and bills move through the Legislature's upper house. Top Democrats have previously said the Senate will not hold any confirmation hearings on Anne Patterson, a lawyer in a private Morristown law firm and Christie's choice to replace Wallace.

"Regardless of her qualifications, she's not going to get a hearing," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Nicholas Scutari (D-Union), whose committee is responsible for vetting the governor's nominees.

Pop quiz: Is this instance of blatant obstructionism by NJ democrats based on:

1. sexism
2. racism
3. corruption
4. all of the above

?

seagate!

algore's epic fail = iowahawk's epic win

fiddler in the house

you can't spell "nero" without "o"

the opposite of right is...

jacobson summarizes:

"Sites on the left are echo-chambers in which like-minded individuals come together to tell each other how smart they are, in the comfort of a platform provided to them by ideological gurus... who lead these bloggers to pre-determined fundraising and political action while deluding the bloggers into thinking they are part of a grassroots movement so they can feel good about themselves. Right-wing bloggers, by contrast, exhibit the rugged individualism that built this country, defeated fascism and communism, and put men on the Moon."

forget fired

this mug would get me lynched at work

another travel note

i've been to nyc twice. that was three times too many.

Arizona Iced Tea Boycott?

guess what i'm thirsty for all of a sudden

update: oh it's from new york? boycott!

;)

Thelma and Louise II

The phrase "pitfalls of unchecked power" takes on a whole new meaning:

"(Just) like Thelma and Louise when they knew the jig was up, the Democratic Congress has decided it might as well put the pedal to the metal and go over the precipice with a crash and a bang. Unfortunately, they've got an already pummeled economy in the back seat with them."

brace yourself, and read it all.

states i've visited

here's a neat way to make a map of the states you've visited.

here's mine currently:


visited 31 states (62%)


...and i hope to add between 3 and 7 more (of the north central ones) this summer.

racist hate crimes

la raza (spit) was for them before they were against them

earth day

from completely different premises, george carlin still got the holiday right. iowahawk's take is a close second.

weekend pics

quite a bit of driving this weekend, and took a few pictures you might enjoy... (click on thumbnails to embiggen)

---

i've heard that llamas like to have their picture taken - looks like that's true:



...but this chihuahua couldn't care less:



random doors:



random vehicles:



random number:



flowers, trees, etc.:



it wasn't all pretty though - this swarm was hovering over the heat of my parked car - yuck!:



(a couple of these images were *slightly* adjusted in contrast to more accurately represent what i saw.)

rooneyism

"...and why is it that the more people there are involved in solving a problem, the less sensible their solution is going to be?"

(another thought from recent personal experiences, sadly.)

update: i take that back - idiocy can happen no matter how small the management team is.

war crimes

who knew they happened so close to home?

"let them drink tea!"

mme. boxer-antoinette was rumoured to have said...

homophobe!!! gaybasher!!!

don't be a hater, o-man!!!

;P ;)

we're all in jeopardy

it's funny because it's sad...

who's in charge here?

i've had this site linked for a while in my sidebar, but haven't really promoted it. who's in charge here? is a site that's "interested in who appears to be the leader" in the publicity photograph of a random musical group. despite occasional f-bombs, there's still a fun discussion every week. for no good reason, the number of comments has been dwindling lately, so go check it out and participate if you like.

automotive advice

i hear a click and clack sound coming through the vents...

revenge of the nerds?

not exactly:

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular. Why?

To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smart kids make themselves popular? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular...

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him... Of course I wanted to be popular... But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things...

I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists...

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is "Lord of the Flies"... Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me... I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid...

What bothers me is not that the kids are (imprisoned in schools), but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.

it's long, but read the rest

(emphases mine, sadly from experience)

the cure for socialism

...is not more socialism

it's fab

No, "fab" is not an opinion, it's the acronym for Future of American Broadband, whose six goals are:

1. 100 million US homes should have affordable access to 100 Mbps download/50 Mbps upload broadband Internet connections.
2. The US should be the leader in mobile network innovation, and the US should have the fastest and most extensive mobile networks in the world.
3. Every American should have access to “robust” broadband, and “the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose”.
4. Every community in the US should have access to 1 Gbps broadband for schools, hospitals, and government buildings.
5. The implementation of a wireless, interoperable public safety network available to all first responders.
6. Every American should be able to use a broadband connection to analyze their energy consumption (power, water, etc.)

The good news is that the net is getting stronger.

