It would be awfully cool if the progressives among us were to view new social programs with the same suspicion, paranoia and scorn they so regularly thrust upon creches in courthouses & pledges-of-allegiance in schools. Jamie Jeffords tries to make sense of it all:

I would speculate the divide is a result of the differing view of government. For progressives, nothing is above government, so religion must be given a subordinate position. Conservatives do not have this problem. The issue may go deeper. There is also a notion that enlightenment and intellectualism are mutually exclusive from religion. That is just old fashioned arrogance. It cannot be dismissed, however.

As do I:

Some thoughts:

Atheists and secularists insist the statement “atheism is a religion” is as risible as “bald is a hair color” — heard that one before? It makes a lot of sense, until you start to ponder how the universe was built. To the atheist, the faith placed in the not-a-religion eliminates all possibilities save for one, and the one possibility looks more like a miracle than a scientific theory. Event 1, nothing; event 2, something complicated, bizarre and not quite specified, event 3, miraculous result. So atheism plus explain-how-we-got-here equals something I, for one, am very comfortable calling a religion.

Thought two: How we got here, is a much more important question to good governance than mere theoretical exercise. You make reference to a dichotomy involving whether religion should be subordinated to government. If there is any possibility to a competent mind at all that there might be a sentient and superior force involved in putting us here, then subordinating religion to government makes no sense at all. If we were put here, we must have purpose; where there is purpose, there has to be a will; and unless that purpose has changed from what it once was, then that will must lead to an expectation. Government, by its nature, has expectations too — if we are to erect a government that makes contrary expectations on us, then abiding by the law(s) becomes an exercise in abject futility, and mankind itself becomes a perversion.

Point three: The possibility that atheism is, after all, a religion, arouses another possibility that those who are trying to secularize the government, are the ones who are trying to establish a theocracy. Whether they know it or not.

That sign-off is a reference to a specific issue, which is teaching evolution and/or Creation in the public schools. Ever see Inherit The Wind? It’s about a real court case involving a penalty for teaching about evolution. Got that? They were deciding whether evolution should be allowed to be taught in the schools. And that Spencer Tracy, he seems so reasonable.

Fast forward forty-five years after the movie was made, and eighty years after the events took place, and the public hearing is on exactly the same issue but the so-called “law” says something completely different — now we’re deciding whether any alternatives should be allowed in the schools.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is an encroachment into a government by an order attempting to establish a state religion. A successful encroachment, and a successful establishment. This is how liberalism works in general; it acts like it’s on the defensive, fighting for its sacred right to express, for its very life. And as the years tick on by, you see it persecutes any & all challenging ideologies exactly the same way it once claimed it was being persecuted.

Back in Sunday school they used to tell me about God & Jesus being kind of like a compass, or a map — you’re lost in life without them. I never did understand the wisdom of this until I saw liberals work away at things. The things they do, are 180 degrees off course from where they say they’re going…where they seem to think they are going. The persecution thing is just one example of this. They talk a good game about building a new society, a wonderful society, based on tolerance and acceptance. But their most zealous acolytes are so bitter, resentful and angry; they wouldn’t know what tolerance was if tolerance ran up and kicked ’em square in the ass.

They want to be the only game in town. On each question, on each issue, on each matter of any public policy. And then they want to make everything that has to do with the living of life, a matter of public policy.

Blogsister Cassy calls out NOW’s latest hissy fit over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging. Said hissy fit is about Hooters. Yup, women men do not want to see are bitching away about the women men do like to see. Hey, I wonder if that simple statement just sums it all up. Ya think?

Patricia Bellasalma, NOW’s California president, asserted that Hooters is violating state and local laws prohibiting sexually oriented “adult” businesses from serving minors. The chain is also violating federal employment standards, she said.

Bellasalma said the federal government has not subjected Hooters to the rules requiring employers to protect their workers from harassment by customers. The Atlanta restaurant chain has successfully argued that its employees know they will be working in sexually charged surroundings, Bellasalma said.

But in recent years, she said, the company has promoted itself as more family-friendly. She cited a statement on hooters.com that “10 percent of the parties we serve have children in them.”

“If they want to switch and turn the chain into a family-style restaurant, more power to them,” but Hooters would then have to follow the same anti-harassment rules as other restaurants, Bellasalma said.

This has nothing to do with following law; I can tell that because no law is cited. I suppose I could go digging around to find more stories about the same issue, but why should I? If you’re arguing about the law, wouldn’t you be taking the initiative and talking some about the law?

No, it’s the same leftist crap as always: “Someone is having an influence on the next generation…besides us!”

Yours Truly is having none of it:

I suspect there are some good Americans who have infiltrated NOW, and are sabotaging it from within. NOW’s credibility is diminished every time they do this. If they go after Hooters a few more times, NOW may be utterly destroyed. They have never restored themselves to the lofty position of power & influence they had before Clinton/Lewinsky, when business executives immediately did anything-&-everything once they found out NOW was so much as thinking about coming after ’em.

This isn’t about skinny girls in skimpy outfits or hot wings & cold beer. This is about red state versus blue state. The truth of the matter that nobody seems to want to acknowledge, is there is an order of cultural expectation in the red-state culture that the blue-state culture does not want to acknowledge is there. It isn’t perfect, but it’s there, and it works. It works pretty well.

