It's quite simple, really ...

 h/t Theo

You can put lipstick on a pig, but ...

 h/t Theo
... it's still what it is!

By now, we've all heard Nancy Pelosi's remarks just before the vote on Monday, in which the bipartisan bill was defeated. There have been admissions (by a sufficient number of Republican congressmen to have reversed that defeat) that Pelosi's partisan remarks were to blame for their negative votes, because her remarks negated the supposed bipartisan spirit of the bill. Democrats have rejected this claim as amateurish, immature, unpatriotic, or similar characterizations. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Pelosi's partisanship triggered a rejection of what had been presented as a bipartisan bill.

Would some unbiased interviewer, assuming one exists in television land, please ask some Democratic leader (I use the term technically) who blames the Republican naysayers, what exactly did the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives hope to accomplish by her remarks? And does she now believe she has succeeded in her attempt to accomplish whatever it was? Inquiring minds, who can detect partisanship oozing from every politician's pores, would like to know, or at least hear the response spin.

It could happen ...

{link » The Financial Crisis}

“Then Sen. Dodd takes over, waves a paper as his eyes flash and he rails at the Wall Street greed that brought us this mess. He never offers a word that as the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, he took $165,000 in contributions from the failing Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac octopus as payback for his long-standing opposition to regulating these out-of-control institutions that triggered the entire mess, or that he took VIP insider discounted loans from the now long gone Countrywide Financial that did its part to get us to where we are. Pretty shameful. Who will police the police?”
— Victor Davis Hanson

No worries Victor. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will police Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, respectively. It could happen ...
 h/t Theo
Definition of a stupid c*nt

It Only Hurts When I Laugh

Now that the House failed to pass The Deal and The Market predictably tanked in response, what next? Damned if I know. I suspect very few people really can know, though many will claim they do.

So, in the well-established tradition of adding fuel to a raging fire, I am going to join the millions of others who feel they have an inalienable right to engage in a verbiage free-for-all now that our Congressional leadership has declared it's bullshit as usual.

Top 10 Reasons Why I Don't Know Whether to Laugh or Join the NRA

10

Harry Reed trots out on national television to present the so-called Bipartisan Deal. He claims his Democratic Party "rescued" The Deal from the vile Bush proposal, with carefully crafted protections for no-credit homeowners (who, crucially, retain the right to vote Democratic), as well as alibis for partisan hacks like Harry Reid.

9

Nancy Pelosi trots out on national television to present the so-called Bipartisan Deal. She proceeds to lecture the Republican Party on the need for responsible Democrats to carefully control the evil intentions of the Bush Administration.

8

Chris Dodd trots out on national television and promises to conduct hearings to find the Republican culprits responsible for this mess, just as soon as the irresponsible Republicans cooperate with the Democratic leaders to pass the legislation that will credit the responsible Democrats with saving the Nation's economy.

7

Barney Frank trots out.

6

Barney Frank looks sternly at the national television cameras.

5

Barney Frank summons the full abundance of his holier-than-thou-ness.

4

Barney Frank ridicules his inferiors across the aisle.

3

Barney Frank cracks wise.

2

Barney Frank dribbles sarcastic.

1

Barney Frank still has kneecaps.

Roll With the Punches

The universal human motivational factor is self interest. The variation stems from personal priorities. Even the most altruistic among us is motivated by the desire to be judged altruistic.

My own self interest is currently focused on finding a satisfactory personal accommodation with the world around me as I see it evolving in the foreseeable future, which is to say in the vernacular, I aim to roll with the punches coming my way. Having had more than six decades to learn how best to roll, and having reached the stage of life when one finally understands the futility of trying to prevent the punches from coming, the difficult part is anticipating the nature of the punches.

Some form of financial-crisis resolution will be passed by Congress this week. Perhaps a depression-scale disaster will be averted/postponed. Some will be relieved, albeit temporarily. Many will be outraged. Most are, and will continue to be perplexed. Everyone, to vastly varying degrees, will have been part of the problem. Absolutely no one will accept an iota of responsibility.

My own plan is to do nothing different from what I have been doing for the past three decades: try to estimate my personal needs (as distinguished from my desires); try to estimate my anticipated resources; try to find ways to make up the shortfall, if any. If I anticipate a windfall, I will first recompute. Then, if the windfall hasn't vanished, I will, with great trepidation briefly glimpse inside Pandora's Box, whose male pass-phrase is, "Man does not live by bread alone, but also for some toys." There is no corresponding pass-phrase for women, for no one has ever figured out what a woman wants, besides more. But I digress.

Barack Obama will win the general election, and the Democrats will retain majorities in both Houses of Congress, which means that a liberal majority will hold sway in the Supreme Court. In my humble opinion, this will effect a complete takeover of the insane asylum by the inmates, and the electorate will get precisely the government it deserves.

My plan is to hunker down to the lowest personal profile I can assume, given my chronic lower-back pains, and hope that the Nation I love can survive the ensuing changes until the next general election.

An objectively honest opinion is a gaffe?

{link » Biden's Gaffe Immunity}

When Joe Biden described an Obama ad attacking John McCain's inability to use a computer as "terrible," the world acted as if the Joe-pocalypse had finally arrived. Jonathan Martin of Politico called it "perhaps his most off-message statement yet." Newsday dubbed him "gaffe-a-minute Joe."

Please. Biden's blunder couldn't matter less. Not because gaffes never matter—they can, if they play into public perceptions of the candidate's character—but because Joe Biden is gaffe-proof.

Am I missing something here, or has the "down is up; black is white; nonsense is sense;" mantra of the liberal fascists finally engulfed us? Since when did one of Biden's rare, objective, and honestly-expressed opinions been categorized as a gaffe?