The bad news is that the net is getting stronger.

the body as machine

interesting illustration - is there any wonder why the best industrial music comes from germany? ;)

making a taxing day less taxing

lileks, of course. it is funny, but he does make the point:

"there just maybe might be a limit to the number of millstones you can pile on the economy’s chest"

change i can believe in

ron paul's polling even with obama. i'm not a ron paul supporter, i'm just happy about how fast the pendulum of opinion can swing away from the nanny state.

"It turns out that watching Goldman Sachs, the United Auto Workers, public employee unions and a raft of other vampires drain the treasury at America's weakest moment in a generation will make a person pretty hacked off"...

Libertarian sentiment has finally gone mainstream.

A movement that said that people should do whatever they wanted as long as it didn't hurt anyone else couldn't compete during the culture wars that began in the 1960s.

But after two wars, a $12 trillion debt, a financial crisis and the most politically tone-deaf president in modern history, Americans may have finally given up on big government.

movies

lileks, on "titanic"'s music:

really – the visuals were excellent, but you can’t recollect them without thinking of the plot or hearing Enya cooing, or threatening to coo. The main theme isn’t bad, in a formless sort of melancholic adolescent notion of romantic loss, but most the score is a bore, stuffed with the sort of tics and riffs Horner threw into all his 90s soundtracks. The four-note trumpet tattoo. The crazy piano glissando. Anvil strikes. Could have been worse; could have been Elfman, and then we would have seen the Titanic sink to the sound of overwrought ironic oompah-oompah melodies.

imao, on "300":

I think we should all rewatch 300 to see strategies that worked against the Persians. There’s a big difference, though, since in that movie their leader is very tall while Ahmadinejad can fit nicely in a shoebox.

imao, on "thief" ...or "the sting" ...or "the heist" ...or something:

I just wish this day didn’t feel so much like take a big portion of my earnings from last year and throwing it in a pile and burning it. What am I paying for these days? Defaulted mortgages caused by earlier jackassery of the government? It would be nice if the government at least humored us, sending us pictures of terrorists getting blown to pieces labeled, “Your taxes paid for this.” Then I’d at least feel my thousands of dollars were going to something useful. Instead I keep hearing about million dollar grants to some random museum in a Congressman’s district that didn’t even request money.

Here’s what we should do. I assume a lot of the Congressmen use some credit union or something in D.C. We should find a way to hack into all their accounts, steal all their money, and then spend it on completely useless crap like everything from the Sharper Image catalog. Then they’ll know what it feels like.

many tiny ropes restrained gulliver too

for a short time.

i'm not paraphrasing

As a counterpoint to militant atheism's claim that the Bible* promotes subjugation of women and homosexuals, the vast majority of the Koran** promotes violence against all unbelievers.

* the book of the true God
** the book of the fakir

the title could have been shortened

...to "Huckabee is correct":

Mike Huckabee, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, says the effort to allow gays and lesbians to marry is comparable to legalizing incest, polygamy and drug use.

Huckabee also told college journalists last week that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt. "Children are not puppies," he said...

Huckabee told the interviewer that not every group's interests deserve to be accommodated...

"That would be like saying, well there's there are a lot of people who like to use drugs so let's go ahead and accommodate those who want to use drugs. There are some people who believe in incest, so we should accommodate them. There are people who believe in polygamy, should we accommodate them?" he said, according to a transcript of the interview.

link list

the side effects of ethanol

the financial crisis was foretold

the financial crisis was exaggerated

half of voters "strongly favor repeal" of obama's healthscam

"unprecedented diversity"

hunting for the new hunt brothers

most of these help prove one comment that "everything the democrats touch turns to (dung)".

Apollo 13

houston, we've had a problem - forty years ago

dual- quad- hex- core computer processors

how about dual x quad x hex core computer processors?

welcome to canada

ann coulter found some canadians less welcoming than my sister and i did when we traveled there several years ago. maybe toronto is just nicer than ottawa?

tsunami warning

Caused by a large O followed by many zeroes...

observation of a conversation

Beware of any romantic involvement with any person who has more concern about "the relationship" than they have concern about you as a person.

freedom isn't free

a discussion, not of soldiers' noble sacrifices, but of trade-offs in power vs freedoms.

it makes as much sense

On Daylight Stupid Time, via Dustbury:

"Why don’t we move the calendar forward by two weeks in the spring, and back two weeks in the autumn. Then we would get an extra month of summer!"

“What part of no don’t you understand?”

Pelosi, Reid and Obama understand. They just don’t care. It’s the progressive way.

cost/benefit

unfortunately, this is only satire

czar wars

There is something troubling about Americans’ newfound willingness to accept and submit to czarist authority.

bad news

i like reruns, but not of the cuban missile crisis:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced the offer by Russia (that) officials would discuss the possibility of setting up a "satellite launcher and a factory."... The two countries are also discussing new weapons deals, Chavez said in televised remarks, without giving details.

