Michelle Obama’s scowl is so ingrained that, figuratively and maybe literally, it is her expression in repose.That said, one wonders if perhaps she has reason to scowl. At first blush it seems unthinkable that Barry would fool around like FDR, Ike, JFK, LBJ and WJC did. Why? (Another possibility is that Barry has reason to fool around.)
From time to time I point out that, given a graduated income tax, income inequality maximizes the government’s revenue, all else being equal. In that sense, notwithstanding protestations to the contrary, income inequality is in the government’s interest—and the politicians know it.(Otoh, that comment's concern about a VAT proved unfounded. So far.)
Inequality did not just happen, it was deliberately engineered through a whole range of policies intended to redistribute income upward.But he doesn't go far enough.
Howard Dean, yes, Howard Dean, was saying he isn’t sure the President has legal authority to allow the cancellations to be revoked.Litigated with a fast track to SCOTUS urged because this might be the most urgent situtation since Bush vs. Gore. And, importantly, litigated while remedial legislation is being pursued and publicized to the extent possible
Iirc, in his swing vote upholding Obamacare, John Roberts said it was not the job of SCOTUS to rectify bad legislation, only to rule on constitutionality. That statement should be put to the test.
Obama’s action should be litigated.
Words that think for usHT: Judy Curry.
An accusation of “denial” is serious, suggesting either deliberate dishonesty or self-deception. The thing being denied is, by implication, so obviously true that the denier must be driven by perversity, malice or wilful blindness. Few issues warrant such confidence. The Holocaust is perhaps one, though even here there is room for debate over the manner of its execution and the number of its victims. A charge of denial short-circuits this debate by stigmatising as dishonest any deviation from a preordained conclusion. It is a form of the argument ad hominem: the aim is not so much to refute your opponent as to discredit his motives. The extension of the “denier” tag to group after group is a development that should alarm all liberal-minded people. One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed.
... between 2001 and 2007 the Department of Justice (DoJ) opened investigations into seven times more Democratic public officials than Republicans.Curious, isn't it, that this goes unmentioned by the people beating the tom-tom's about the Obama administration's abuse of the IRS?
She added that the Premium McWrap platform itself was an example of a menu idea from other areas of the world that McDonald’s imported to the United States.I'm guessing that they don't speak colloquial English in those areas of the world, nor, apparently, do they do so at McDonald's headquarters.
—D.C., Maryland, Alaska, Hawaii and Virginia have the most federal workers per capita and are disproportionately affected by the shutdown's immediate impact.(Cf. Forbes...and consider the amazing resemblance between the CNBC piece and the prior Forbes one.)
—D.C., Virginia, Alaska,New Mexico and Maryland receive the most federal contract money per capita, which means people in those areas stand to lose even if they don't technically work for the federal government.
—Small-business owners from the Dakotas, Colorado, Alaska and Michigan who are seeking funding are hurt most by an inability to garner Small Business Administration loans, as those states have displayed the highest small-business borrowing rates in recent years.
Yes, some people behave as though being too toxic to interact with means they “win”.I quit smoking a long time ago. Before taking the last and hopefully final plunge, I knew I'd have to quit eventually but wasn't ready. I'm developing a similar attitude toward comenting online.
A thought or few have lodged in my brain to keep me sane online (to the extent that I am):
1. I am not obliged to have the last word. Getting (or foregoing) the last word does not mean I’m right and it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
2. For certain discussions: If an onlooker buys into my interlocutor’s “argument”, anything I say will not change their mind.
3. Some things are not worth the time to talk about.
4. I like to talk with people who have something to offer me, whether or not we agree, whether or not I persuade, am persuaded, or neither. If they have nothing to offer me, why am I talking with them?
And if my counterparty doesn’t view me similarly—it’s highly unlikely that they are Richard Feynman, posting anonymously from Beyond—, why are they talking with me?
5. Unfortunately, my belief in suasion by reason has declined since I went online. Some people in effect demand to be manipulated. (Nor am I necessarily always immune.)
... swing voters distrust both parties wrt hidden agendas. That being so, they understandably vote for the party that offers them free stuff.Abusive behavior directed at me in that thread was tolerated by the blog owner, whose position it supported. A few months ago I decided between subscribing to Hoyt's site and joining Ricochet. Apparently I chose wrongly and, unless something changes, will correct the mistake unless something changes by renewal time. Yet another reason why libertarians and conservatives lose: they either have forgotten or are unwilling to emulate what Reagan demonstrated about disagreeing without being disagreeable.