As has been thoroughly explained, John McCain has difficulty using a keyboard, stemming from beatings he received in captivity at the hands of the f*cking North Vietnamese, whom the f*cking Jane Fonda supported then and still. So when Biden has the decency to characterize the Obama Campaign's obnoxious ad as "terrible", his remark is characterized as a gaffe? An objectively honest opinion is what the left considers a gaffe? Is there no sense of decency left, at long last?

WTF?!

How the Financial Crisis Evolved

{link » Theo Spark: The Best Explanation of How the Financial Crisis was Created}


A couple of the Great Bipartisan Communicators

Theo has the embedded vid. For those who prefer an executive summary, I recommend Richard Epstein's Greed, Or Incentives? in Forbes, which I quoted in Read it; and weep!.

Don't let the real culprits get away with pulling the wool over your eyes. The usual suspects include Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and their liberal colleagues both inside (Harry Reid and Barack Obama) and outside of Congress (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton).

The liberals will blame the Bush Administration's "failed" policies (read free-market capitalism), of course. But it was their progressive policies (read socialism) that enabled irresponsible behavior by lenders and borrowers who greedily offered and accepted mortgages doomed to foreclosure.

Paul Newman, R.I.P.

 h/t libertas
Paul Newman (1925-2008)

’tsup?

{link » Brevity}

“87 years ago, our dads made us free. Yay! Still want free, but hard! Fighting, dying, burying! Need more fight tho, so dead be happy.” — Gene Weingarten

“backatcha” 

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon.
Going to a candidates debate.
Laugh about it, shout about it.
When you've got to choose,
Every way you look at it, you lose.

Where have you gone Lincoln Abraham?
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Woo, woo, woo.
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson,
Lincoln Abe has left and gone away?
Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey.

Your Ticket to Ride

If your parents are baby boomers who are fast approaching retirement, chances are they were too stoned to learn the facts of life themselves. But if the current National financial crisis has your attention it is not too late to learn those facts yourself. Herewith a list of useful guidelines to help you sidestep the muck your parents are mired in now:

Rules to Live By in the Grown-up World
• There is no free lunch. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy are make-believe characters for kids. The government is not the adult's version of Santa Claus, unless you happen to be in the government yourself.
• Start thinking about your retirement. Now. If you have finished school and found gainful employment, start paying down your debt and begin saving for your retirement. Time is your friend.
• Stock-picking is not for you. Only Warren Buffet knows how to do it, and he doesn't always guess right either. You don't stand a snow-ball's chance in hell.
• Invest the maximum allowed by the IRS in a tax-deferred, broadly diversified, balanced mutual fund, on a dollar cost-averaged basis, especially if your employer is willing to make matching contributions for you. Deferring taxes until retirement will generally mean you'll be in a lower tax bracket when you pay. Diversification is the best alternative to stock-picking. A balanced fund will automatically buy low and sell high. And dollar cost-averaging will, in the long run, reduce your cost. Matching contributions from your employer is tantamount to an immediate 100% appreciation of your investment, and, to the best of my knowledge, is the only bit of free lunch in the whole free world.
• Purchase insurance for home, car, and health care. Can't afford it? Don't buy the home. Still can't? Don't buy the car. Must have a car? Buy a cheap car. Still can't afford health care? Don't get sick. WTF! I can't solve all your problems. You have to assume personal accountability to make it in the grown-up world.
• That quip about the difference between men and women being "reason and accountability" was funny, but the truth is it's the difference between responsible adults and everybody else. The brain is your friend. Personal accountability is your ticket to ride (clean bill of health).

Read it; and weep!

{link » Greed, Or Incentives?}

(From Forbes.com)
Richard Epstein 09.23.08, 12:01 AM ET

It had been my devout wish to write a set of disinterested columns about labor markets to illustrate the power of the presumption against state regulation of voluntary agreements. But the financial meltdown of the past week has rudely interrupted my plan to pillory the minimum wage.

Instead, I shall turn on a dime to address two connected questions: How did we get to that sorry state where great institutions topple, and what should be done?

On both questions, our bipartisan consensus is holding true to form. In a system that is chock-full of heavy regulation, they instantly blame the current collapse on the excesses of the free market, for which a still heavier dose of regulation supplies some supposed cure. That indictment contains few particulars. It typically rests on a populist broadside whose centerpiece is greed on Wall Street, but never on Main Street--where there are more voters.

This prior is all wrong. Greed is a constant of human nature. Financial meltdowns are not a constant of economic political life. It takes, therefore, an understanding of the overall incentive structure to explain why selfish economic behavior produces great progress on some occasions and financial ruination on others.

On this question, your stalwart libertarian is persona non grata in respectable company. If voluntary markets normally align private incentives with social welfare, then always look first for a government intervention that knocks those incentives off line. It’s not hard to find some culprits.

One bad move has government legislators and courts intervening to slow down mortgage foreclosures because it is socially unacceptable for people to lose their homes. Unpleasant yes, but unacceptable no. Start with this assumption: Individual tenants can be evicted at the termination of their lease. Only the ardent defenders of rent control (which has ruined New York City real estate markets) find this outcome is unacceptable. Everyone else rolls with the punches.

So what is the difference between the evicted tenant and the foreclosed owner? Only this: The owner has put a down payment on the house. But so what? Foreclosed homeowners typically made only small down payments, or even none at all. Treat their mortgage payments as lease payments, and bump up their amount a bit by dividing the down payment over the number of months before foreclosure. Not much of a financial difference between the tenant and the owner. [And "interest-only mortgage payments" are indistinguishable from RENT!]