It works so well that if “mistreat a lady” is an item on your things-to-do list for the day, Hooters is the *very* last place you should go. Sure the girls are dainty, sweet, skinny and young — but they’re surrounded by these gentlemen who don’t want to put up with your crap, they’re there to watch the game, and some of ’em are as big as a house. You’re better off going to Denny’s to harass the waitress. I’ve spent some time in Hooters, believe me. If there were stories to be told about young ladies being heckled or harassed or propositioned inappropriately, I’d be able to tell ’em. In short: NOW talking about the Hooters environment is very much like the liberal talking about Rush Limbaugh’s show. They don’t have to get too many words into it before they’ve proven they’re just repeating the cliches they’ve been given, and have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

Hat tip to Viral Footage.

Just give me and my friends what we want.

That would be your tolerance and love of diversity right there.

National security is at stake, eh? Throwing weapons away not only helps our national security, but is vital to it?

This is why these people must be driven from power. Some guy walking around your neighborhood would just love to perforate you with a high-powered machine gun, people like Joe Biden figure if you just get rid of the gun everything will be okay. And they aren’t willing to discuss or debate it.

…inspired by, and manifested by, irresponsible class warfare rhetoric. Dangerous, deadly progressive rage.

Clay Duke, the man who opened fire on a Florida school board Tuesday, posted a “last testament” on Facebook decrying the wealthy and linking to a slew of progressive sites including theprogressivemind.info and MediaMatters.org.

The chilling Facebook statement, posted under the “About Clay” section, talks about being born poor and how the rich “take turns fleecing us”:

My Testament: Some people (the government sponsored media) will say I was evil, a monster … no… I was just born poor in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse, and economically enslave 95% of the population. Rich Republicans, Rich Democrats… same-same… rich… they take turns fleecing us… our few dollars… pyramiding the wealth for themselves. The 95%… the us, in US of A, are the neo slaves of the Global South. Our Masters, the Wealthy, do, as they like to us…

Doug Powers notes:

Meanwhile, as Media Matters is still busy trumpeting how dangerous Glenn Beck’s “violent rhetoric” is, there’s not a mention on their site of the media that Clay Duke considered worthy of following. Some media just don’t matter when it comes to these things.

Just wow. As one who could be considered a highly-compensated professional in the private sector, I wonder what my government is going to do to protect me from these gun-wielding, wild-eyed progressive cranks. Maybe we needs us some more regulation to put a check on their freedoms, and the irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric that inspires them to act.

And it reads like he just got done visiting a war zone…

The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools, and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation…
:
Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant.

Blame Republicans?

The liberal effort is bolstered by a bushel of bromides and platitudes but never by a crisp, prioritized mission statement that could be objectively recalled later. Banishing some kind of a wage gap? Racial integration? Everyone gets the education, food and clean water they need? Economic sustainability? The human condition becomes ecologically friendly? Can we put a nice, fat, green, satisfying check-mark by any of those, or any other objective?

VDH has just stepped into a land where when liberals want something, they get it — where they rule the roost, and have ruled it for a very long time.

VDH has just stepped into the Twilight Zone. Bet he’s glad to step out of it again.

Hat tip to blogsister Daphne.

It would be nice if liberals could muster the same agitation for fight, the same determination to oppose, the same cantankerous attitude, against terrorists that they manage to focus through their government upon their fellow citizens.

And it would be nice if certain dimwits weren’t thought to be geniuses simply because they show a talent for reading words and looking somewhat nice. Not that I care much, but in Couric’s case she’s coasting on old glory on the last of those two.

Related somewhat with the post previous: I see over on the Hello Kitty of Bloggin that blogger friend John Hawkins is making an observation about liberalism. It always seems to be, as the adage goes, the shirt off the other guy’s back that the liberal stands ready to offer.

To those who are receptive to the liberal viewpoint, the first paradox they might seek to resolve is this: The plan has to do with helping some indigent and it is an important plan because the indigent’s plight is a desperate one. Supposedly, it says something derogatory about all of us that the indigent’s living situation is what it is; great urgency is involved in changing this.

The person from whom the wealth is to be confiscated in order to make this situation better, is just as much a dirty rotten creepy jerk after the deed has been done, as before. Now…there is your paradox. That is your conundrum. If it is so important to offer this aid, and it is impossible to offer the aid without the assets that are to be seized from the DRCJ over there…and the DRCJ is a bigger DRCJ because the task needs to get done. How come getting it done doesn’t have a redeeming effect on the person who is, in effect, bankrolling the aid?

Thing I Know #32 helps to explain this. Liberalism is, among other things, a way to reach your coffin without ever expressing gratitude. To some among us, it is emotionally unacceptable to ever acknowledge that someone enjoyed options, and that someone chose to exercise the option that made life better for someone else. Oh, they’ll admit that much about Ted Kennedy or Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or some other wealthy distributionist engaging in the “please tax me some more” malarkey.

But outside of left-wing politics, they cannot acknowledge that anybody anywhere chose to do something nice when an alternative was readily available. And so their impulse is to eliminate the alternative, and pretend it was always that way — so they can rationalize “that wasn’t really a good deed, he was required to do that anyway.”

It’s the Christmas season. Avoid making more liberals: See to it after the wrapping paper is cleared away, your child writes all the thank-you notes he or she can. Just as houseflies come from maggots, liberals come from kids who weren’t taught gratitude.

Traffic Calming Roundabout Thinking (n.)

One of the commenters on Ed Darrell’s site comments way more than most other commenters; he captures nicely the spirit liberals have in mind when they speak of unification, tolerance, learning to get along together.