Dr. MattThe Tea Party made her do it!
10/04/2013 7:04:16 am PDT
Clint Van Zandt was reporting today that she was paranoid about the government and thought President Obama was spying on her. Wonder how this paranoia was fueled…….,.
Trent Lott trashed Ted Cruz…to a Mother Jones reporter.Obama's disaster does not mitigate Bush's failure. "Miss me yet?" No.
The prominence of people like Lott and Rove in the previous administration is one reason why my contempt for Bush has not diminished despite the passage of time and his catastrophic successor.
The owl of Minerva takes flight only at the onset of dusk.is a fine one.
On protecting the unborn, Mr. Moore says he is a "long-term optimist" but "a short-term pessimist." He doesn't get excited every time a poll shows that more Americans are pro-life than pro-choice...Yours trulyy, after the 2012 election:
But he also believes that this battle will not be won in Washington: "You have to take it to a personal level." He touts the many faith-based pregnancy crisis centers that not only try to talk women out of having abortions, but also help with child-care, job training and housing—"all of the things that have brought them there in the first place."
Social conservatives should stop trying to impose their religious views via the federal government. They should work to devolve social issues to the states: abortion, drugs, gay marriage, assisted suicide, etc.
"After my first Sports Illustrated cover, I felt terrible about myself for a solid month," Upton tells Elle in its September issue. "Every single guy I met was either married or about to be married, and I felt like I was their bachelor present or something. I'm not a toy, I'm a human. I'm not here to be used. I am a grown woman, and you need to figure your s**t out."So distressed, in fact, that she posed for the cover a second time.
...It is not too late. Not yet. But the craziness has to stop now.In principle, it is not too late. As a practical matter...
If there’s any hope within this editorial it is that the first glimmer of fear is now openly appearing within the liberal establishment. They’re beginning to suspect it’s not going to work; that survival is not guaranteed; Detroit can go broke, the pensions can be forfeit, their writ may no longer run in Cairo and American dominance — indeed their own jobs and lives — are not a given. It has finally occurred to them that the US can lose in the Middle East and beyond; that America can be defeated after all, if they behave stupidly enough.
But one must let them come to this realization themselves, just as if they were the first persons to think of it. Their vanity must be given its due. Because it is all they have. It impelled them to make history’s most stupid luxury purchase: the elevation of Barack Obama to President of the United States. That memory is embarassment enough for anyone. Let them eat crow in peace.
He and his collaborators, a transnational group of intelligence researchers, fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points.The claim must be taken with salt, given the level of BS in cognitive science. However, IMHO it's likely the timetable, not the outcome, which may be wrong. And there is the potential for catastrophe: see Philip K. Dick's Our Friends from Frolix 8.
Zhao Bowen is late for a Satanic heavy metal concert.(Satanic heavy metal...in Beijing? Really? This ain't your ancestors' Confucian austerity.)
I always have loved the 4th of July. It is pure Americana. No other nation on earth traditionally has shown such joy in celebrating its creation. I have been to lots and lots of national day celebrations around the world. Most are at best joyless affairs, e.g., lift a glass to the monarch, and many involve a lot of whining, e.g., everything bad is the fault of the colonialists. Ours, however, was always an optimistic, happy event...
For the first time, I am having a hard time, very hard time, recapturing that air of optimism. Everywhere one looks, one sees the ravages of the semi-totalitarian ideology that has seized our ever-growing government...
Maybe the greedy businessmen now running the Republican Party should talk with their Hispanic maids sometime. Ask Juanita if she'd like to have seven new immigrants competing with her for the opportunity to clean other people's houses, so that her wages can be dropped from $20 an hour to $10 an hour.Boldface mine.
A wise Latina, A.J. Delgado, recently explained on Mediaite.com why amnesty won't win Republicans the Hispanic vote -- even if they get credit for it. Her very first argument was: "Latinos will resent the added competition for jobs."
But rich businessmen don't care. Big Republican donors -- and their campaign consultants -- just want to make money. They don't care about Hispanics, and they certainly don't care what happens to the country. If the country is hurt, I don't care, as long as I am doing better! This is the very definition of treason.
