When we were out of power, we organized to win the next election. Conservatives, apparently, prefer to talk “revolution” and kill cops.
Markos Moulitsas
April 4, 2009
Twitter Badness: DailyKos Frontpager, Kos Joke About Pittsburgh Cop Shooting
[Typical leftest “thinking”. He is cherry picking the data to arrive at the desired conclusion. He “forgets” about last month when it was someone on the left praising the shooting of cops.–Joe]
She hit it off with Nixon from the word go. Beneath her lovable grandmother veneer of course she was as tough, uncompromising, hard-headed, mean, selfish, and vicious as he was. He liked that.
Martin Sieff
Referring to Nixon’s meeting with Golda Meir in the ’60s.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East, page 127.
[I finished listening to this book on my recent trip to/from Idaho. Good book. He rips both presidents and advisers to both political parties for their naiveté and unrealistic view of the Middle East. It’s kind of depression to think that he might be right, the things we value the most such as religious tolerance and electing political leaders cannot work in Arab nations. He claims we have to accept dictatorial rulers for those countries to have stability. The people are not currently capable of handling representative democracies. It just a question of whether it’s going to be benevolent or murderous dictators.–Joe]
As to guns in private hands detering invasions. The Japanese disagreed with you. During WWII, the Japanese were considering a raid on the Northwest US, in order to force the US to divert resources to defend this area. They decided against it precisely because they knew how well armed and trained the citizens were. This is not theory or conjecture, the minutes of the meetings were captured when Japan surrendered. During WWII, civilian patrols were quite influential in protecting British shores against sabuetors.
Mark Wilson
3/31/98
From http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/98/0326/iccon.asp
[This link now appears to be dead but if you do a search for some of the phrases you can still find the text on the web.–Joe]
We’re Americans. We bow to no one.
Breda
April 3, 2009
The Bow
[I’m sure others have said this before but this occasion to elaborate on it struck me as particularly appropriate. It’s part of the public servant/ruler thing. The United States does not have “rulers”. It has public servants. Public officials are delegated their powers by the consent of the people. The constitution does not grant rights, it guarantees them. It grants limited, enumerated, powers to the government. The people are the highest authority in the land. We do not bow to authority figures anymore than you would bow to your next door neighbor.–Joe]
One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in the country that security is more important than freedom. It ain’t.
Lyn Nofziger
[I have nothing to add.–Joe]
Gun control is more about control than anything else, accepting gun control is about abandoning our self-rule more than anything else. The armed citizen is not only a matter of personal self-defense or even ego, the armed citizen is a aggregate national defense as the safeguard of our supreme authority over our officials and their boondoggles. An armed citizenry means that so many programs simply are not needed. The problem with electing not to carry this personal burden is that it doesn’t end at your choosing to carry a gun or not–for, someone else is more than eager to replace our entire self-rule and rule over all of us, not just you.
John Longenecker
February 15, 2009
Gun Control: the very first pig with lipstick on it.
[The bearing of arms is a very individualist thing. There are many, many people in the world when asked, “Who is the ultimate authority?” would answer their god(s), or some ruler is. The true individual knows they are governed only by the consent of the whole people and should those public servants ever decide to change the relationship between servant and master the whole of the people must have a means of revoking their consent and enforcing it. And that is why the right to keep and bear arms is required for all free people. Those that wish to infringe upon that right either do not wish to be free or wish to be rulers.–Joe]
The newly created money will follow the laws of gravity and flow downhill to the bond market where the fun is. Risk-free bond speculation will further reinforce the deflationary spiral until final exhaustion occurs: the economy will collapse as a pricked balloon. Instead of hyperinflation and the destruction of the dollar, you’ve got deflation and the destruction of the economy.
Denninger says that the “death spiral” will lead to fire sales of assets in a mad liquidation dash and, ultimately, to the collapse of both the monetary and political system in the United States as tax revenues evaporate. He opines that probably not one member of Congress understands the seriousness of the situation. Bernanke is risking something much worse than a Depression. He is literally risking the end of America as a political, economic, and military power.
Indeed, the financial and economic collapse of the last two years must be seen as part of the progressive disintegration of Western civilization that started with government sabotage of the gold standard early in the twentieth century. Ben Bernanke, who should have been fired by the new president on the day after Inauguration for his part in causing irreparable damage to the American republic may, in the end, have the honor to administer the coup de grâce to our civilization.