Which is a nice way of saying this commenter doesn’t believe in any such thing. His litanies are regularly filled with references to “my side” and “your side” and “us” and “them” — opinions like these are very important, because they’re popular. As best I can understand the mindset, it works like this: We need to stop fighting with each other and build a society that works for the benefit of everyone, and when we get that done, we need to figure who among us is not really part of this “everyone” and do everything we possibly can to destroy them.

This person recently came to learn of some remarks by Republican Congressman Spencer Bachus, who is set to become Chairman of the House Banking Committee. He was kind enough to inform me of the Congressman’s comments the way he informs me of everything else being discussed in the underworld of left-wing myrmidons: By injecting the news into a discussion that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. Said underworld is going nuts over something the incoming Chairman said:

In an article yesterday from the publication, The Raw Story, Congressman Bachus intimates that his leadership role will be to keep the regulators working in a subservient role for the banking cartel.

“In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks,” Bachus told The Birmingham News in an interview.

As I said, I know from experience that what Congressman Bachus said is no different from what regulators and auditors regularly say. There’s even a little joke about it: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” is one of the biggest lies, right after “the check is in the mail.” Heard that one?

I would not characterize the Congressman’s comment as a winning one. But he is right, at least about the “Washington view.” We know from the I’m-from-government-I’m-here-to-help-you joke that this is an old situation, it’s much bigger than bank regulation.

Congress makes requirements and auditors go in to make sure the requirements are met. Somewhere along the way, the government becomes a sort of aristocracy; an elite layer of noblemen who enjoy special rights and privileges, and are there to fight the citizen.

How do things get to be this way? From unhealthy, diseased thinking…and it is not deposited into the equation. Like the maggot swarming over the dead body, it is there from the very beginning. We have these twits running around who think it is the job of the Government to fight the governed — they have the same right to vote that everybody else does, and so Government is only too pleased to accommodate. When your grandmother’s golden years turn into her living nightmare of fighting with the IRS over some form your grandfather forgot to fill in properly 45 years ago, you’re looking at the result.

This is what inspires the odious road engineering custom we have imported from Europe, known as “traffic calming.” How does traffic calming work? Exactly the same way a progressive income tax works, by artificially elevating the difficulty involved in attaining success. By fighting the motorist, the same way the government fights bankers, or businessmen who seek to make a profit.

Traffic calming does nothing at all to calm traffic. It makes ordinarily patient, long-tempered motorists into agitated, frenzied assholes.

Still, overall it can lower congestion over the long term in one key way. If you have a trip planned that involves twenty miles and a round-about, with an alternate bypass demanding thirty miles, you’ll probably take the bypass. Now, you ponder the implications of that thinking with regard to an onerous, progressive taxation system and you’ll start to see why there was such contention about the new tax bill — and, why our economy sucks as much as it does right now. Another interesting aspect to traffic calming is: It seems to be geographically planned to thwart this one single potential benefit. Where there is a roundabout, there is considerable difficulty involved in planning an alternate route. Case in point, the last onerous roundabout encountered by Yours Truly, at 39°36’13″N 119°13’37″W.

Wherever you find any kind of traffic calming, coupled up with artificially inflated difficulty involved in taking a bypass route, you know somewhere is a civil engineer who is a complete dick. That engineer thinks like this. That the point to the exercise is to fight the driver. Make life harder just for the hell of it. Make the errand take longer. Create a real potential for an expensive collision every fucking ninety degrees of the circle. Scare the driver. Aggravate the driver. Calm (heh) the traffic.

The mindset is real, and it is out there. It is the province of dimwits. It is as old as the country itself. The mindset says that government exists to torture citizens — and it’s quite alright, you should vote for it because you’re not one of the citizens to be tortured. Government is working for you, by making life tough for that other guy over there.

Aw, but here & there you might become that other guy. Don’t worry. Probably won’t happen.

Every now and then we’ll come to find a new appreciation for the enormous and growing cost of some particular line of business complying with new regulations. What is objectionable about this is not quite so much that it is the biggest expense after payroll; but, rather, that the cost of compliance is much larger than it needs to be. And that this is by design. And that idiots like Ed Darrell’s guest mentioned above are running around, voting it in that way, fully intent on doing it again, trying to inspire others to do the same. Often succeeding at it.

The rest of us take note that ordinary everyday commodities cost many times what they used to. Bread, sugar, coffee, movie tickets — ah, and then there’s health care. Hmmmm…if your head is useful for something besides a hat-hanger, you’ll start to see a connection.

Note the scare quotes, please. Not my question, it’s someone else’s. The question surfaces because of the scarce supply of female libertarians.

Yeah my brain went there too. Sorry, not female librarians; libertarians.

Tim Cavanaugh interviews Allison Gibbs, chief muckety-muck of the Ladies of Liberty Alliance. Among the issues discussed is the bizarre nineteen-to-one (!) ratio of men to women in libertarian ranks.

Some of that gets into the gender disparity between attraction to opportunity & attraction to security, which comes perilously close to the Three Things Morgan Hasn’t Got the Balls to Blog.

I do think, though, that if you changed the subject from libertarianism…to something more like…I recognize liberal democrat policies are bullshit. You wouldn’t be looking at a nineteen-to-one ratio anymore. I’m gonna peg that one at two-and-a-half to one or thereabouts. Just spitballing here.

