Oh yeah

Why GM is screwed:

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?

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.

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

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."

Yeah, everything is going to be fine

"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...

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...

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.

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."

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.

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?

Test mail post

I am posting this from my phone via email.

Well Said

I have had this idea in the back of my head for a long time, that somehow the loss of our common cultural identity in favor of cultural balkanization (blacks vs whites vs La Raza vs Native Americans vs ...) was not merely bad but ultimately fatal, but wasn't able to articulate it. Steve Schippert does a very nice job, here:

http://threatswatch.org/commentary/2008/07/my-country-tis-of-thee/

Getting a seperated shotgun hull unstuck

I had a reloaded shotgun hull seperate just in front of the brass, taking the top part of the hull up the barrel where it lodged about halfway to the bore.  Getting it out was a pain.  I tried a number of solvents and widgets none of which worked, and most of which just seemed to iron the plastic tube that is the top part of the hull closer to the bore.

I had googled around some looking to see if anyone else had this problem and what they did to fix it, but apparently I am the only person ever to do this, or at least the only one to admit it :-).  

Eventually what worked was giving it a good dousing of Hoppes #9 with a bore mop and letting it sit for a day.  Then, I got a wooden dowel and built it up to a tight bore fit with cleaning patches, then wound some steel wool twisted into a 1/8" worm in a spiral over that.  I put that down the muzzle until it wedged in the hull.  I tapped it firmly to get the steel wool to get a grip on the plastic, then pushed until it slid out.  I had to lean pretty heavily on the dowel to get it to break free.  

Anyway, if anyone knows of another, better way I'd be interested in hearing it, as I fully expect this may happen to me again.

Teddy Roosevelt - Got it right in 1910, still right 97 years later.

Today I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we a great citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as ours - an effort to realize its full sense government by, of, and for the people - represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and evil. The success or republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure of despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or very few men, the quality of the leaders is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nations for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type of national greatness. But with you and us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance for enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position should especially guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable; and if yielded to, their- your- chances of useful service are at an end. Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier."

Eject! Eject! Eject!

Bill Whittle has put together a terrific collection of essays covering Freedom and Responsibility among other things. Damn this guy can write. It is worth a trip over there (http://www.ejectejecteject.com/) simply to read the prose, even if you have no interest in the message.

If you have no interest in the message, however, shame on you, your soulmates are waiting for you in a trendy sidewalk cafe in france somewhere ready to discuss the ills of the world ad nauseum while eminently unwilling to do anything about it.

Initial post

Howdy all -

I see Google has a blog feature, think I'll check it out...