We have created two huge problems where none existed before -- domestic terrorism and government spying -- all to help the Democrats win elections by changing the electorate.IMO the ruling class is not not in the least squeamish about spying on its citizens. They've always wanted a pretext and now they've found one. They're not happy about domestic terrorists of course, but they may feel, even if they don't admit it to themselves, that the benefits---to them---outweigh the drawbacks. How do the police justify a police state without threats?
“There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it,” the Rubio aide told Lizza. “There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly."The image at the link captures Rubio's inner sleazebag well.
During roughly the same time frame in which Wilson was doing his scaling-based work, Mandelbrot was formulating (and popularizing) fractals.Maybe, in part, I did not make a post about Mandelbrot's passing because I prefer a researcher who sticks to his last to one who trumpets in self-promotion.
In my amateur opinion each was uninfluenced by, and possibly unaware of, the other’s progress. but in a sense they approached the same monolith from very different directions.
...After his meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron, in opposition to arming the rebels, Putin declared: "You will not deny that one does not really need to support the people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras. Are these the people you want to support? Is it them who you want to supply with weapons? Then this probably has little relation to humanitarian values that have been preached in Europe for hundreds of years."(HT: Instapundit.) Humanitarian values preached in Europe for hundreds of years? That choice of words would leave a mark if the Europeans had any shame left.
The message at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference: Don’t stop talking about abortion and marriage. “The Republican social issues we believe in are more popular than our economic agenda,” said one speaker.He may havea point, but not the one he thinks he has.
But the research could also have an impact beyond mathematics. Microsoft hopes to develop a similar system for checking the logic used in computer programs, which could pre-empt some unforeseen bugs that cause programs to crash.(Also, Bill Gates took Harvard's hardest undergraduate math course before he dropped out.)
The first obstacles facing any astropreneur, in the West at least, are America’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations, known as ITAR. Like guns and tanks, almost all rocket systems and space components require a licence for export. This includes shipping them abroad, but a licence is also needed if components are worked on, or merely shown to, a non-American. Tight ITAR controls on commercial satellite technology are reckoned to have almost halved American satellite manufacturers’ global market share since 1999. Space-tourism firms may even need export licences to carry foreign passengers on sub-orbital spaceplanes. Virgin Galactic, one such firm which hopes to start operations in New Mexico later this year, received an exemption from ITAR by designing its procedures so that passengers do not see what happens behind the scenes. But ITAR seems likely to complicate the company’s long-term plan to launch from a spaceport in Abu Dhabi.Having believed that low-cost foreign entrants had taken away business, I hadn't realized that ITAR had been that devastating.
SpaceX, a company that has already made two successful cargo deliveries to the ISS, is modifying its Dragon spacecraft so that it can carry up to seven astronauts. This means working alongside and ultimately being certified by NASA officials, who are writing regulations literally on the job. SpaceX hopes to launch its first manned mission by 2015. If it does not get airborne before the FAA’s certification exemption expires, whether in 2015 or later, the company may face two sets of regulations. “When the FAA does step in, if they have safety requirements that are completely different from the ones NASA has put forward, then we have a big problem,” says Garrett Reisman, a former astronaut who works for SpaceX.It's likely that FAA and NASA will start a turf war, so expect a big problem.
Honestly, we might be better off abolishing the civil service and going back to the spoils system. At least then there’s no pretense of fairness, and you know who to blame.Civil Service professionals overwhelmingly donate to the Democrats (HT Instapundit). When the system has been captured by a single party, the rationale for a nonpartisan, permanent Civil Service has disappeared. In fact, we might be better off with election-induced turnover.
Tesla Motors is fighting a bill in North Carolina that would effectively ban the company from selling its electric cars in the state, pitting it against auto dealers who say the car maker has an unfair advantage selling directly to consumers online.An LGF commenter:
...Now we get to see what a conservative, free-enterprise government can achieve.More Republican governance.
It all depends on what the meaning of ‘free enterprise’ is. In NC, it means that enterprises like car dealerships are free to bribe Republican legislators to keep superior technology from being offered to their constituents.
Afaic this is exactly how the Republicans operated under Bush/DeLay/Lott. And this is exactly how they’d operate if they got the White House and Congress back.
They’re not the party of free markets, they’re corporate whores.