But the libertarian 19:1 thing is interesting nevertheless. Wonder what’s up with that?

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Hat tip to Ed Morrissey, by way of Robert Stacy McCain.

Question: Where are all the “War On Christmas Is A Myth” People? It seems last year they were out in force, trying to sell us on the idea that Bill O’Reilly just made the whole thing up, unctuously and bumptiously demanding to know our anecdotes so they could take ’em apart. Supposedly, if we would recite everything we thought we knew, we’d find every single “attack” on Christmas was a perfectly valid enforcement of the sacrosanct Wall of Separation, and we’d misinterpreted what it all meant because we were bigots or something. This year I’m not seeing hide nor hair of any of this.

That wasn’t…uh…just a hackneyed talking point put together without a grain of reason or truth behind it or something?

Yes, I know you can’t headline a story quite like that. But I like the way the Los Angeles Times approached sanity a little bit with “Suspected Bomber Dies in Stockholm Blasts.” That beats the hell out of “One dead after suicide bombing in Stockholm“…and then you read and read and read…and you find the evidence indicates, rather strongly it would seem, that the “one dead” is the bomber which would mean this is a complete failure. It looks like The Beeb did the same thing.

At the other end of the spectrum, Michelle Malkin brought the relevant facts and headlined them properly.

To be fair about it, it seems the information about “one dead two injured” arrived first. I would imagine, even in this day and age, that the organizational stress of getting copy in by a deadline would lead to some headlines remaining unchanged that perhaps shouldn’t & wouldn’t…but when we start looking at how many stories about this bombing were headlined this way, that starts to wilt a little bit as a valid excuse.

It’s an important issue. This is a psy-ops war being waged against western civilization. What, is that a right-wing neocon kooky thing to say? Because it’s true. The enemy wants to propagate a feeling, not so much that they’re on the winning side, but that we are on a losing one. Our society is molded and shaped around the idea that our press should be as free as possible, so it can thrive and pay our society back by keeping it strong.

We have a situation here were the bombing failed. Not a first by any means. That is a fact of primary importance. That fact should have made it into the headlines. “One dead” is completely unacceptable.

And the headline writers — perhaps entirely unaware of the vast power they wield — are, actively or passively, muffling and muzzling that bit of truth. “Bombing Kills One” looks like a successful bombing. This was not one, not even a little tiny one, thank God. Oh yeah some property was damaged.

Institutions of the press should not spread untruths to prop up empty morale, but they shouldn’t spread untruths to tear morale down either. I can see how this might be entirely innocent, maybe, but it’s a situation good enough for an Ombudsman’s column.

Hat tip to Coyote Blog, and thanks to blogger friend Daphne for sending it in in an off-line.

This one’s going viral. Or it should.

Breyer made a brilliant point, the same way Joe Biden beat Sarah Palin in a debate: Didn’t do it. Flashed pearly whites in a grin that telegraphed self-satisfaction, condescension, insouciance and ignorance. Strip away the grin and there’s nothing to it.

Not a shred of logic as far as I can see. This guy’s really sitting on the Supreme Court? I mean, when an Associate Justice offers his thoughts on an issue on which I disagree with him, I expect him to weigh in with some brilliance and give me some “omigaw” moment. Where’s the “omigaw” moment? Breyer certainly acts like he laid one down…has the mannerism down. But there’s nothing.

Kinda reminds me of this.

Anyone got a good argument they can offer against impeachment? An argument that will give me an “omigaw” moment? I’m not talking about impeaching all justices who weigh in on the minority; that would be tyranny of the majority. I’m not saying that — I’m talking about where the Constitution plainly says something, and that particular amendment is sprinkled with extra, special verbiage to make sure nobody misunderstands (which the Second Amendment is, go look it up). That particular amendment is worded in passive voice, when most of the others are worded in active voice, to make it clear that the authors of it don’t give a good goddamn who is doing the “infringing” it is wrong, wrong, wrong. And then, pondering the plain meaning of this language that is not used in the other amendments, SCOTUS says “yep that is what it says.”

And this guy wants to keep living in a fantasy world. Not just participate in the vote on the minority side. But build castles in the air.

It seems to me a plain, unalterable fact that we need people serving on the Supreme Court who won’t go doing that.

Hat tip to Gateway Pundit.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

Reason:

More people are going to college than ever before, but those extra years of education aren’t translating into the fancy-pants jobs that most people expect after snagging a sheepskin. Sixty percent of the increase in the number of college grads between 1992 and 2008 are doing low-skilled jobs that used to be done by people with high school diplomas or less. Ohio University economist Richard Vedder does the math:

In 1992 the BLS reports that total college graduate employment was 28.9 million, of whom 5.1 million were in occupations which the BLS classified as “noncollege level jobs” while in 2008 the BLS data indicate that total college graduate employment was 49.35 million, with 17.4 million in occupations classified as requiring less than a bachelor’s degree.

An example or two from specific occupations is useful. In 1992 119,000 waiters and waitresses were college degree holders. By 2008, this number had more than doubled to 318,000. While the total number of waiters and waitresses grew by about 1 million during this period, 20% of all new jobs in this occupation were filled by college graduates. Take cashiers as well. While 132,000 cashiers possessed college degrees in 1992, by 2008, 365,000 cashiers were college graduates. As with waiters and waitresses, 20% of new cashiers since 1992 are college graduates.