Antal E. Fekete
Professor of Money and Banking
San Francisco School of Economics
March 30, 2009
Why Obama’s Stimulus Package Is Doomed to Failure
[No. This isn’t an April Fools joke. But I don’t know for certain that he knows what is talking about either.
Have a nice day.–Joe]
I know that all of you as conscientious citizens want to protect our people. We need to band together and demand that the government protect us. We must demand that all chairs, even couches and sofas, are required to have safety belts, and that everyone be required to use them. If someone is caught not using their safety belt they should be required to pay a $1000 fine and with a three strike rule attached that on your third strike not wearing a safety belts that the perpetrator goes to jail. Repeated offenders should be taken to jail, because by not wearing their seatbelts they are endangering themselves, and as a community it is our responsibility to protect and care for each other.
Kimberly Frederick
We Must Protect Our Citizens
March 13, 2009
[Daughter Kim got an A on this piece of satire. I read the notes the prof wrote on the paper so I know he knew it was satire. I’m a little bit afraid some dimwit in government (but I repeat myself) will take the idea and run with it as a campaign issue. But I figure that if I put it up on the web with it clearly labeled as satire then we have a chance of embarrassing whoever might try something like that.–Joe]
Perhaps there is a physical principal involved: information spreads at the speed of light, while ignorance is instantaneous at all points in the known universe.
Dmitry Orlov
February 13, 2009
Social Collapse Best Practices
[Of course. Ignorance is the default state so it doesn’t really need to “spread”. But giving Orlov some slack there does appear to be a very strong tendency for people to cling to their ignorance despite the availability of information.–Joe]
We don’t need to bend the truth, make up facts, and just paint things with rhetoric. There are facts, figures and numbers we can rely on (without twisting them) and make reasonable, rational decisions. As a gun toting liberal, I pride myself on using my mind to understand issues. The anti-gun crowd simply refuse to look at all the information available, which is purely and utterly overwhelming in favor of conceal carry laws. That is not progressive thought, and it’s not liberal. It’s shamefully anti-science.
BlackPR
March 25, 11:02 PM
In the comments to A bulletproof bottom line
[Or, to distill it even further and put the onus on them, you can ask Just One Question.–Joe]
Breaking shit sounds easy, but it’s not. It’s actually pretty hard. The reason being because there are people just as smart as me, if not smarter, designing this specifically so it doesn’t break.
hunter006
March 27, 2009
My job as a SDET
[hunter006 is a co-worker of mine. We are, in a sense, on opposite teams. It’s an interesting relationship. I give the other team full access to every detail of the design and implementation. All the documents, all the source code, all the threat models then at any time completely and honestly answer any questions they might have about the system including things like, “Where do you think the greatest weakness are?” And “How would you go about breaking this?” Any success they have means more work and possibly poor performance reviews for me.
On the other hand, if I do my job right they will work their butts off, not find anything worse than typos in the documentation, and have their boss constantly screaming at them because they haven’t found any bugs. If they haven’t found any bugs then they aren’t doing their job, right?
Large bug counts, if found by you, are good on performance reviews. Large numbers of bugs assigned to you are bad. Currently I have one bug assigned to me. It’s about a year old and I’m pretty sure someone else fixed it a long time ago when they were working on something related. I just haven’t gotten around to verifying and closing it out or assigning it to him. Son James recently told me in his group the average is about 70 bugs assigned to each developer. He has about half that.
I just got new tester assigned to my portion of my current project. She’s a sweet young thing and I had a meeting with her earlier this week to explain the design and suggest ways to test it. I didn’t show her the proof I have been writing software since before she was born. I’ll save that for later when she is putting in long hours and still not finding enough bugs to keep her boss off her back.–Joe]
Jim: If Barney Frank could reach into my pocket he would take everything in my wallet and…
Sean: If Barney Frank could reach into your pocket that isn’t all he would grab.
Sean Flynn
March 26, 2009
During a conversation about economics and politics.
[I had lunch with Jim, Sean, and Steve yesterday. It was great. Jim and Sean, always fantastic with their wit and insight, were in top form.–Joe]
The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls.