In my opinion, she is a Marxist, or more correctly the Marxist equivalent of a Satanist. She accepted the Marxist worldview, but inverted it. Good became evil and evil, good.Perceptive. It may well apply to libertarians and conservatives other than Rand, especially in today's polarized environment.
Her works read like Soviet propaganda, save that the villains in Soviet works, the individualistic capitalists are the heroes in Rand’s.
Cynthia TuckerVoting Rights Act: I was wrong about racial gerrymandering
...
Unfortunately — like so many measures designed to provide redress for historic wrongs — those racially gerrymandered districts also come with a significant downside: They discourage moderation. Politicians seeking office in majority-black or –brown districts found that they could indulge in crude racial gamesmanship and left-wing histrionics.
...
As Richard Harpootlian (cq), chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party, told me: “When the only issue is race, idiots win, black and white.”
...Particularly lamentable is to see academic standards for fourth graders turn into a “tea party” issue that’s used to bludgeon GOP office holders to repudiate a sound reform out of fear that they’ll be clobbered from the right during the next Republican primary. (One sorry outcome of both parties’ twenty-year quest for “safe” legislative seats is that nearly all of today’s credible electoral challenges come from the fever swamps and fog banks within the parties.)The thrust of Finn's piece is that grassroots conservative activists are wrongly opposing a voluntary set of educational standards that was developed in a federalist spirit.
"It is clear that the fundamental principle of freedom of expression has been placed in conflict with our core values of diversity, inclusion and respect," Rothman said.I didn't get the memo, or see it in the Constitution, that diversity and inclusion are core values. They certainly aren't mine. (Respect, yes, because of the fundamental dignity of each human being.)
...My analysis is that, at a crucial moment, the dean failed to defend a real core value of the university: tolerance.”Free speech, free inquiry, and tolerance were viewed as vulnerabilities and exploited accordingly. Common decency is for naifs.
Free speech and tolerance were only important back when communists and gays were being gone after. Now that the worm has turned, those bourgeois values no longer obtain.
...Those who die for freedom, or to protect their homes and families from invaders and aggression cannot be pitied and dismissed as victims. They must be honored and respected as warriors, as men whose service ennobled them and calls forth an answering sense of dedication among the living.As should the conscripts who did not want to fight, but went and did their duty even unto the ultimate price.
Pity and compassion can be noble emotions, but wallowing in these feelings is not what Memorial Day should be about. Our duty to the fallen is not just one of remembrance, or of caring for the wounded or those the warriors left behind. We also owe a debt of emulation: to continue to fight and if necessary to die for the great causes of our time. To fight an ideology of hatred that masks itself as religion is a noble and a generous thing to do; those who give their lives in the fight against this great evil are not victims. They are heroes, and they deserve to be remembered as such.Yes.
...The generals who ordered those boys and young men into No Man’s Land in Flanders were incompetent bunglers more often than not. This does not vitiate the heroism or render meaningless the sacrifice of those who laid down their lives in that war.
The Americans who have fallen in battle, and especially those who have fallen since 9/11, demand more from us than our pity. Their sacrifice demands that we live up to the values for which they gave their lives. Their memory demands that we embrace the generosity with which they placed themselves in harm’s way for our sake and that we dedicate ourselves to the values of liberty and toleration whose banners they followed to the end of the world.
...hold that the basic unit of existence is the tribe, which they define by the crudest, most primitive, most anti-conceptual criteria (such as skin color). They consequently reject the view that the achievements of Western— i.e., individualistic— civilization represent a way of life superior to that of savage tribalism.(HT Instapundit. Boldface is mine.)
The balance of the Senate remained unchanged at 55-45 in favor of the Republicans. Because of gains made in the House of Representatives, it was the first time since 1934 that the out-of-Presidency party failed to gain congressional seats in a mid-term election, and the first time since 1822 that the party not in control of the White House had failed to gain seats in the mid-term election of a President's second term.The Democrats would looove to make the 2014 midterms a national election, i.e. a repeat of 2012. Protect the President! Protect the Constitution! Protect the nation! Protect them from evil Republicans, of course.
1. This conference focuses on theory but Paul Williams' presentation, the second talk on the list, touches on the kind of thing you have in mind. See also Schumacher's talk and perhaps others.