Chavez's government has already bought more than $4 billion in Russian weapons since 2005, including helicopters, fighter jets and 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles. Chavez said last year that Russia agreed to loan Venezuela up to $2.2 billion for additional arms deals.

but don't worry about that, just keep worrying about those angry white males...

update 1: i'd also like to avoid reruns of the french revolution, please:

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Burke, a Protestant, asked the French, "From the general style of late publications of all sorts, one would be led to believe that your clergy in France were a sort of monsters, a horrible composition of superstition, ignorance, sloth, fraud, avarice and tyranny. But is this true?"

update 2: iowahawk put a lot of research into another kind of bad news.

a matter of perspective

the tick praises the ant for being larger than the flea:

"Over all, the numbers were: 9.92 million viewers for NBC; 8.27 million for ABC and 6.45 million for CBS.

Is this a signal that viewers are abandoning network newscasts in droves?

Not really. The number of viewers still watching the three shows together — more than 24 million in the first quarter — continue to dwarf any news program on cable."

So that means about 276 million Americans did not watch any MSM news, right?

step on a crack

break gaia's back

Constitutionality

update & bump: No fooling - a 14-year-old has written a book on conservatism: Defining Conservatism: The Principles That Will Bring Our Country Back.

This blog got two referrals from two posts on similar topics:

• The Declaration of Independence
• The Constitution as liberals see it

Even more odd is that I've been thinking about this topic for a couple of days now - What the Constitution really means, how it has been twisted (predominantly by the left), and how America can "have its foundation repaired".

Your thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated. There may be a follow-up to this post *IF* my inspiration can hold out.

don't fill me up with your rules, old man

paraphrasing one comment here:

"The 60s radicals are now "the man," and the Tea Partiers are now the civil rights activists."

reverse the curse

A common complaint made by atheists (particularly the militant kind) is:

"How can there be a god if there is so much evil in the world?"

I wonder if any of them have ever asked themselves (or anyone):

"How can there be no god if there is so much truth and beauty in the world?"

2011 Mustang GT

I only see two problems with it:

1) They still haven't fixed the crooked lines over the headlights and under the taillights.

2) The number on the badge should be "302" not "5.0"

blowing the curve for everyone

one of the few times i can recommend cbs news site, check out president hussein's low grades.

dances with wolves - in space!

i can't wait for the sequel :D

Health Care Deformed 2

Ten updates was enough for the previous post about the big 0's healthcare scam. Here's more:

Phil Gramm:

Any real debate about health-care reform has to be centered on solving the problem of cost. Ultimately, there are only two ways of doing it. The first approach is to have government control costs through some form of rationing. The alternative is to empower families to make their own health-care decisions in a system where costs matter. The fundamental question is about who is going to do the controlling: the family or the government.

President Obama and his congressional allies systematically excluded every major proposal to empower consumers to control costs. From beginning to end, they insisted on a government-run system. That's why compromise was never possible.

NRO:

"It’s a sad day when the President of the United States uses taxpayer dollars to travel around the country ridiculing and provoking those taxpayers with whom he disagrees."

Director Blue lets Chavez Del Norte and his victims speak for themselves.

racism has jumped the shark

...and it wasn't even a great white ;)

Health Care Deformed

(10 updates below)

The anti-intellectual liberals at my workplace are congratulating themselves today as to how much more compassionate they are than "those bigoted and mean-spirited conservatives". I would like to ask them "how can ruining everyone's health can be considered compassionate?" (...but i'd much rather remain employed)

update 1: in response to one particular person's wait-and-see attitude, i'll point out that the legal resistance has already begun.

update 2: some related quotes via dustbury:

Our political class and bureaucracy are a bunch of bumblers, time servers who are squatting on the neck of society. Their cost far exceeds their benefit. It is perfectly rational — not extreme — to demand relief from their predations. They simply aren’t very good at what they do and need to be downsized like any other enterprise that has lost its focus and no longer produces value... Political leaders have no idea what they are doing. They need to listen rather than preach so that they can become marginally less incompetent... It isn’t that there is some magic formula, some set of politicians and policies that can make huge, centralized authoritarian societies work well. They can’t work well. It’s a silly idea that arises from muddled thinking that glosses over the particularities of systems. It [is] a juvenile notion that belongs in a jar kept by the door where you place your cherished illusions when leaving your cloister to engage with the reality of the world at large.

update 3: imao is optimistic:

