Friday, December 18, 2009

Best thing I've heard all week

There’s an old expression I just made up: There’s no liberal in a bear attack. In matters of life and death, like a bear ripping apart your house, there is no time to morally preen and pat yourself on the back for how smart you sound.

Back in the day, life was pretty brutal for everyone, so there just weren’t any liberals. Unserious people starved to death or were mauled by giant sloths. With death lurking around every corner, people had no time for useless worries like whether warming the ozone would kill unicorns or whatever.

Things are a lot easier now — so easy that even useless people can survive — and thus we now have to suffer liberals. But we have one brutal leftover from the olden days. War. And it’s not something a liberal is ever going to learn to deal with.


Absolutely. A favorite saying of mine is "ecoguilt is a first world luxury". Same idea, but Mr. Fleming says it better. You can read it here.

Insulating folks from the consequences of their useless or counterproductive ideas and actions is a feature of modern affluent society.

In the old days, there was no cushion, and if the wolves killed the milk cow or the crops failed to come in, your family went hungry and possibly died. If the next village over had a crop failure, you could bet that they would be coming over the hill with spears in hand to see how badly you wanted to keep what was yours. In this environment everyone understood that food was important and security a close second.

Social cohesion is an element of security and a vehicle for that cushion. Religion is something that encourages social cohesion.

Since the end of WWII the unprecedented affluence of society has allowed a couple of generations of folks who have never experienced a lack of food, have never seen an empty store shelf, or faced a group of people who view them only as an impediment to what that group wants and is perfectly willing to kill them to get them out of the way. Thus the loss of social cohesion, the diminuation of the importance of religion in social life, and the rise of modern liberalism.

I believe this affluence is an unnatural situation that requires careful maintainance in order to persist (eternal vigilance). I don't believe that vigilance is being applied, and so between the rise of trans-national gangs and islamic terror once again folks are going to be coming over the hill to take what is yours. I heard a saying once that "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged". Well, I think we're all in line to get mugged here.

Monday, November 30, 2009

Oh yeah

Why GM is screwed:

Monday, November 23, 2009

The murder of common sense, continued

"A statement from the American Family Association explained, "Tampa Police arrested Robert Johnson in February 2008 for hanging out in the locker room–restroom area at Lifestyle Fitness and watching women in an undressed state. The City of Tampa's 'gender identity' ordinance could provide a legal defense to future cases like this if the accused claims that his gender is female."


Ahem. "...claims that his gender is female". The english language is the most expressive in the world, and yet it is incapable of capturing the doublethink inherent in that statement.

"This ordinance will give lawful protection to cross-dressing males to patronize women's restrooms," the Florida Family Association said in a statement. "And men dressed as women or women who perceive themselves as men can also use men's restrooms."

More here

What the hell is it with the radical left? This is the flip side of the hate crime coin. These are what normally would be crimes, but that are OK in this instance because of the mental state of the perpetrator. Utopian fantasies aside, can anyone think of a real-world environment where this will not cause problems?

Friday, November 06, 2009

Why so serious?

I've been reading some of the output of Mises.org, a school of economics that adheres to the 'Austrian School', which makes a lot more intuitive sense to me than some competing models. Anyway, a recent article had this to say:

To solve a problem caused by malinvestments resulting from easy credit at 1 percent interest rates, the Fed is supplying even more easy money at 0.25 percent. None of the malinvestments have been allowed to be liquidated.

Housing prices have been propped up, banks and auto companies have been bailed out, regulations have been increased, debt covenants have been violated, unemployment insurance has been extended. In addition, there's the cap-and-trade bill, the healthcare bill, and a "czar" around every corner.

All of these increase the already-humongous burden on wealth creators. In short, the problems that caused the Great Recession have been compounded. Real output must then necessarily decline. How can anyone logically assert that we are in the beginning of a recovery?

I am less than sanguine regarding the immediate future. And that quote summarizes why pretty nicely.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Well, if you put it that way

COST OF HEALTHCARE

“It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”
- Thomas Sowell

Friday, October 30, 2009

insulated from the consequences of their actions

Someone once asked me why people kept indulging in obviously self-destructive behavior. My answer was, 'because they have been insulated from the consequences of their actions'.

I believe the socialists currently fulfilling their wish list in Washington at taxpayer expense are a dandy illustration of the point.

Peggy Noonan gets it:

"When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren't they worried about the impact of what they're doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they've never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don't have the habit of worry.
...
We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on."