These numbers are big enough that we’re not seeing a clsuter of arty comp lit major-novelist-waiters picking up some cash while living their dream in a garret. The stats show people who probably wouldn’t have gone to college in another era, responded to incentives like cheap loans and went to college in the ’90s or ’00s, graduated at 22- or 23-years-old, and then got the same gigs they would have been qualified for at 18.

Hat tip to Dyspepsia Generation. That’s gotta be a kick in the nuts. Here you are in your cap & gown, and if you’re lucky you can scrub pots after closing time at Sizzler’s.

Wonder who’s taking it tougher. The ones who sprung for tuition on their own, or the ones who skated on through thanks to mommy & daddy’s second- and third-mortgage?

If you think there’s something wrong or surreal about this…

…but that this is completely on the up-and-up and right as rain…

…I would have to say there’s something wrong with you. Probably. Not that I want to judge anyone. But it would probably be good for you to have a check-up from the neck-up.

Update: Treacher, via Instapundit: “Say what you want about Sarah Palin quitting her job, but at least she finished her own press conference.” Good ‘un.

What this country really needs is a leader who’s willing to finish what h

I wonder who this one person is who complained? Macy’s will, of course, not only refuse to answer to that, but do everything in its power to dissuade people from asking that question. Can’t build an awesome “everyone with a mouth is a fucking loose canon” perfect Utopian society, without a thick muffling cloak of safe anonymity upon those loose canons.

This is “42 definitions of a strong society” stuff. The right to face your accuser is not merely a ritual phrasing embroidered into our Constitution; it’s a darn good idea. This is where the alternative goes. A society that cannot stand — a society filled with towering tempered glass spires, and every single grown-up walking around is an eight-year-old malcontent with a rock.

One person complained, about nuthin’, so Santa has to take a hike. You know, it’s not that I think the joke is a good one or that I’m jotting these thoughts down to try to defend it.

But I shouldn’t have to. This was just plain wrong.

Was she looking for something like this?

He reads the Washington Examiner first, then Politico, and “Then I look at the [Washington] Post, which is not what it used to be. Each year it’s less than what it used to be before….It’s so neocon I can hardly read it….I read the New York Times….You gotta read some other newspapers before you read the Times, you have to work your way up to it…. The [Wall Street] Journal, once in a while, not often.”

And…

I used to love the [Washington Post] Style section. … What a joke it is. … It’s about this ridiculous show business news that is totally boring.

Also in this interview, Chris Matthews said something truly amazing:

‘Hardball’ is absolutely nonpartisan.

Stossel:

“To get an address, somebody’s got to recognize that that’s where you live. That means … you’ve a got mailing address. … When you make a deal with someone, you can be identified. But until property is defined by law, people can’t … specialize and create wealth. The day they get title (is) the day that the businesses in their homes, the sewing machines, the cotton gins, the car repair shop finally gets recognized. They can start expanding.”

That’s the road to prosperity. But first they need to be recognized by someone in local authority who says, “This is yours.” They need the rule of law. But many places in the developing world barely have law.

There can be no real property, without a way to recognize a right to the property.

And for a right to be a meaningful right, it has to endure without regard to who might have a grievance against it being there, or to who is capable of prevailing against whom in a physical contest. If might makes right, order becomes indistinguishable from chaos.

For people to have property, they have to be able to keep it just because they have earned it, and for no other reason. Regardless of who it ticks off, how upset they get about it, or what they can do.

It’s clear the number of fans does not tell the whole story; in fact, it may be irrelevant, and it’s even more likely that it’s something of a negative indicator.

The whole article is here (hat tip to Instapundit).

…to the student who earned a “C”:

You have asked me why this happened. I offer the following explanatory theories:

1) You are so dull that you couldn’t find East with the rising sun, a compass, and a praying Arab as visual aids. To call you a lunkhead insults lunks everywhere. If dumb were population, you would be China.

2) Perhaps due to 1), you have mistaken the professor’s advice for a complete proofing/copy editing service. It is not. Showing your professor a draft is not an abdication of your responsibility for the quality of your work.

3) Perhaps due to 2), you have decided that specific, marked instances of mechanical/formatting/syntactical errors are the only times such errors occur in your draft. This is not a wise decision.

4) The various instructions I gave earlier in the semester regarding such niceties as citation form continue to apply, even later in the semester.

5) The initial draft of your paper made me long for the Purgatorial terrace where the eyes of the envious are sewn shut, as that would have kept me from having to read it. As that was not an option, I informed you that your draft “need[ed] a lot of work.” Pursuant to 2), you were the one expected to do said work.

6) My international students (who are non-native speakers) have a finer grasp of elegant expression than you do. You have taken the language of Shakespeare, Milton, Strunk and White and made it read like marbles being poured into a wood chipper.

7) Did I mention that in a game of Jeopardy! against Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, you would still somehow manage to finish fourth?

8 ) Yeeeaaargh!

9) All of the above.

Therefore, I suggest you take the C (which left me wanting to shower after writing it in my gradebook) and be grateful. Also, never darken my classroom again.

Love and sloppy wet kisses,

Prof. M

Ah, the professor who takes his job seriously, meets up with the grown-up man-child who has thus far been able to argue his way into & out of everything. Hilarity ensues, although not from the point of view of the man-child.

I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top. — allegedly written by an English professor at Ohio University.