Yet once regulators slow down foreclosures, other potential homeowners are denied opportunities to purchase housing they can afford. The housing stock cannot recirculate. Banks that acquired this mortgage paper see their portfolios nosedive. That dicey paper, as William Isaac noted in last week’s Wall Street Journal, drives the entire economy over the edge by strict government regulations that require all financial institutions to “mark-to-market” the various instruments in their portfolio.

Unfortunately, there is no working market to mark this paper down to. To meet their bond covenants and their capital requirements, these firms have to sell their paper at distress prices that don’t reflect the upbeat fact that the anticipated income streams from this paper might well keep the firm afloat.

One bad regulatory turn leads to another, and lo, the bailouts come thick and fast. At the nth hour, wise heads often rightly conclude that some desperate measure has to be taken to prevent the financial disintegration brought on by, well, prior government regulation. Those bailouts, of course, come from the hides of taxpayers who borrowed prudently. The entire system subsidizes destructive behavior, which means that we will get more destructive behavior in the future. We might as well sell flood insurance at bargain prices in Galveston, Texas, and New Orleans.

The moral of this story is that bad regulation metastasizes. Short term heroics are no substitute for dispassionate deregulation, which won’t happen so long as our political leaders are fixated on greed. Taking steps to prevent financial meltdowns is more likely to hasten their unwelcome arrival, so says the libertarian.

Richard Epstein writes a weekly column for Forbes.com. He is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a professor of law at the University of Chicago.

[Emphasis added to highlight some points that are invariably omitted from political machinations.]

Barney's Rubble Frankin' Trouble

{link » Bush to Meet With Presidential Candidates, Lawmakers on Bailout Plan}

Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a lead negotiator on the package, said given the progress of the talks, the White House meeting scheduled for Thursday afternoon was a distraction.

“We're going to have to interrupt a negotiating session tomorrow between the Democrats and Republicans on a bill where I think we are getting pretty close, and troop down to the White House for their photo op,” said Frank, the House Financial Services Committee chairman. “I wish they’d checked with us.”

 h/t Theo
In other words, Barney, Patron Saint of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the White House photo op will interfere with your own photo op designed to obfuscate your personal culpability in the frickin' mess to begin with, you sigmoidal disgrace to the human race.

Satchel's Perfect Caption

 h/t Theo
"Don't look back: Something may be gaining on you."
— Satchel Paige, US baseball player (1906-1982)

Liberals Needn't Bother Reading Anything They Think They Already Know

{link » John Steele Gordon on the Financial Mess: Greed, Stupidity, Delusion — and Some More Greed}

Senator Chris Dodd — formerly ranking member and now chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, with oversight over Freddie and Fannie — recently said on Bloomberg Television: “I have a lot of questions about where was the administration over the last eight years.”

Excuse me? Just where the hell were you, Senator? Oh, right. You were standing in line at the bank in order to deposit the political contributions Fannie and Freddie were lavishing upon you. At least they got their money’s worth — until the party ended and the American people got the bill.

Members of Congress — aided and abetted by their many waterbearers in the media — wonder why their collective approval rating is about on par with colon cancer’s. The reason is simple enough: Congress is the sick man of Washington; a textbook example of the truism that institutions tend to evolve in ways that benefit their elites, at the expense of the people they were created to serve.
[Read entire article here.]

Good ol' Chris Dodd. He and his fellow liberals will take good care of their supporters (those poor unsuspecting schmucks).

Same Lame Blame Game — Insane Name McCain Again

So this moron comedienne appears on Leno last night. She riffs on how the proposed mortgage bailout is for "the rich people with private pools". The moron Leno and his moron audience are lapping it up.

It's a proposed bailout for the irresponsible schmucks who took out sub-prime mortgages for way more house than they could afford, and are now defaulting and blaming the government for not protecting them from the mean old lenders who took advantage of their greed, stupidity, and lack of personal accountability.

The liberal leftists are riffing on John McCain's inability to use email.

John McCain has difficulty using a keyboard, stemming from beatings he received in captivity at the hands of the f*cking North Vietnamese, whom the f*cking Jane Fonda supported then and still.

Biden thinks Franklin Roosevelt was President in 1929. He thinks people had television in 1929.

Biden is a moron.

Obama can't manage to divide 100 Senators by 2 Senators/State to get 50 States in the Union. He has a degree from Harvard?

Obama is an idiot.

Chaos Theory for Dummies

I'm a big fan of the "Such-and-such-a-topic for Dummies" format. After all, we are too busy to learn everything, especially those subjects that encroach upon our shrinking daily allocation of spare time, much of which has already been appropriated by de facto necessities, such as sleeping, napping, and watching "Law & Order" re-runs.

The recent spate of intrusions by the mainstream media in the form of ever more alarming breaking-news alerts, concerning incomprehensible occurrences at some obscure address named "Wall Street", has prompted me to prepare a crash course (styled as an "X Theory for Dummies") in, for want of an suitably incomprehensible title, "Chaos Theory".

To wit, I spent a couple of precious hours of my spare time surfing the Web (i.e., "iGoogled stuff", a technical term I will discuss at a future date). In the process, it occurred to me that the best way to present the facts is to mimic mainstream media! I have, therefore, assembled a "Top10-like" list of factors potentially contributing to the chaos on Wall Street, and present them herewith for the readers to prioritize via a poll of opinions, of which there is no shortage.

Hence, "without further ado" (another technical expression I will investigate at some future time):

Contributing Factors to Chaos on Wall Street
[to be prioritized by readers]
• Subprime mortgage market collapse
• Credit rating cartel
• Mark to market fiasco
• Obama collects hundreds of millions in return for change
• Derivatives and regulation
• Oprah's unwillingness to be lender of last resort
• Repeal of Glass-Steagall [the Act, not the person(s)]
• Fannie Mae and the Vast Bipartisan Conspiracy
• Senator Dodd
• The other 99 Senators
• Hindsight regulation
• Modern financial systemic risk
• All of the above

I know, I know. My Top10 list has 13 entries. That's because I eliminated the 14th entry — "Shit happens".