2. I had a similar idea: build a miniature analog of the Earth and include the heat flow from the Sun.
How to scale everything perplexed me, though. For example, the stratosphere extends up to about 30 miles on a planet whose radius is 6000 miles. Not only that, the dynamics within the atmosphere is complex. How do you infer what happens on the Earth from what happens in the scale model (if you can even build it)?
Nevertheless, IMHO suggestions like yours have merit as exploratory research. How well can current scientific models characterize simplified heat transfer environments? If the models work well there, that somewhat enhances confidence wrt their applicability to the Earth. If they don't work well there...
My new sig line may be, "The right to print weapons is the right to be free", with apologies to A. E. van Vogt.The linked site does not assign addresses to individual posts, so click the link and search for Vogt.
What a brilliant individual. He emanates it. Listen to how quickly, how seamlessly, he reconfigures the questions.
My guideline is that, before seeking higher office, a politician should be reelected to their current slot by a greater margin than they were elected by.
Time will tell.Cruz heads my list of potential exceptions.
Here’s a simple two-step recipe for a prosperous career as a leftist intellectual.
a. Write an essay titled The Electoral College: Mend It, Don’t End It. Follow with a book.
Argue that the Electoral College should be revamped with electors representing the classes of multicultural identity politics.
b. Hire an assistant to screen the flood of job offers from elite universities, foundations, and think tanks.Alas, I was way too late. Mel Watt, former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, has been nominated to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Daily Caller reports:
“There would be a substantial majority of white voters who would say that under no circumstances would they vote for an African American candidate,” Watt said Oct. 14, 2005 during a Washington hearing held by the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act should be expanded to “adjust districts to take [racially motivated voting] into account,” Watts said.
Such voters “need to be factored out of the equation,” Watt said, because “I’ve got no use for them in the democratic process.”The former head of the CBC openly called for the disenfranchisement of voters whom he doesn't like. Let's see if he gets confirmed. I bet he does. (Given a choice between a white candidate and a black candidate, who, whites or blacks, are more likely to vote extra-racially?)
My long-term nagging suspicion is that (one reason why) legal immigration does not get reformed (is) because government knows full well it is too incompetent to do a professional job of regulating immigration. Cases in point: FEMA, TSA.Derb just now:
Even if this new law were to get passed, and even if this administration, and the next, and the next, made sincere efforts to enforce it, they could not.
The USCIS people—and don’t get me wrong: they are nice people, dealt with me courteously, and I have no doubt are doing their best—cannot handle their current workload. Give them ten or twenty years to master this new bureaucratic extravaganza that Schumer, Rubio & Co. have cooked up, they might just possibly re-attain their current unimpressive level of mastery; but to imagine that the Act, once passed, will swing smoothly into action, all the things in it happening and being done, is wild fantasy.
A Hillary Presidency would be the Tantrum Boomers’ last chance to exact revenge for their inadequacy to the Great Generation. (Maybe those Americans who are zealous to tear down the country are driven, in part, by the knowledge that they lack what it took to build it.)Especially the first sentence.
It is a road that understands that the world is a safer and better place when America is the strongest country in the world.Here's Rubio on abortion:
“The issue of life is not a political issue, nor is it a policy issue. It’s a definitional issue. It is a basic, core issue that every society needs to answer.”
He continued, “The answer ends up defining society. That’s how important the issue is.”
...
Rubio said while people push pro-lifers to focus on the national debt, jobs, the economy and other fiscal challenges, “Well, we can’t do that.”
He said, “This speaks to more than just our politics. It speaks to what we want to do in our life to serve and to glorify our Creator.”Well, at least he's (sort of) honest. He comes right out and says that abortion is more important than all that wonky limited-government stuff.
Gabrielle Reece, the former volleyball star and model who filed for divorce less than five years after tying the knot to surfer husband Laird Hamilton roughly 17 years ago, recently wrote a book explaining how she got her marriage back on track.
The key? In “My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper,” Reece credits an “old fashioned dynamic” and abiding by more traditional gender roles — and has created a firestorm in the process.
“To truly be feminine means being soft, receptive, and –- look out, here it comes –- submissive,” she wrote.OMG! OMG! shriek the usual suspects.
The prostrate lover, when he lowest lies,Iirc similar sentiments are expressed in the Tao Te Ching. I'll dig them out later if time and memory allow.
But stoops to conquer, and but kneels to rise.