The things you find in the New York Times letters section:

Robert H. Frank’s article (“Taxing the Rich: It’s All Relative,” Economic View, Nov. 28), on the rationale for allowing tax cuts to expire for families’ income over $250,000, is focused on the wrong issue. It’s our spending that’s a problem, not the ability of the wealthiest to pay even more.

I want the wealthy to keep doing what they’re doing. Personally, I am happy I have spreadsheets (thank you, Bill Gates) and can order all my holiday gifts in 15 minutes (thank you, Jeff Bezos). The richest of the rich, in most cases, provide more value to the world via the items they create than any charity or government organization could dream of. Their wealth is an exact measure of the value they have provided to society.

J. Todd Larson

Bainbridge Island, Wash.,

Nov. 29

The writer is the president of Citium Wealth Management and an adjunct professor in the M.B.A. program at Seattle University.

The Frank article is here.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin’s page on the Hello-Kitty-of-blogging.

Blogger friend Phil has thoughts on this issue too.

But it’s really not about “fair shares”. It’s about people wanting something, seeing someone who has the means to give them what they want, and getting their grubby hands on the levers of government power to force those other people to cough up more of their dough. Not only are they already giving more dough, they’re giving a bigger percentage of their dough for the cause. At what point will it become “fair” if it is not “fair” now?

The answer is never.

We seem to be caught up in a big national debate about socialism. I notice the socialists are lately deploying an argument that could be expressed as “if you think a socialist is what I am then you obviously don’t know what socialism is.” I hear lots of people begin this argument but then they don’t complete it — they don’t say what exactly it is a socialist does, that they are not doing.

I would expect we can all agree that if your vision is one where everyone has the same amount of stuff, that would make you a socialist. So from this, I infer the quibbling is about matters of degree. I am interpreting the socialists to say “I would be a socialist if I wanted everyone to be left with the same amount of stuff, but I do not want that goal. I just want to use our tax code to sort of trot out in that general direction, a little bit.” I think they rationalize their non-socialism by insisting they’d stop at some point.

That’s what I think when I take them seriously — and maybe that’s a mistake.

But my point is: How come it falls to the rest of us to figure out where they’d stop? How come it isn’t up to them to tell us? They use numbers like “wealthiest one percent” and “those who make $250,000 or more” to assure us that they only want to bring pain to those other guys — we don’t need to worry about it. And if we keep worrying about it it shows how dumb we are.

To be a smarty-pants, I guess you just need to tune out and not absorb any information about anything.

But if we do this tuning out, to show how smart and unconcerned we are…then how far does it go? It goes toward complete entropy but doesn’t actually reach it because they’re not socialists. So how much equalization gets done? When the dust settles, how much loot is the most productive, wealthiest person left with, and how well off is the laziest person? How come they don’t spec it out? Wouldn’t it be to their political benefit to do so?

Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, by way of RightNetwork:

Despite protests from the Democrats, the Republican Party made banning slavery part of its national platform in 1864. Senator Lyman Trumbull (R-IL) wrote the final version of the text, combining the proposed wordings of several other Republican congressmen.

FrankJ is noticing what I’ve been noticing:

…I’ve listened carefully to a number of liberals, and here is a transcription of their argument of why we need to raise taxes on the rich:

“I get really worked up about the rich not paying more in taxes because how much they earn affects me because of [unintelligible]. And we really need the tax money; sure, we did a ton of spending without worrying about having revenue to back it up before, but now it’s really important because of [unintelligible]. And I don’t buy the argument or historical evidence that raising taxes will decrease tax revenue by harming the economy since [unintelligible]. There is just no reason to think that taking money away from job creators will harm job growth if you factor in [unintelligible]. In fact, raising taxes on the rich could help the economy by [unintelligible]. Really, the reason I get so worked up about us needing to tax the rich is because once their taxes are raised we all get the awesome prize of [unintelligible].”

I think that covers their whole argument. Did I miss anything?

I think it does, and I don’t think you did.

Doing crimes, doing time: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Earning money: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Paying taxes: The people who fuck around shouldn’t have to pay any penalty, and the people who help other people shouldn’t benefit.

Hey, give ’em credit for consistency.

Just another smarmy secularist. Oh, no wait, I forgot: She isn’t saying anything about a desire for more secularism, her argument is grounded in diversity. Okay, very well then. She’s a cowardly fucking secularist.

And she’s being eaten alive in the comments section. Oh, that just warms the cockles of my heart. Really, it does. She deserves it. Just give it a read…

It seems there should be no debate that Christmas does not belong in the workplace. The people who disagree do not understand what it’s like to be a minority, and they fail to accept that Christmas is not a universal holiday.

“Should be no debate” — that’s rich. This is where the whole thing falls apart. Diversity has something to do with tolerance, right? Tolerance has something to do with diversity? Diversity-tolerance, tolerance-diversity? Two great tastes that go together like peanut butter & chocolate?

Anybody who thinks so, I’m gong to show them Penelope’s column. It absolutely oozes non-tolerance.

What are my own feelings about it? Ann Landers wedding rule — and longtime readers will know what I mean by that. It’s one of the few pieces of sage advice on which the addled-minded late advice columnist agreed with Yours Truly, or maybe it’s more appropriate to say Yours Truly agrees with the advice of the deceased fuzzy-brained advice columnist: When someone says “If you want me there you’ll have to dis-invite X” there is only one appropriate, one logical answer: “That’s a shame, we’ll miss you.”