A Bottomless Pit

{link » Crows may be smarter than apes}

“However, the crows didn't understand the difference between a hole with a bottom and one without. This suggests the level of cognition here is intermediate between human-like reasoning and associative learning.”

Reactions to these findings have been mixed. Whereas most crows have dismissed the relevance of a hole with a bottom, liberals in Congress see it as a neo-conspiracy to associate liberal tax-and-spend philosophy with a bottomless pit. As McCain promised to plug that loophole, Palin stifled a laugh (recalling an Italian-American reference to Alaska). Meanwhile, Obama vowed to look into the abyss, as Biden simply stared back. Predictably, Bill Clinton said, "Been there, done that". And if looks could kill, Hillary ...

Conspiracy Theories and Mainstream Thinking

I received an email from a retired chemist who asked me to consider the proposition that:

"Those who ridicule 'conspiracy theorists', or anyone who may hold a quite different radical viewpoint to mainstream thinking, are essentially closed-minded and rather naïve. Oddly, these people are in many cases scientists."

After due consideration, the view I retain is that, although some people do spend an inordinate amount of time debunking theories that others spend an inordinate amount of time concocting, most of us must content ourselves with ridicule, in the interest of saving time.

Reason and Accountability

{link » Palin and Obama: What Really Is Wisdom?}

What Is Wisdom?

Not necessarily degrees, glibness, poise, or factual recall, but the ability to understand human nature. And that requires two simple things: an inductive method of reasoning to look at the world empirically, and a body of knowledge and experience to draw on for guidance.

Palin in empirical fashion bucked the Republican establishment and the old-boy network when she thought it was unreasonable; Obama never figured out or at least never questioned Tony Rezko or the Chicago machine, Trinity Church or the Pelosi-Kennedy liberal mantra — unless it proved advantageous. Palin draws on everything from position papers on ANWR to how to keep four screaming kids fed and bathed; Obama on Harvard Law Review and dispensing more public money to more Chicago interest groups.

That’s a simplification, but also an answer to the old Euripidean question “What is wisdom?”

©2008 Victor Davis Hanson
[Read Hanson's entire post here.]

Here's an oversimplification for the answer to the old Euripidean question: reason and accountability. And despite the very funny quip in "As Good as It Gets", some women have an abundance of both.

People ... stick to your day jobs!

h/t Theo

Beware of Liberals Bearing Gifts

 h/t Theo
Beware of Liberals Bearing Gifts

A Few More Captions:
• Needs More Lipstick
• Delusions of Adequacy
• Icon of Insanity
• Audacity of a Dope
  • Adversity of the Slope
  • Legacy of a Grope
  • Tendency to Lope
  • Paucity of Scope
  • Scarcity of Soap
  • Reluctancy to Cope
  • Tendency to Mope
  • Ubiquity of this Trope
• Exit, Stage Left

More Captions (Suggested by Reader Comments):
1. Get This Donkey Off My Back!

No, Mr. Grunwald, Race Remains the Donkey in the Room

{link » For Obama, Race Remains Elephant in the Room}



The preponderance of race-based support in this Presidential campaign has been, and continues to be the 92% of black voters who support the Democratic candidate. The favorable ratio of 92% to 8% is a whopping (more than an order of magnitude) factor of 11.5! A more technical term for "whopping" is monolithic. The mulish hypocrites in the Democratic Party, and their lapdogs in the MSM, insist on calling race the "elephant" in the room. But for anyone willing to call a diamond a diamond, race is most assuredly the donkey in the room.

Stalin and his leftist admirers knew well the so-called Big-Lie tactic: if you repeat propaganda often enough, no matter how patently false it may be, the sheep will believe the horse-shit.

Enlightenment Tunnels Through Opaque WaPo

{link » Paulson's Moment Of Truth}

“The longer the financial turbulence goes on, the greater the likely backlash against U.S.-style financial globalization. But Paulson's gamble -- if it succeeds -- could limit the damage. By refusing to use the Fed's balance sheet to bail out Lehman, he may have saved the Fed from becoming further bogged down in its crisis-management role, freeing it to focus more on preserving the value of the dollar. And by repealing the too-entangled doctrine, Paulson may have strengthened market penalties for banks that mismanage modern financial instruments -- thereby increasing the chances that sophisticated, market-based finance can flourish safely.

Shocking though it may sound now, there is much to like in U.S.-style financial globalization. America's critics may be tempted to celebrate the dollar's dethronement, but ordinary savers from Brazil to Belarus are grateful for an international store of value. The critics may say that the newfangled financial instruments are inherently dangerous, but this is only true when they are combined with excessive borrowing. The challenge over the next year or so is to preserve the good parts of the system while embracing necessary change. Paulson's willingness to throw the dice has made the world hold its breath, but it shows that he knows what the stakes are.” — Sebastian Mallaby

Sounds like Mallaby sees "Paulson's Moment Of Truth" as an instance of National accountability. If only Treasury's example would trickle down to the consumers-without-borders level, some lasting progress towards personal accountability could ... Nah.

1080p? Don't know what it is, but I want it. Charge!

The Lame Blame Game

{link » Lehman Brothers collapse stuns global markets}

The "blame everybody, especially that heinous Bush, but spare my personal accountability" game begins.

