Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
So says Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel. The full excerpt is:
Intel is on pace for what Otellini predicts could be the company’s best year ever but said other businesses are not so lucky. “A lot of companies are sitting on the sidelines right now,” he said, due mainly to a lack of clarity about taxes and regulation.
“Take the uncertainly out. Businesses can’t invest until they have fewer variables and right now there are just too many variables,” he said. [emphasis in original]
Or, as a tire company executive put it some three quarters of a century ago, during a dress rehearsal of what would later become Obamanomics: “[The investor] will not risk financing new ventures if the government take is greater than that of the average gambling house.”
In the interest of full and fair disclosure, I’m an Intel employee.
There is so much good meat in this article that brings us the two quotes above, it’s like a half-year-early serving of TurBaconDuckEn and I don’t know where to start with it. Although BlogUncle Gerard knew exactly what to do. He went after the tastiest morsel on the lovely, juicy, glistening, baconey-goodness salty carcass.
What would happen, if, heaven forfend, Obama actually went into business himself?
Oh my, he had fun lifting & linking that one. Yes, the High Prince of Hope and Change, Birther Zero, Mister Let Me Be Clear, founder of the “Office of the President-Elect.” The Teleprompter King. The very archetype of the non-productive telling the productive what to do, and feeling perfectly entitled to do so…not because He was sworn in on January 20, 2009…but simply because, since childhood, nobody has ever told Him “no.”
What if He was part of an effort to — not sell some stinky piece of legislation that is so pus-filled and rancid that everybody and his dog needs some kind of “waiver” from it — but create a product, bring it to market, and move it along to the consumers who can use it? And at a profit? Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the last six years, you know He has some considerable skills. But are they applicable to useful pursuits? In any way? Any at all? Any mission that has something to do with helping people…in ways other than forcibly taking money from one class of person and giving it to another?
The anecdote about George McGovern suggests the intensity and magnitude of surprise that awaits “Professor” Obama in the Driscoll hypothetical.
But there is more yummy goodness here. Obama manifests great talent at non-productive things, and doesn’t manage to suggest any talent at all in things that would actually create other things. But that, by itself, offers no evidence of any contempt toward the private sector. Notice I said “by itself.” Just because you have a lack of aptitude for tending to a discipline, doesn’t mean you harbor actual disdain against that discipline.
The wifey, Mrs. O, took care of that part:
“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do…Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”
But the real problem — what is asphyxiating our economy in the here and now — is perhaps best summarized by another anecdote near the very beginning:
Adolf Berle, Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of state, sounded for all the world like Hank Paulson or Timothy Geithner when he argued in the late 1930s for a “modern financial tool kit.” Tool kit means “let me fiddle around” and not “let us agree together on rules and abide by them, together.” [emphasis Driscoll’s]
It’s a quote from Amity Schlaes, author of The Forgotten Man.
What we are to learn from all this, is that investors are people. That sounds like I’m pleading for some kind of sympathy for their benefit, which is where the progressives tune out. That’s the world in which they live — light on the “if this is done, that happens” and extremely heavy on the “it’s so-and-so’s turn to get all the attention, advantages, pity and praise.” But this isn’t about pity or praise, it’s about the other; the if-this-then-that.
Because they are people, and thinking people, they go through a process before they shake loose of the bucks. As Chairman Otellini points out, uncertainty about the outcome, and the variables that contribute to the outcome, affect the decision to shake loose; they’re less willing to do it. That’s just the way sane, reasonable people can be expected to behave.
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