There’s no use in conservatives getting too down in any political defeat, because we’ll always still be our awesome selves, and liberals will still be losers who smell weird... We’re conservatives; we have useful things to do.

update 4: double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble.

update 5: telling us all what some of us already knew - "it's all about control".

update 6: if the program is so great, why did obama, pelosi, et.al. exempt themselves from it?

update 7: truth in numbers and pictures.

update 8: the best summary yet:

We've passed a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that exempts themselves from it, to be signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's broke. What could possibly go wrong?".

update 9: How do the democrats plan to enforce their takeover of America? ACORN brownshirts.

update 10: explanation of how this is bad numbers and bad law

coincidence? 2

up against cspan's healthscam vote coverage, tonight's tv schedule includes:

madhouse
mad men
mafioso
monster
kill bill
tool academy


the titles (if not the actual shows) seem fitting...

yes. please. now.

Impeach Obama:

"(The Slaughter Solution - the scheme to avoid actually voting on president hussein's healthcare takeover) would be an unprecedented violation of our democratic norms and procedures, established since the inception of the republic. Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution stipulates that for any bill to become a law, it must pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate. That is, not be "deemed" to have passed, but actually be voted on with the support of the required majority. The bill must contain the exact same language in both chambers - and in the version signed by the president - to be a legitimate law. This is why the House and Senate have a conference committee to iron out differences of competing versions. This is Civics 101.

The Slaughter Solution is a dagger aimed at the heart of our system of checks and balances. It would enable the Democrats to establish an ominous precedent: The lawmaking process can be rigged to ensure the passage of any legislation without democratic accountability or even a congressional majority. It is the road to a soft tyranny. James Madison must be turning in his grave.

Mr. Obama is imposing a leftist revolution. Since coming to office, he has behaved without any constitutional restraints. The power of the federal government has exploded. He has de facto nationalized key sectors of American life - the big banks, financial institutions, the automakers, large tracts of energy-rich land from Montana to New Mexico. His cap-and-trade proposal, along with a newly empowered Environmental Protection Agency, seeks to impose massive new taxes and regulations upon industry. It is a form of green socialism: Much of the economy would fall under a command-and-control bureaucratic corporatist state. Mr. Obama even wants the government to take over student loans.

Yet his primary goal has always been to gobble up the health care system. The most troubling aspect of the Obamacare debate, however, is not the measure's sweeping and radical aims - the transformation of one-sixth of the U.S. economy, crippling tax increases, higher premiums, state-sanctioned rationing, longer waiting lines, the erosion of the quality of medical care and the creation of a huge, permanent administrative bureaucracy. Rather, the most alarming aspect is the lengths to which the Democrats are willing to go to achieve their progressive, anti-capitalist agenda.

Obamacare is opposed by nearly two-thirds of the public, more than 60 percent of independents and almost all Republicans and conservatives. It has badly fractured the country, dangerously polarizing it along ideological and racial lines. Even a majority of Democrats in the House are deeply reluctant to support it.

Numerous states - from Idaho to Virginia to Texas - have said they will sue the federal government should Obamacare become law. They will declare themselves exempt from its provisions, tying up the legislation in the courts for years to come.

Mr. Obama is willing to devour his presidency, his party's congressional majority and - most disturbing - our democratic institutional safeguards to enact it. He is a reckless ideologue who is willing to sacrifice the country's stability in pursuit of a socialist utopia."

Democrats... would guarantee that any bill signed by Mr. Obama is illegitimate, illegal and blatantly unconstitutional. It would be worse than a strategic blunder; it would be a crime - a moral crime against the American people and a direct abrogation of the Constitution and our very democracy.

It would open Mr. Obama, as well as key congressional leaders such as Mrs. Pelosi, to impeachment. The Slaughter Solution would replace the rule of law with arbitrary one-party rule. It violates the entire basis of our constitutional government - meeting the threshold of "high crimes and misdemeanors." If it's enacted, Republicans should campaign for the November elections not only on repealing Obamacare, but on removing Mr. Obama and his gang of leftist thugs from office.

"The 50 Worst Things Ever to Happen to Music"

The list is "debatable and crude, but funny."

"stop making sense"

when i first saw "stop making sense", the talking heads' famous concert movie years ago, little did i know that so many people would make its title their personal philosophy...

(this thought was inspired by several recent "debates" with people whose logical skills are not yet as advanced as chomskybots.)