Sound Off: Your opinions and comments

“Brings to mind those obscene bonuses of $5 million or more given to GM execs at the holidays, because they might otherwise go elsewhere... not one reporter had the cujones to ask, "go where? Who would hire them?" Toyota doesn't have a fat-cat system; the ceo has an office among the middle-level execs. Only in capitalist-owned America do we sit quietly by while the freeloaders at the top suck up the profits while those who made their companies successful with the sweat of their brows get laid off in multitudes... serves them all right. I'm taking my money out of the stock market today. I won't live long enough to see it recover. Thanks, greedy ones.” — Woman at Large

Well, Large Woman, 5-megabucks here, 5-megabucks there, pretty soon you're talking real money. What is happening in the financial markets, however, involves gigabucks; hundreds of gigabucks. And as you proceed to blame the "fat-cat system" in "capitalist-owned" America, consider that until you decided to take your money out of the stock market, you were a capitalist too, albeit an unsuccessful capitalist (there are a lot of those).

Did you forget that stock market investment involves risk? Were you OK with capitalism when you were sucking up profits before the turnaround, while others were making your stock more valuable with the sweat of their brows (though I fail to see how brow-sweat ... oh, never mind)? Perhaps we should have a dual economic system that people can switch between: capitalism during a bull market; and socialistic Federal bailouts for bear markets. That way, all the cats (fat, skinny, small, and large) can continue to make money, while taxpayers can pay for your personal unaccountability.

“This administration is a disgrace. They planned this to happen. They knew. How DARE they allow all these people to lose jobs, lose their houses, lose hard earned money while they allow the top 1% to get bonuses? Bring back the guillotine. If the old man with melanoma and the drill, baby drill witch get into office, it'll be the end of the world as we knew it. Time to buy gold and hide it. Get a plot of land and plant some potatoes. Hunker down, it's going to worse.” — jinky

I knew someone like junky would be heard from. "They planned this to happen. They knew."? It wasn't enough that they, along with the Zionist conspiracy to rule the world's banking systems, planned the 9/11 attacks, now they "DARE to allow all these people to lose jobs, lose their houses, lose hard earned money while they allow the top 1% to get bonuses"?

Why is this Administration knowingly: killing thousands of innocent Americans; destroying skyscrapers; allowing people to lose jobs; allowing people to lose the houses they couldn't afford; allowing people to lose their hard earned money (not to mention the easy unearned money), instead of taking the fat-cat bonuses away and giving them to the people, just the way all those nice Communist countries were supposed to do? What is that Bush crowd trying to accomplish by all this mayhem? Maybe it's some evil plan to clean up the gene pool. Off with their heads!

Hey junky, low blow on "the old man with melanoma and the drill, baby drill witch". Can I assume you're an Obama supporter? Just a wild-ass guess.

"Hunker down, it's going to worse." Fer shur, dude, it's going "to worse".

Litmus Test 2008

The American Presidential election of 2008 is a test; it is only a litmus test. But the outcome will have significant repercussions for America and the rest of the world. Will the forces of insanity reach the tipping point, or will common sense prevail?

The Party faithful will do what they have always done, namely vote the Party line. The newly minted, enthusiastic youth will vote: for whomever their favorite pied piper stipulates; against whomever their parents support; or not at all if they oversleep. The poor will vote for whomever they trust more to provide for their personal needs; and the same reasoning will guide the short-sighted and the greedy. The Holyshitwoods (except for a handful who read and think), 92% of black voters, and 100% of liberals who masochistically take full responsibility for the actions of their slave-owning ancestors will follow their donations to the tipping point and beyond. Which leaves us with the deciding demographic and the litmus paper of Test 2008 — the principled pragmatism and traditional common sense of the American independent voter.

Will it be the acid reflux disease of a Keith Olbermann, or the basic common sense of a Victor Davis Hanson? The acidic ravings of a Sean Penn, or the basic common sense of a Clint Eastwood? The acidic dissolution of a Harry Reid, or the basic common sense of a Joe Lieberman? Acidophilic leftism, or basic conservatism? Nancy Pelosi, or any Republican Congressman? Joe Biden's fake hair, or Sarah Palin's lipstick? Obama's naive (or possibly miscreant) plan to talk our enemies into a catatonic state, or McCain's common sense to speak softly and deliver shock and awe.

The Election of 2008 may be a litmus test. But it is not a game.

Apropos Deserving Sacrifice

h/t Theo

{link » [Hurricane] Ike}

“It may be harsh to second-guess people in such dire straits, though I recall thinking Friday, if you live on a sand spit or in a coastal swamp, and there’s a 20-foot storm surge coming, that’s a pretty simple equation that has nothing to do with your ability to ride out hurricane-force winds.

This is America. Even reckless morons who endanger their own lives and others deserve our sympathy, tax dollars, and the potential sacrifice of those who serve.” — Jules Crittenden

I don't know, Jules; maybe two out of three. In America, even morons are entitled to unalienable human rights; but does that include the right to a "potential sacrifice of those who serve", when the morons would not heed mandatory evacuation in the face of destruction?

I am reminded of an incident that occurred last winter, when a party of hardy mountain climbers decided to ignore storm warnings, just for the fun of it, and proceeded to get stranded in a blizzard on Mt. Hood. Subsequently, before the storm subsided, rescuers, because of some noble impulse for self sacrifice, were risking their own lives to get those morons to safety. Why should people who understand the concept of personal accountability risk their lives for those who don't?

I think that in our current leftist climate of arrogant demands for ever more entitlements, there needs to be some reality check about who owes what to whom. When the Founding Fathers guaranteed our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I don't believe their intention was to abnegate all personal responsibilities for adult citizens. They didn't promise us a rose garden; they promised the right to look for one. If you search for your rose garden in a known minefield, be prepared for major disappointment. And don't expect your buddy to throw himself on a mine to save your sorry ass.

