H.L. Mencken on the fine line between helping people and controlling them: "Caped Crusader sent me this one in response to my post about ways to counter the HBO propaganda pumped into my daughter the other day:"
Ace of Spades HQ: "And let’s not forget: Many of those new Obamacare sign-ups are self-sufficient people who were previously paying their own way and now receive government subsidies for insurance. Creating government dependency is not progress — it’s a step backward. The stated goal of Obamacare was not to move millions of privately insured Americans into taxpayer-subsidized health coverage. The goal was to cover the uninsured. That was the justification for all the chaos and disruption Americans have experienced — and that is the standard by which the administration should be judged."Read More......
For ‘Earth Hour’ tonight, turn on your lights to celebrate the elevation of the human condition from darkness | Watts Up With That?: "The Earth Hour stunt wants people to turn off their lights from 8:30-9:30PM local time. I plan on having our lights on.
Bjørn Lomborg writes on his Facebook page:
===========================================================
1.3 billion people in the world live without electricity. Celebrating darkness at Earth Hour sends the wrong message.
Unfortunately, Earth Hour tonight is nothing but an ineffective feel-good event. It does little for the climate in terms of reducing CO2 emissions and distracts us from the real problems and solutions — especially giving light to those in the darkness."
Obama refuses to raise human rights issues with Saudis | WashingtonExaminer.com: "President Obama refused to raise human rights issues during his meeting Friday with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, despite urging from a bipartisan group of lawmakers and assurances from the White House that Obama "raises our commitment to human rights" on all his trips.But the Deltas are happy. And the chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams. Read More......
“Saudi Arabia's human rights record is abysmal at best and its mistreatment of women is systemic, unthinkable and cruel," said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., who -- along with Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., -- wrote a letter to Obama urging him to pressure Saudi Arabia about human rights abuses that take place in the country. "When President Obama meets with King Abdullah, he must speak out against intolerance and urge specific reforms to bring the country closer to the rest of the free world.”"
protein wisdom | …because not just anybody can summarize the news: "Dear Congressman Brooks,
As a practicing family physician, I plead for help against what I can best characterize as Washington’s war against doctors."
“Report: Americans commit an average of 3 felonies a day” | protein wisdom: "A report issued by author and attorney Harvey A. Silverglate indicates that the United States now has so many restrictive laws and regulations that Americans commit an average of three felonies a day without knowing it.... whenever they like, fool. Read More......
Silverglate’s book titled “Three Felonies a Day” takes a critical look at the Justice Dept. and is available for purchase at his website.
The upshot of the book is that the U.S. government has now loaded up the books with so many laws, restrictions, regulations, and mandates, that not only is it impossible for citizens to know them all but it is impossible to live a full day of normal activities without committing at least one or more criminal acts, to the tune of an average of three felonies a day."
The Republican Style | National Review Online: "Barack Obama showed up at his meeting with Dutch PM Mark Rutte with his usual caravan of armored limousines and the like. Here’s how Mr. Rutte got there:"
Ace of Spades HQ: "Shocker: After First Claiming to be Ready to Comply With Congressional Demands for Lois Lerner's Emails, IRS Now Says It Will Delay Releasing Them... Until After the 2014 ElectionsThey're nothing if not brazen. Read More......
OUT: A healthy democracy requires a responsive government and a well-informed citizenry
IN: Go F*ck Yourself Peons"
The Rise of Secular Religion - The American Interest: "America’s consensus culture, Bottum argues, is the unmistakable descendant of the old Protestant Mainline, in particular the “Social Gospel” promulgated by Walter Rauschenbusch before the First World War and adopted by the liberal majority in the Mainline denominations during the 1920s. Although this assertion seems unremarkable at first glance, the method that Bottum brings to bear is entirely original. A deeply religious thinker, he understands spiritual life from the inside. He is less concerned with the outward forms and specific dogmas of religion than with its inner experience, and this approach leads him down paths often inaccessible to secular inquiry. The book should be disturbing not only to its nominal subjects, the “Poster Children” of post-Protestant America, but also to their conservative opposition. The battle is joined on a plane far removed from the quotidian concept of political debate."This is an eye opener. Read More......
Sultan Knish: "There's more money in predicting an apocalypse that can only be stopped with trendy progressive policies than the recognition that environmental debates are complex and often come down to a tug of war between competing interests. Reality doesn't pay. Politicized and prostituted science does. The mythologization of science, like the cowboy movie, always had a loose relationship to reality, but still derived from it, dressing up reality, rather than entirely displacing. It has now become the idealization of a murdered ideal by the people who murdered it."Just wow. RTWT. Read More......