You do not negotiate with terrorists, and you do not appease people who make those kinds of ultimatums. Period. It all comes down to this — if your productivity & cheerful demeanor slip a notch or two because you were just reminded someone has a different belief from yours, then you are the problem. Just like the wedding guest who says “I’m not coming if X is coming” is the problem.

Penelope has allowed herself to wander very far afield from where she wanted to go; she’s on a very dark path, although she may not realize it. She has begun to systematically abjure things that are not compatible with “diversity,” and I don’t think it’ll be too long before she starts to target the people she thinks are incompatible with this goal, as she sees it, as well.

And she has a big ol’ fistful of studies that say this is key to workplace productivity; profitability; competitiveness.

Whatever trivial differences there are between the people who are like her, and the classic caricature of Ebenezer Scrooge, are melting away rather quickly huh? Kind of like a snowman whose season has passed. Um…how is she any different…gender, age bracket, nationality. And diet. And she looks kinda hot in her own way, whereas Scrooge certainly did not — although others are hotter. Other than those things she’s pretty much a carbon copy at this point, right?

If I had my way, every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

Yup. That’s her; she’s there.

You know what I hear when someone says “Merry Christmas”? Lots of things, chief among them the very same thing I hear when someone says “Welcome to Hooters sir!” I know I’m someplace where there aren’t any tightasses. I hear “Come, let us break bread together because we’re all here together, we’re all brothers and sisters; maybe we have some long-simmering dispute, but if we do, we’ll pick it up in January. Have a seat at our table, and leave your troubles on the doorstep!”

I’m sorry, if you have a problem with that there’s something wrong with you. Something frightfully, terribly wrong. I don’t care if you have a bookshelf full of Nobel prizes, a healthy society is not going to be listening to people like you until you get a serious attitude check. The issue is not wisdom, but brotherly love…which, contrary to what may have become my rightfully-earned reputation as a cold-blooded bastard, I daresay is a bit more important. The brotherly love — you people who are like Penelope and Ebenezer, you see it where it doesn’t exist, and you deny it where it is paraded right before your cynical eyes, in as real and genuine a form as it has ever been beheld.

The English language deprives me of the words I need to describe how much I pity you.

Say hi to Marley’s Ghost for me, Penelope. If he doesn’t pop up on your doorstep about seven o’clock tonight, he should. If he and his pals turn your damned attitude around, I’d like to see you over a table filled with num-nums and good wine and a great big ol’ stuffed goose in the middle. If it doesn’t happen, then maybe next year. And pardon me for daring to disagree, but I’m sure your employer & mine would do just as well as they would’ve otherwise.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel.

Just bookmarking without comment.

Other than to give the reason why: Election/Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan stuff excluded, this is easily the most important story of 2010.

If you’re unemployed and hoping to land something, you’d better hope to hell some uncharacteristic magnitude of leadership emerges from, of all places, the beltway. Otherwise you’re completely screwed.

Me:

From here forward, no more about the Wonder of Wasilla…Back to Palin, when she points out something meaningful, or is imploded by the major scandal that has been so breathlessly anticipated by her enemies for over two years straight now. Or, when she turns out to be right about something and the O-Man turns out to be wrong…which is the trigger most likely to get tripped first.

But some whiny pussykins writing a meandering screed — thereby proving she’s relevant AND electable — is not going to get any notice from us for the foreseeable future. This is just stupid. Someone wants attention so they write “Palin Go Away!” and they just…get it? Enough is enough.

Charles M. Blow, writing in the New York Times. Different sentiment, but essentially the same moratorium in effect.

This is it. This is the last time I’m going to write the name Sarah Palin until she does something truly newsworthy, like declare herself a candidate for the presidency. Until then, I will no longer take part in the left’s obsessive-compulsive fascination with her, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive.

She’s the Zsa Zsa Gabor of American politics. She once did something noteworthy, but she’s now just famous for being famous.

…except, of course, I’m breaking my own moratorium by mentioning his. But what the hell, it’s worth it. Besides, I’m a blogger. If I come up with an idea and someone copies me, I have to point it out.

Blow just doesn’t get it. “Famous for being famous” is Courtney Peldon. Now, did you recognize that name? Probably not; you’ve probably read the name “Sarah Palin” a whole lot of times since the last time you’ve heard any mention of Peldon. In fact, there are really only two things in common between Palin and Peldon, and “famous for being famous” is not one of them.

They’re both vastly more aesthetically appealing than the average chubby-liberal-goth-chick in Seattle, and each is more qualified to be President than our current one.

The one that is being talked about more often, however, is constitutionally eligible to run in an election for that office. And, I still maintain, if she comes gunnin’ for it the job is hers. I maintain, furthermore, that deep down everybody with a working brain knows this, including Charles Blow. That’s why nobody anywhere is actually ceasing & desisting from talking about what’s-her-name. We have a lot of people (including me) saying they will. We have lots of people talking about how everybody else should. And we have truckloads and truckloads of liberals who are wishing everybody would. Starting now.

And absolutely nobody is saying “hey, it’s a great idea if we start talking about Sarah Palin!”

But people are talking about her anyway…all the time. You know the real reason? Because it is becoming an impossibility to imagine a credible sequence of events, between this moment and 2012, culminating in an outcome other than Gov. Palin being our new President-Elect. Lot of comments about how it can’t happen because this-insurmountable-obstacle or that-insurmountable-obstacle. But not a single credible scenario that stops it from happening.