Effing Hilarious

Three Dregs and a Dreck

{link » The Other 9/11 Story by Victor Davis Hanson}

“Long after Jacques Chirac, Michael Moore, Gerhard Schroeder, and Cindy Sheehan have come, gone, and nearly disappeared, a General David Petraeus and thousands of American soldiers and diplomats like him remain. George W. Bush is reviled, in part because of an inability to articulate what the war against terror was, and what it was for. But Bush hatred has been reduced to a sort of politically correct trinket, worn around the neck of the clannish critics as a reminder of the President’s ineptness in expression or supposedly dangerous views — without examining what others might have done to achieve the same results of achieving freedom from further attack.”
[Read the rest of Hanson's post here.]

My title for this post is a suitable answer for, "Who are Jacques Chirac, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and Gerhard Schroeder?" Sadly, many others would also fit that bill, but these four "nearly disappeareds" are specified in Hanson's post, and they do cover a broad spectrum of the zombielike infestation of Western civilization. Moreover, unlike MacArthur's "old soldiers" who had the decency to "just fade away", Bush revilers intensify and broaden their scorched-earth retreat in the "hopes" of dragging the Nation down in their despicable hand basket.

Apotheosis of a Mad Female Dog

Cintra Wilson: rabid; female; canine; and pissed!
{link » Pissed about Palin, by Cintra Wilson}

“Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it's easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.

She is dangerous. She is not just pro-life, she's anti-life. She is the suppression of human feeling and instinct. She is a slave to the compromises dictated by her own desire for power and control. Sarah Palin is untethered from her own needs and those of her family, which is in crisis, with a pregnant daughter, a son on the way to Iraq and a special-needs infant.”

[Read the rest of this mad-female-dog diatribe here, if you have the stomach for it.]

It's been noted that, with rare exception, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Cintra Wilson's fury is that rare exception. Her visceral condemnation of Sarah Palin might lead one to question whether National Socialism could be as horrifying to "a ghetto Jew" as such rabid support for Democratic Party hopelessness is to an average American.

Unconventional Wisdom

Wisdom	Conventional Wisdom
noun : accumulated philosophic or scientific learning	noun : the generally accepted belief, opinion, judgment, or prediction about a particular matter
Large Hadron Collider Experiment	It will blow up the world!
General Relativity	The military officer who will press the button that will blow up the world!
Quantum Mechanics	The physics of the bizarre.
Free Will	The film about a young boy who befriends an Orca whale.
Platonism	The idea that youngsters should not be sexually active.
Stoicism	Supports the wave-particle duality of light.
Wisdom of Solomon	The idea that if a pregnant woman is not sure she is the baby's mother, she should have an abortion.
Ecosophy	The necessity for the proponents of social liberation whose struggles in the twentieth century were dominated by the paradigm of social revolution and Marxism to embed their arguments within an ecological framework, which ultimately earned Al Gore the Nobel Pinhead Prize.
Evolution of intelligence	The belief that a larger human brain was devised to punish Eve for eating the apple.
Global Warning	The rapid spread of a computer virus that will ultimately melt the polar icecaps and crash the entire internet.

Patriot Day

h/t Theo
We Remember ...

This Side of Bedlam

{link » Voting the European preference in Ohio}

“If I were a US voter I'd be voting for Barack Obama on November 4. Why? (a) Because voting Democrat would be my default position as an American citizen, just as I dutifully vote Labour in this country every time. (b) Because I think Barack Obama is a better candidate than John McCain. (c) Because the symbolism of a black president would have great significance for the progress of American society. And (d) because it might help to restrain the more kneejerk tendencies within global Guardianista opinion, for which all the world's problems have either been created or aggravated by George W. Bush in particular and US Republicans in general; the fact that the problems will still be there might bring a degree of sobriety into dinner-party, liberal-media and locked-leftist discussion, though there will inevitably be parts of this body of thinking, the more crazed parts, that nothing at all will ever reach to dissuade from hostility towards the hated US hegemon.

I would not, however, be voting for Obama for the reason evinced today by Jonathan Freedland.” [Read the rest of Norm's post here.]

Full Disclosure: I agree with Norm more frequently than John McCain's touted 90% voting-record in support of President Bush, which makes McCain only 90% correct on the issues. This now is one of my rare disagreements with Norm.

Now then, if I was Norm, and there is strong evidence that I am [e.g., Has anyone ever seen us together in the same place at the same time? No? I rest my case.], I would not be voting for Barack Obama; not for Norm's listed reasons; not for any other reasons. I hasten to add that I probably would have, however, as recently as 8 years ago, when I voted for Al Gore and was disappointed that he lost to George W. Bush. But a lot has happened in the world during the past two American Presidential terms, all of which has played out in full view and dying color for anyone with access to the Web.

The ultimate outrage against American ideals occurred on September 11, 2001, a date which will live in infamy, along with December 7, 1941. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the scourge of civilization, international terrorism, an enemy that liberal fascism hopes will just go away. It won't; it must be defeated militarily. Furthermore, liberal fascism must be defeated electorally.

Let me, therefore, enumerate the reasons for my change of heart and mind, in close correspondence to Norm's listing above:

1. Although voting Democratic had been my default position as an American citizen prior to the election of George W. Bush in 2000, I have witnessed the radicalization of the party of FDR, HST, and JFK (all of whom I admired before I was old enough to vote), as well as Johnson, Carter, and Clinton (for all of whom I did vote). The radicalization has reached obscene proportions, and borders on insane self-destructive anti-Americanism. Witness: today's Jimmy Carter; yesterday's Ted Kennedy; and every day's Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Barbara Boxer, and the list goes on ad nauseam.
2. John McCain is a good candidate; Barack Obama is a good speaker but has the substance of an empty appartment.
3. Though I agree that the symbolism of a black president would have great significance for the progress of American society, the American Presidency is much too important a role for the survival of American society, and all civilized society the world over, to subordinate it to the mere furtherance of progressive ideals. And,
4. Though I have indeed contemplated the personal benefit offered by the line of reasoning in Norm's list-item (d), above, I have instead relegated that reasoning to the solace I might derive from the onset of despair in the event of an Obama victory.