Ready for Rand? - Kevin D. Williamson - POLITICO Magazine: "Rand Paul’s admirers, and more than a few of his enemies, believe the country is having a “libertarian moment”—from Tea Partiers in Topeka to Silicon Valley techno-separatists who dream of going Galt. We’ve had these moments before, but each time they come and go without the elevation of a libertarian to high office or the advancement of libertarian ideas. There’s a reason for that, and Sen. Rand Paul is just learning why now. The problem for libertarian politicians is that Americans hate libertarianism. They like Social Security and minimum-wage hikes, they are still somewhat wary of free trade and they resent that the world is full of conniving and frequently swarthy foreigners who are scheming to provide us with goods and services in exchange for little green pieces of paper. Four times as many Americans support pulling out of NAFTA or renegotiating it as support staying in."RTWT. He's right of course. Deltas will never understand Othello. Read More......
Articles: The Betrayal of the Western Middle Classes: "The middle classes, together with the intellectuals, could be said to epitomize Western Civilization. Both are uniquely Western phenomena, not only because they embody the strengths of the West -- creativity, rationality, and individualism -- but also the weaknesses of our culture. This last point has never been sufficiently explored on the right, and certainly not in the movements that want to bring the expansion of Islam and all kinds of progressivism to a halt. But if we really want to understand the predicament of our civilization, we must first understand the sociology of the middle classes and the intelligentsia, and that sociology's connection to history and current developments."RTWT ^ 3. Another fairly short yet worthy expose of doom. Read More......
The Only Way Out Is Exile | World Affairs Journal: "If Cuba needed a Berlin Wall, Fidel Castro would have built one. Fortunately for him—though not for his much-abused subjects—one of the world’s last communist regimes is surrounded on all sides by water, cruelly trapping its people. Thus Castro’s totalitarian state, Cuban exile Humberto Fontova wrote, “gave rise to psychic cripples beyond the imagining of even Orwell or Huxley: people who hate the sight of the sea.”"This is a RTWT of course. Read More......
Islamic law is adopted by British legal chiefs - Telegraph: "Islamic law is to be effectively enshrined in the British legal system for the first time under guidelines for solicitors on drawing up “Sharia compliant” wills. Under ground-breaking guidance, produced by The Law Society, High Street solicitors will be able to write Islamic wills that deny women an equal share of inheritances and exclude unbelievers altogether.""Justified" stonings are next I suppose... Read More......
Democrats Steal Tea Party Symbol to Promote Obamacare: "How desperate are Democrats to sell Obamacare? So desperate that they're adopting the Tea Party's beloved symbol, the Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flag, to sell it, as per this tweet by Democrat strategist Christine Pelosi (yes, that Pelosi family). The flag is a national symbol, of course, but Democrats have spent the last several years describing it as some kind of latter-day version of the Confederate battle flag, or worse."
Moonbattery » Sarah Palin Rewrites Dr. Seuss: "Sarah Palin continues to be exceedingly unpopular among the moonbat weenies comprising the liberal elite. Her revision of Dr. Seuss isn’t going to help:"
Sharyl Attkisson: There Is Coordination Between Reporters And Politicians « CBS Philly: "Attkisson also confirmed she’s working on a bookabout how stories are reported in the media. “I’ve been wanting to write about the unseen influences on the media by coordinated, paid factions, whether they’re from political, corporate or other special interests, the tactics they use to manipulate the images we see, not just in the news but on Facebook, Wikipedia, or fake Twitter accounts. It’s become a way of life and I don’t think the public is aware of how much nearly everything you see today may be influenced, in some fashion, by a paid interest that wants you to think something,” Attkisson said."Read More......
Instapundit » Blog Archive » LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: ‘Most transparent’ White House ever rewrote the FOIA to suppress po…: "LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: ‘Most transparent’ White House ever rewrote the FOIA to suppress politically sensitive docs. It’s Sunshine Week, so perhaps some enterprising White House reporter will ask press secretary Jay Carney why President Obama rewrote the Freedom of Information Act without telling the rest of America."Read More......
Missing Malaysian Airlines: Flight MH370 pilot pictures wearing anti-government T-shirt amid fears he hijacked his own plane - Mirror Online: "Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was a fervent supporter of his country's opposition leader who was jailed for homosexuality - illegal in Malaysia - only hours before flight MH370 vanished with 239 passengers and crew on board, the Sunday Mirror can reveal.Read More......
And in a new twist, it emerged that the pilot's wife and three children moved out of the family's home the day before the plane's disappearance."