Father Robert F. Capon
[Yeah, things are pretty messed up.–Joe]
It’s kind of sad irony when the head of the EU is criticizing the socialist schemes in the US.
James Huffman-Scott
March 25, 2009
Regarding EU chief: U.S. economic plans ‘a way to hell’
Via IM.
[There is no way I can add anything meaningful to that.–Joe]
You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.
Dorothy Parker
When asked to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence.
[Sebastian’s post from yesterday reminded me of this. I laugh every time I hear that classic truism because I immediately think of Parker’s twist on it. And it is rare that I am in the sort of company where I can explain why I am laughing.–Joe]
Let me just tell you, Congressional/Executive Branch Scumbag, Esq., if you do this… if you take this turn… I won’t even think twice. I will move my firm to Switzerland, or to London before the year is out. Those employees who do not follow me, I will have to fire. The corporate taxes I pay will no longer be yours. Instead, they will go to something useful, like a nice tunnel through a mountain for high speed trains that actually work. Further, I will dedicate a substantial portion of my personal time, effort and capital to frustrating your every attempt to collect personal taxes on me thereafter- given your draconian anti-expatriation laws. But that’s not all. My job is to make money for my clients, in whatever way I can. I will short your flagging financial firms mercilessly and remorselessly. I will buy QGRI puts to bet against any firm that took bailout money. I will buy credit default swaps on every firm you put your greasy paws on, because I know your fingerprints are laced with poison. For every boneheaded centralist move you make, I will be there, profiting from your lunacy. I will never again take a client who pays taxes in the United States. I will not permit any capital or profit to be diverted to any such. I will do this because in the same way you believe it your divine right to punish “greed,” I consider it my duty to punish the stupidity and arrogance that is central planning, and because I believe in economic freedom. I will divert as many of your resources to my new home and its relative economic freedoms as I can. I will promote free markets in this way, and I will never look back. You will have made it clear that you are my enemy, and I do not forget such declarations.
I take no pleasure in this fight. I did not ask for it. I only asked for liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Deny me these at your peril. In the end, I can only hope I’m not alone.
Austrian
March 22, 2009
Wait a second… you want to blame ME for the financial crisis?
Via Ry.
[It seems to me there are hundreds or thousands of ways one can legally declare war against the enemies of freedom. Look around and find yours.–Joe]
The bigger the appropriations bill, the shorter the debate.
Senator James Abourezk
[The Senator left office over 30 years ago but it appears to me his observation has withstood the test of time.–Joe]
So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!” Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won’t be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don’t recommend passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to have a death wish.
Dmitry Orlov
February 13, 2009
Social Collapse Best Practices
[I don’t know whether to believe we are really in a life or death situation but I suppose it is possible. What I am fairly confident of is that the current administration doesn’t have a clue as to what to do. They may think they have a clue but it’s all “hope and change” and almost zero knowledge.–Joe]
Yesterday afternoon, DoD additionally confirmed the lifting of the suspension to pro-Second Amendment United States Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who sent the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) a joint letter vigorously opposing the suspension, on the grounds that it had “an impact on small businesses who sell reloaded ammunition utilizing these fired casings, and upon individual gun owners who purchase spent military brass at considerable cost savings for their personal use.”
…
DLA also put to rest various theories and rumors that were circulated on the internet, concerning the reason for the suspension. As DLA explained to Senators Baucus and Tester, and to NRA-ILA, DoD officials responsible for the demilitarization of military property temporarily halted the release of the cartridge cases last week, pending review of a policy change issued last year by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which, in the interest of national security, halted the sale of items within a broad category of government property including, but not limited to, surplus small arms cartridge cases.
Chris Cox
March 18, 2009
Military Surplus Cartridge Case Issue Resolved
[I was working on a post comparing the destruction of the brass to destroying used books that were being sold to underfunded schools in black neighborhoods. But I procrastinated long enough to avoid the appearance of jumping on the Obama conspiracy train.
Appearances are not always what they seem.–Joe]
Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without.
Interest charges not only eat up a household budge, awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity.
Lazarus Long
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, page 30.
“The Notebooks…” was extracted from Robert A. Heinlein’s book Time Enough for Love in which Long is the main character.
[Although this advice was intended for marriages between humans in a common household, probably including group marriages, it seems to me it applies to much larger groups as well. I’m thinking of our city, state, and Federal governments.–Joe]