To contemplate an Obama victory is to imagine a perfect-storm trifecta that would join the Executive, Legislative, and subsequently the Judicial Branches of American Government into an insane asylum the likes of which has not been seen this side of Bedlam.

Truly Stunning

{link » Bush: 'Quiet Surge' of Troops Sent to Afghanistan}
h/t Theo

“The president said he also plans to order 8,000 more combat and support troops out of Iraq by February, but plans to keep the bulk of U.S. force strength in Iraq intact until the next president takes over. No more combat brigades will come home from Iraq for the rest of this year.”

“Said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: ‘I am stunned that President Bush has decided to bring so few troops home from Iraq and send so few resources to Afghanistan’.”

As I surmise from the Senate Majority Leader's reaction to the President's announcement of American troop realignments, Harry Reid must be privy to military information that is not available to the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces. Moreover, Mr. Reid must be the foremost expert in the American Government on military strategy and tactics, though that fact has somehow eluded my, admittedly, limited investigations.

In light of the significance of our campaign against international terrorism, I am perplexed, nay stunned that the President has not seen fit to consult Harry Reid in the latter's capacity of Senator, Majority Leader, military expert, and all-around sincere participant in a bipartisan effort to confront the forces fanatically intent on our destruction.

The Democratic Presidential candidate has also made the observation that, "It is not enough troops, and not enough resources, with not enough urgency." How could the President have missed that which is clearly obvious to prominent military experts in Government, especially that the President has the Joint Chiefs of Staff advising him, not to mention the resources of the entire Department of Defense at his disposal? What is the meaning of these amazing contradictions, I wonder?

It's a conundrum.

Re-enacting the BIG Bang — NOT!

{link » 'Big Bang Machine' Set to Start Up Wednesday}

The multibillion-dollar Large Hadron Collider will explore the tiniest particles and come ever closer to re-enacting the big bang, the theory that a colossal explosion created the universe.

Britain's Daily Telegraph reported last week that scientitst [sic] working on the collider had been receiving death threats, to which University of Manchester particle physicist and former rock star Brian Cox replied, "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."

[emphasis added]

The real twats in all this doomsday hysteria are [Surprise!] the media. As always, "newsworthy" hysteria sells "news" and scares the shit out of people, some of whom begin frothing at the mouth.

The LHC will attempt to re-enact, for only two-at-a-time colliding protons, the temperature (expressed in energy units) of 14 TeV. That is believed to be the temperature of the entire universe (not just two colliding hydrogen nuclei) a very long cooling-off time (relatively speaking) after the Big Bang — roughly one billionth of a second! During that nanosecond of expansion, the temperature of the universe cooled from an essentially infinite temperature to a comparatively very modest 14 TeV, albeit the work required here on Earth to accelerate two hydrogen nuclei to that combined energy is substantial (for humanity). This is what the LHC has been built at great effort and cost to accomplish.

In order to actually re-create the evolutionary circumstances of the universe, during its first nanosecond of existence would require an "experiment" like the Big Crunch during the last nanosecond of its demise (albeit in reverse chronological order).

I wish, futilely, that the muckraking media would just shut the f*ck up about the Big Bang and stick to their Liberal fascist horseshit.

§ Quantized History #17

§ ≡ A quantum of Quantized History { #16 « #17 » #18 }
September 8, 1504 » Michelangelo's David is unveiled in Florence


Michelangelo's David

Michelangelo's David, sculpted from 1501 to 1504, is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture and one of Michelangelo's two greatest works of sculpture, along with the Pietà. It is the statue of the young Israelite king David alone that almost certainly is one of the most recognizable stone sculptures in the history of art. The completed sculpture was unveiled on 8 September 1504.

Extraordinary Masterpieces of Art

• David — Michelangelo, 1501-1504
• Mona Lisa — Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1503–1506
• Hamlet — William Shakespeare, 1599-1601
• Symphony No. 9 — Ludwig van Beethoven, 1824
• War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy, 1865-1869
• Renovation of Paris — Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, 1852-1870

Sex, Drugs, and the Big Bang

{link » It's sex and drugs and particle physics as D:Ream star recreates the Big Bang}

Er ... as the Hertz commercial has it, "Not exactly". It may be sex, and drugs, and particle physics, as well as the D:Ream star. And it might even recreate something. But, most definitely it will NOT recreate the Big Bang. It would require ALL the mass/energy (including the dark varietal) in the so-called Big Crunch to recreate the Big Bang. The difference between the amount of energy available to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment and the amount of mass/energy in the Big Bang/Crunch is analogous to the difference between a couple of accelerated protons and all the protons (hydrogen nuclei) and photons (particles of light) in the entire universe. That ratio is in the neighborhood of 80 orders of magnitude, give or take, and we might as well be talking about the scale of a googol (the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros).

Lest you think I may be exaggerating the mass/energy googol-scale above (which I am, by roughly 20 orders of magnitude, for simplicity) to prove my point, allow me to underestimate the relative scale in more familiar terms.

Recall the advice given Sky Masterson by his father:

“Son, I am sorry that I am not able to bankroll you to a very large start, but not having any potatoes to give you I am now going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you stand there you are going to wind up with an earful of cider.”