Team of Nitwits reconvened | Power Line: "Bloomberg News reports that 60,000 Russian troops are massed across the Ukraine border. What are they doing there? They are apparently awaiting the results of the secession or consolidation vote concluding in Crimea. They are standing by to enforce the will of the people, of course, and perhaps extend it further into Ukraine. It is an impressive and audacious display of force. Readers familiar with Hitler’s prewar playbook know what comes next. Timothy Snyder is the formidable historian of Eastern Europe and author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. In the New York Review of Books post “Putin vs. reality,” he provides a short course on the echoes that eluded John Kerry in his “Putin is so nineteenth-century” routine. (“This sort of argument, the need to protect the Volksgenossen, was used to significant effect by Adolf Hitler in 1938 in enunciating German claims to Austria and then to the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.”)"Read More......
U.S. to relinquish remaining control over the Internet - The Washington Post: "U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move that pleased international critics but alarmed some business leaders and others who rely on the smooth functioning of the Web. Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain names that organize the Internet has been building for more than a decade and was supercharged by the backlash last year to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance."Read More......
White House Was Aware Of CIA's Attempt To File Criminal Complaint Against Senate Staffers; Did Nothing To Stop It | Techdirt: "Having the White House be supportive of the CIA not only spying on its overseers, but then (even more ridiculously) filing a criminal complaint against those same staffers for doing their job speaks volumes about how this White House views Congressional oversight of its giant spying machine. It views it with contempt. It only reinforces how the claims that have been stated repeatedly over the past few months that there is plenty of oversight of the intelligence community are completely hogwash."Read More......
Instapundit » Blog Archive » ONE OF INSTAPUNDIT’S MANY READERS FROM THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY WRITES: I don’t have a whole lo…: "Everything should generate an audit trail. It’s not clear that’s what happened here, though to be fair, it’s not clear it isn’t, though I believe DiFi and her staffers were promised that no one would track what they looked at, and that promise was broken. But — and this is my key point — while spying on foreigners is fine, trust in the intelligence community has taken a hit in no small part because so many other parts of the bureaucracy that are supposed to be apolitical have been politicized and weaponized by the Obama Administration. That kind of damage takes a generation to undo."Read More......
Ace of Spades HQ: "And therefore, impliedly, a legal nullity, to be undone at Russia's whim. According to Dzhemilev, Putin also said that it was debatable as to whether Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, acquired in 1991, was even legal. Dzhemilev is a Crimean Tartar leader. He'd called Putin to advise him that the upcoming referendum on Crimea's re-annexation by Russia might violate treaty guarantees of Ukraine's sovereignty. Putin seems to be taking the position that Ukraine has no legal sovereignty to violate. Thanks to @slublog. Meanwhile, a Kiev legislator has said Ukraine must go nuclear to preserve its freedom."Read More......
Obama: Health insurance isn’t expensive – just cancel cable and phones; Update: White House responds « Hot Air: "Welcome to the Lillian Hellman Presidency:Read More......
Every word they speak is a lie, including “and” and “the”!
Another Drew on March 12, 2014 at 2:57 PM"
Moonbattery » Obama Helped Disarm the Ukraine: "One reason Putin has been able to impose his will so effortlessly in the Ukraine is the fecklessness of current American leadership. Another is that the Ukrainian military is not in a position to put up a fight — in part due to that same American leadership:Read More......
As a U.S. senator, Barack Obama won $48 million in federal funding to help Ukraine destroy thousands of tons of guns and ammunition – weapons which are now unavailable to the Ukrainian army as it faces down Russian President Vladimir Putin during his invasion of Crimea."
Read More......Instapundit » Blog Archive » JAMES TARANTO: Empty Souk: The uninsured aren’t buying what the ObamaCare marketplace is selling. …: "The third phase of failure is the slow revelation that the basic economic assumptions behind ObamaCare are wrong. A new survey from McKinsey & Co., conducted in February, found that only 10% of those who lacked insurance pre-ObamaCare had signed up for an exchange plan, and that of those who had signed up, just 27% were previously uninsured.It’s train wrecks all the way down."
True, those numbers were up significantly from January’s figures, 3% and 11% respectively. Still, they’re low enough that the Washington Post sums it up: “The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal.”
Instapundit » Blog Archive » MORE RUBES SELF-IDENTIFY: Liberal labor union makes Republican arguments against Obamacare. “A new…: "MORE RUBES SELF-IDENTIFY: Liberal labor union makes Republican arguments against Obamacare. “A new labor union research report offers a scathing indictment of how Obamacare affects middle-class workers. The report features a series of arguments that conservatives have long made about the law, right down to mentioning the language of ‘unintended consequences.’”What next? That they'll figure out that illegal immigration is bad for their current members also? Read More......