Reuters, via Yahoo News:

Employment barely grew in November and the jobless rate unexpectedly hit a seven-month high, hardening views the Federal Reserve would stick to its $600 billion plan to shore up the fragile recovery.

Nonfarm payrolls rose 39,000, with private hiring gaining only 50,000, a Labor Department said on Friday. However, data for September and October was revised to show 38,000 more jobs were gained in those months than previously estimated.

The unemployment rate in November jumped to 9.8 percent, a troubling sign for an economy many had thought was strengthening. Economists had expected 140,000 new jobs last month with the jobless rate holding steady.

“The U.S. economy has yet to achieve the escape velocity needed to improve the worrisome jobs picture,” Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief investment offer at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California.

No hiring, few working, little to none among the new businesses being launched. Local, state and federal governments awash in red ink with nobody left to tax.

How much more evidence does one need before one is ready to chisel the epitaph? How about…every single city with a population greater than 250,000 mired deeply in liberalism, with a democrat mayor and a big ol’ mess of leftists on every council and advisory panel. And, in all those cities, the primary metropolitan newspapers splash whiny human-interest stories on every single square inch, every single day, of someone being dependent on a government program and they’re in dire straights because the budget is going to get cut again. Because that municipality just can’t make ends meet.

When everybody, everywhere, has run out of things to tax. And the demands for more and more government largess just keep right on rolling in.

When it’s like that in all fifty states, all across the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea…can we then proclaim that liberalism doesn’t work?

Or no. Will it somehow be Bush’s fault.

Much thanks to Neo-Neocon for this bit of unpleasant reality.

VDH:

When they are out of power, modern leftists advocate massive government spending and large deficits. They applaud when Republicans and conservatives sometimes prove as profligate as any big-government liberal. But when invested with the responsibility of governance, they come to understand that Keynesian “stimulus” must eventually cede to the same unhappy logic as the private household’s indebtedness.
:
There is an iron law that transcends politics and limits the application of fiscal liberalism: Print more money and money becomes less valuable; default just once and all future credit is lost or intolerably expensive.
:
In a similar way, the WikiLeaks mess reminds us of the adolescence of crusading freelance leakers and their enablers. This time the disclosures are not morality tales about Vietnam or Guantanamo. They concern a tough Hillary Clinton urging her State Department subordinates to spy on United Nations personnel. Barack Obama is not seen calling for the planet to cool, but is shown as so desperate to keep his promise to shut down Guantanamo that he is reduced, in tawdry fashion, to horse-trading photo-ops with the leader of any small country willing to take a detainee or two off his hands. In other words, those who once sermonized about the morality of leaking the Pentagon Papers and details of U.S. policy in the war on terror are now seeing that a let-it-all-hang-out transparency can be nihilistic rather than liberating…

Likewise, the notion that “civil liberties” were sacrificed in the effort to stop Islamist terrorism increasingly is shown to be a liberal talking point, not a serious criticism of responsible wartime government. Barack Obama conceded that argument when he flipped on every pre-presidential critique he had made of George W. Bush’s protocols. At one time or another, Obama, as law professor, state legislator, senator, and presidential candidate, had ridiculed the Patriot Act, wiretaps, renditions, military tribunals, the Iraq War, Predator strikes, and Guantanamo.
:
Surely one lesson is that when out of power one is not responsible for Americans’ being murdered, and thus has the leeway to call for a sort of cosmic justice in a way one cannot when in power.
:
What are we to make of this great history lesson of the last two years?

Behind the recent news of massive debt, looming defaults, WikiLeaks, the administration’s about-face in the war on terror, and the implosion of the European Union is a reminder that progressivism, at least as it operates today, is a sort of high-minded adolescence, as sophisticated in faculty-lounge repartee as it is near-suicidal in its actual implementation.

It’s very much like parenting, methinks. You can make a successful go out of it without being a dickhead about it every day, or even much of the time. If you’re blessed with a child who doesn’t force you to be a dickhead, maybe you’ll never have to be a dickhead at all.

But if you go through the experience determined to use it to prove what a nice person you are, you’re pretty much guaranteed to bollux it up. Because that would necessarily mandate a fuzzy sort of dogmatic extremism: Every single time you can make a problem go away by spending some loot, you have to; every single time you can suspend a rule that would make life inconvenient in the moment, you must; each time you can appease someone who’s trying to get something he wants by flouting common sense and basic good manners, then appeasement is the order of the day.

I think Obama does deserve some credit. Disaster would surely ensue if He were to take an approach of, “but I promised my constituents I’d turn all these things around” and went ahead, facts and national security be damned. Maybe not that day, or that year, but eventually. And, to the best I know about it, He hasn’t done that. I don’t know if that begins and ends with Him, though. I’d like to think there are some Col. Nathan Jessup types out there, in “places you don’t talk about at parties,” who managed to convince the right people that if the peace-love-rock-n-roll stuff went forward as planned things would get really, really ugly. If so, we want them on that wall; we need them on that wall.

What makes me think it went that way? Not much. Just, the stuff that does not directly relate to national security — the peace-love-rock-n-roll stuff has indeed gone forward as planned. We are in hock up to our ass. I haven’t seen profligate spending of this magnitude of recklessness since the first Christmas shopping season after my ex-wife got hold of the household credit card.

It comes from the authorities in charge excluding it as a possibility that anybody from among the “right” people can every be told no. Generally, that is the anatomy of a poor decision. Somebody didn’t want to tell somebody else no.