Now then, imagine the prima facie improbability of the above-described earful of cider. If you multiply that improbability by the square of the improbability that you will have lunch with Jimmy Hoffa in a trans-Siberian rail car on Tuesday, the reciprocal of the resulting improbability will be much smaller than the disproportionate scale of the mass/energy ratio between all the energy in the universe and how much of it is available to the LHC.

Definition of "obvious"

h/t Theo
Caption: Something to do with melons, blonds, and the male one-track-mind.

Surreal Personal Invective's Harvest

{link » Sarah Palin and Her Discontents}

“In short, Sarah Palin is the emblem of what feminism was supposed to be all about: an unafraid, independent, audacious woman, who soared on her own merits without the aid of a patriarchal jumpstart, high-brow matrimonial tutelage and capital, and old-boy liaisons and networking.

Instead this entire sorry episode of personal invective against, and jealousy toward, Sarah Palin is surreal. Given the rising backlash, Palin Derangement Syndrome may prove to be the one thing, fairly or not, that sinks Barack Obama.”

©2008 Victor Davis Hanson

Amen to that, bro.

§ “..., with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

§ ≡ A section of Preserve, Protect, and Defend: Faithfully Executing the Office of the President
{Section 3.1 « Section 3.2 » Section 4.1}

{link » Ending Tyranny}

“But only tyrants are apt to defend tyranny. A focus on ending it could move us beyond distracting debates over where democracy can be transplanted and how long this might take, allowing concentration instead upon the single greatest prerequisite for democracy, which, as Franklin D. Roosevelt once reminded us, is ‘freedom from fear’. It is from this that all the other freedoms flow.”

“This, then, should be our standard: to respect the ways in which people elsewhere define their fears, not to impose our own fears upon them. That may mean working with authoritarian regimes when there is more to fear than their authoritarianism—when the trajectory is toward making democracy possible, even if it’s still a long way off. But it also requires resisting regimes—and terrorist movements—whose course lies in the opposite direction: toward making themselves the source of all fears, rather than the safeguard against them. Tyranny is being ‘enslaved to fear’, and it will be quite enough, for the next few decades at least, to secure emancipation.”

—John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University.

Professor Gaddis' essay analyses the fundamentals of evaluating the relative significance of American Presidents. Not only the usual suspects are presented (Jefferson, Monroe, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, et al.), but also George W. Bush! The latter has been much maligned by his contemporaries (as was Lincoln himself). But, as I have stated on occasion in this blog [e.g., search blog for George Bush], the jury of historians will be out for some time to come before their verdict is rendered.

The excerpts quoted above only give a flavor of the the author's scholarly views. I recommend the essay to the interested reader.

Gauche Hypocrisy

(photoshopped insertion of Ellen Page's Juno character)

Which perceived flaw in a candidacy for National office would the liberal Leftists judge to be more egregious? Would it be the voluntary long-term association with a vile demagogic preacher of anti-Americanism, or would it be the pregnancy of a soon-to-be married daughter? You guessed it; the latter.

F*cking Leftist hypocrites.

Shot Heard Round the World?

{link » U.S. Crosses Pakistan Border to Raid Terror Camp}

“The American official [...] told The Associated Press that the raid occurred on Pakistani soil about one mile from the Afghan border.

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry protested saying U.S.-led troops flew in from Afghanistan for the attack on a village in the country's wild tribal belt.

The Foreign Ministry called the strike "a gross violation of Pakistan's territory." [emphasis added]

The wild and reckless shoot-from-the-hip cowboy tactics of American forces fighting the peace-loving liberal hosts of the peace-loving Talibans in the fun-loving so-called "wild", largely unsupervised, tribal belt adjacent to the Afghan border might, just might be the beginning of World War III. No bout? I doubt it.

Hurricane & Global-warming Countermeasures

h/t Theo

Animal Rights Left Wrong

“A noble death”

{link » Cruelty for pleasure}

“It also doesn't follow from thinking animals have rights that we are duty bound to make interventions of an impossible kind into the interactions between other species. We can only do what we can do.” — Norm Geras

The tautology with which Norm closes his astute observation is an idiom worth further consideration. A common tactic of some authors (I refer to the author of the article about bullfighting, which is the subject of Norm's post) is to saddle the reader with straw-man arguments to support the insupportable. I have already coined an expression for such rhetorical devices: compressio ad absurdum. Norm's idiom is a useful antidote for such a strategy.

As for the second part of this post's title pun, suffice it to say that the evidence is lengthy.

Tornado Near Hicksville, New York

{link » Hicksville High Alumni Newsletter (Sept.08)}

h/t “Buffalo Bob” Casale ’61

“Monday, August 11th ... a little after noon. I was taking my daughter, Dawn, to LaGuardia for a flight back to Augusta. As we were driving West on Northern State [Parkway], the weather got really nasty looking ... big dark clouds, then a tremendous downpour. Just before, Dawn was looking toward Great Neck [on the North Shore of Long Island] and swore she saw a funnel cloud and snapped a picture, but we were too far away to see the result. Within a half hour, that same front was pounding the North Shore nearby to Hicksville [Long Island, New York], and sure enough, the tornado formed.” — Robert “Buffalo Bob” Casale, HHS Class of 1961

I am an alumnus of Hicksville High (Class of 1959) and I have never before heard of a tornado forming anywhere near my hometown.

What do you do all day?

Ever since I retired (in 2002) people have asked, "What do you do all day?" I must admit it is difficult to account for all those hours; time flies when you're having fun.

Anyway, my full-time [a]vocation is now blogging, and my work-week daily schedule is as follows:

h/t Theo

Please bear in mind that "office" means my study and "home" means my living quarters. Also, all times are approximate because, strictly speaking I'm not into time, man.

On weekends and holidays like today, I blog some more.