The hopes, they is a-changing

History will note that, after numerous setbacks, the American Dream died during the Obama administration. Now all we have to wonder is how and when the light of freedom will shine again. (I'm hoping for November of this year or sooner, or winter of 2012 at the latest...)

okgo

cool video

update & bump: cool conclusion

random thought

i'm old enough to remember way back when "jedi" was just two words out of a beverly hillbillies episode

;)

breaking up

...should be easy to do

power

Peter Hitchens via Viewpoint:

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of power worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

read the rest of both

un(?)intended results

dustbury, edited:

"Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."

... "Why not?"

It never occurred to (utopian progressives) then — and it doesn't occur to them now — that there might be good and sensible reasons why not. In the summer of 1968 we were not quite four years into the War on Poverty, and no one except for those evil, wicked conservatives ever wondered if it was ever going to end; poverty was already on the decline after Lyndon Johnson made his pitch and Congress followed through, and the level of poverty hasn't changed very much in the decades since. (Did someone say "quagmire"?)

If you think about it, just about every single ostensibly-"progressive" idea pitched in the last forty years has been motivated largely by "Why not?" It's not a function of partisan politics per se: pie-in-the-sky notions have risen from both sides of the aisle on a regular basis, and there's no reason to think the practice is in decline. And once in a while, something actually works: (our cities have cleaner air, for instance...) But generally speaking, the more utopian a proposal... the more likely it is to generate something downright dystopian.

don't mess with Texas

"...contrast Texas, the nation's second most populous state, with the most populous, California. Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the 1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.

But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress -- or lack of it -- over the last decade."

read the rest

update: a related comparison chart

truth is...

a zombie in pajamas says:

"Leftism fails as a coherent philosophy on its own terms. We shouldn’t try to wring significance from the delusional outburst of someone who just happened to be leftist. There are plenty of ways to logically disembowel Marxism and its numerous noxious contemporary offspring without having to resort to an unnecessary round of political “gotcha!”"

read the rest

if you care about your health...

Here's what Parker Griffith says about President Hussein's "frantic, late-stage push on health care":

"We can, and we must, stop this government takeover of health care,"

"For (democrats), health care reform has become less about the best reforms and more about what best fits their 'Washington knows best' mentality — less about helping patients and more about scoring political points.. This is no idle observation. I've witnessed it firsthand."

multiverse

i've long thought about the multiverse and related concepts. viewpoint does so more clearly, and comes to a surprisingly grand conclusion.

rooting for the dark side

this time they offer more than just cookies...

Unconstitutionality

Researching two current issues - the Census' unconstitutional questions and Chicago's unconstitutional gun laws - I found one quote in particular that applies wonderfully to both:

"States may have grown accustomed to violating the rights of American citizens, but that does not bootstrap those violations into something that is constitutional."

This also applies to ongoing Ponzi schemes...

saudi influence

looks like the house of saud (rhymes with fraud) is running quite an "anti-zionist conspiracy".

spam trap

to whoever commented on my old optimus keyboard post: if your seemingly irrelevant comment about raising rabbits was legitimate, i apologize for deleting it, but it looked like a spam test to me. feel free to explain in comments here (in a turing-test-passing way) if that was a mistake.

it's not just restaurants

Restaurant News Magazine explains why the industry is shrinking despite a growing population.

The increase of government legislation targeting the foodservice industry, on the federal, state and local levels, is one of the largest challenges restaurateurs face...

...the intrusion of government through such proposed legislative measures as menu labeling, card check and health care reform, would have the most profound effect on the industry’s future cost of doing business.

“Government, that’s the greatest single threat we have,” Luther said Monday during a panel discussion at the New York State Restaurant Association’s trade show...

down please

...and take your crooked gang with you.

obama takes charge, demands "up or down vote" on health care.

substance

I don't know who Snooki is, but Broun makes sense:

Washington, Mar 2 -

U.S. Representative Paul Broun, M.D. (GA-10) released the following statement after President Barack Obama announced his intentions to incorporate only four minor Republican ideas into the 2,000-plus page health care bill:

“I don’t know if we should be insulted or humored at the President’s feeble attempts to incorporate Republican ideas into his latest health care proposal. Snooki, from the Jersey Shore, has more substance than President Obama’s offer.

“Instead of listening to the American people, the President has once again demonstrated his arrogance and ignorance about what the nation expects from its leaders. This is “The Situation,” Mr. President: the American people do not want unconstitutional mandates and job-killing tax increases. They are concerned with the costs of premiums, the quality of their health care and ensuring their children and grandchildren are not left with the bill. If you want to govern with the consent of the governed, you need to scrap this government take-over plan and embrace more of our commonsense solutions that protect the vital patient/doctor relationship and decrease the costs of premiums without adding to the national debt.”

coincidence?