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

"Give me twenty bucks," says Uncle Sam, to nephew citizen.
And the twenty is given for we trust our Uncle.
"Here's $17. There I've stimulated you. Oh, and here's how to spend it," says Sam.
"Hey, where's the other three?" says nephew citizen.
"That's to pay me to write the rules on how you should spend the $17 I gave you."
"But that's my $20 you took."
"What, you're anti-family? We're all in this together you know. So just be patriotic and give me your money so I can tell you how to spend it."
"Geez, what a bum."
"Now you're being seditious."


American Spectator comment of the day. Reader Jim Hlavac on Max Schulz's About Those Green Jobs...

Monday, October 26, 2009

Thought of the day

"(R)eality being that compassion, culture, law and philosophy are precious, rare and acquired habits that must be defended with force against people who understand nothing but force."

and

"If civilization is worth having (and I believe it is) then it has to be defended, because the restraining virtues of justice, compassion and respect for laws are products of that civilizing force and completely unknown to those who would do it harm. Therefore, since I believe in this civilization, in its laws, science, art and medicine, I believe we must be prepared to defend it against what I feel no embarrassment for calling the Forces of Darkness. Those forces could be raiders on horseback, jackbooted Nazi murderers, faceless KGB torturers or some kid blowing away a shopkeeper."

Read the whole thing here.

Bill Whittle channeling Teddy Roosevelt's Barbarious Values idea. Damn that Whittle can write...

Monday, October 19, 2009

Thoughts on the economy

I don't believe that the downturn is over. Read this quote from 1930, during the rally which was a prelude to the next leg down:


“Cheap money is a stimulant, also an intoxicant. If the dose is large enough, a substantial temporary effect can be brought about, but headaches follow. If the matter really were that simple, everybody could be an economist, and only the perversity of central banks would keep us from endless prosperity. Merchants and manufacturers will not be induced to increase borrowings, since interest on money borrowed is only one small factor in total costs. But if merchants and manufacturers will not use cheap money, speculators will”. Benjamin Anderson, Chief Economist of Chase National Bank, New York Times, April 1930


I believe that housing is one market where a lot of that cheap money went the first time, and the bursting of that bubble was the downturn of 2008. I don't know that all the nonproductive speculation went into housing, though. There will be more to come. IMO The recent stock market recovery is fueled by money looking for a home rather than on the strengths of the business activity of the underlying companies, which makes it a bubble unless the underlying business picks up to a point to warrant the stock values. Time will tell, but I'm not betting on a continued stock resurgence.

Ty Andros at Financial Sense University says the same thing, much more eloquently and with actual documentation. I swiped the quote from his article.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Goya "sleep of reason"


The sabotaging of common sense apparently isn't new under the sun. Francisco Goya in 1797 produced this print:



"Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Teddy Roosevelt and the Barbarous Virtues

"Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail." - Teddy Roosevelt 1899

This idea too has been on my mind recently, and it may be part and parcel of the death of common sense. The idea that we know what is right and we know what we should do, but we have simply lost the intestinal fortitude to pursue it.

For example, Iran is at this time running pell mell toward the finish line of having a working nuclear device. Iran, the first practitioner of suicidal war since imperial Japan. Do you think it is in the best interests of pretty much every peace-loving non-muslim in the world to prevent that acquisition? Say it with me, 'Yes'. Can we, the United States, sole superpower left in the world, bring ourselves to stomp on Iran if only to set this project back a few years? I sincerely doubt it.

I fear that we have lost the barbarian virtues that allowed western civilization to succeed, and having lost them, our civilization will be devoured by cultures still possessing those virtues.

Sabotaging Common Sense

James Lewis in American Thinker wrote this: "So the Left is always asking the impossible. It makes them sound reasonable when they are just sabotaging common sense.", here.

That phrase "sabotaging common sense" really rang a bell with me. This is what I was sensing but having difficulty articulating in my previous post about taking the fairy people seriously.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Land of the Fairies

I saw a 4-page spread in the Spokane Spokesman on a multi-day festival/seminar centered around contacting the fairy realm (here: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/jul/05/beyond-the-veil/). Part of me says 'they're fruit loops, but they aren't hurting anyone'. But on the other hand I have a sense that supporting such unabashed nonsense is harmful somehow, although I am having difficulty putting my finger on why.

Maybe it has to do with the death of common sense, where if we are expected to take a bunch of fruits, flakes, and nuts getting together to commune with the fairies seriously (!) that we'll be expected to accept other patent bullshit just as readily. Stimulus, anyone?

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Test mail post

I am posting this from my phone via email.