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 7:32 am"
Ace of Spades HQ: "Speaking of ostentatious, this is Denzel Washington's California home:"
Earth is Safe From 'Global Warming' Say the Men Who Put Man on the Moon: "Doiron is similarly sceptical of the computer models used by climate alarmists. He and his team argue that the 105 models currently used by the IPCC are seriously flawed because they don't agree with each other and don't agree with empirical data. There is no empirical data indicating Anthropogenic Global Warming will produce catastrophic climate changes. AGW can only produce modest global warming, likely to be beneficial when CO2 benefits to crop production are considered. Doiron says: "I believe in computer models. My whole career was about using computer models to make life or death decisions. In 1963 I had to use them to calculate whether, when the lunar module landed on a 12 degree slope it would fall over or not - and design the landing gear accordingly. But if you can't validate the models - and the IPCC can't - then don't use them to make critical decisions about the economy and the planet's future.""Read More......
Moonbattery » Respect? He Can’t Even Spell the Word: "But I’ll bet he knows how to spell “cultural Marxism.”"
Obamacare Exchanges Are Scarcely Impacting the Uninsured | Power Line: "Of course, this whole situation is very odd. The basic idea underlying Obamacare is that tens of millions of people don’t have health insurance because they can’t afford it. As a result, we all wind up paying for their health care via emergency rooms and so on. Moreover, because the uninsured forgo preventive care, the bills are ultimately larger than if they had been provided with health insurance in the first place. (All of these propositions are debatable, of course.) So Obamacare’s solution is to subsidize the purchase of health insurance by the uninsured. Now they will be able to afford it, because the rest of us will be footing the bill–a smaller bill, the theory goes, than if we were paying for their emergency room treatment or for the consequences of a lack of preventive care.Read More......
On paper, that sounds like an attractive proposition. So why isn’t it working? A part of the answer, undoubtedly, is that people’s decisions about buying health insurance are not so simple. The idea that anyone who can afford insurance would certainly buy it, and therefore those who don’t have coverage can’t afford it, is wrong. From there, the conversation gets complicated. That is a subject for another day. For now, let’s just note that to date, Obamacare is a far worse flop than has generally been reported."
Brutal: Just one in 10 uninsured who qualify for ObamaCare exchange plans has signed up « Hot Air: "That’s according to a survey conducted by McKinsey, not according to HHS’s official figures. And why, you ask, are we forced to rely on McKinsey for this information rather than on the feds? Because, silly. Your government, which reinvented the insurance industry in the name of expanding coverage to many millions of uninsured Americans, is oddly incurious about whether uninsured Americans are signing up or not."Read More......
| A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. |
| — Lao Tzu, 6th century B.C., Chinese philosopher and poet and founder of Taoism |
Luckily this won't be reported by MSLSDCBSABCNYET. Otherwise we would have a problem. Read More......Shocker: Federal government’s fiscal deterioration almost 5 times official deficit « Hot Air: "During the federal government’s 2013 fiscal year, the official federal deficit was $680 billion, but this comprehensive accounting reveals that the federal government’s fiscal position deteriorated by $3.3 trillion or an average of $27,000 for every household in the U.S. There are two basic ways the federal government calculates its obligations. The first does not account for the obligations of Social Security, Medicare, and other programs in the same way the federal government requires of private corporations.The method the Treasury report uses is far more complete. It includes long-term obligations and liabilites unaccounted for in the deficit and debt measurements."
"In the post immediately below, I wrote about the fact that Obama in this past week seems to have abandoned reality regarding Ukraine and the Middle East and opted, instead, for a fact-free fantasy. This chart summarizes some of what he’s missing:"
Instapundit » Blog Archive » BRET STEPHENS: Anatomy Of A Feckless Presidency: Gone are the days when the American president was…: "BRET STEPHENS: Anatomy Of A Feckless Presidency: Gone are the days when the American president was capable of articulating the American interest. You have to believe in it, to be able to articulate it.... that the NSA is so busy spying on the Tea Party that they really don't have a clue where Putin's stash is. Either that or they don't spy on their bosses. How I wish that last one wasn't now so credible... Read More......
Plus: “Mr. Putin’s Russia is a petro-oligarchy whose survival depends on high oil prices and privileged access to the West for the politically connected elite. Raise interest rates, investigate the finances of Mr. Putin’s inner circle, impose travel bans on Putin’s cronies and broaden the scope of the Magnitsky Act, and we’ll see just how resilient the Moscow regime really is.” Start coastal drilling and oil exports. And if the NSA doesn’t know where Putin’s offshore money is parked, it should be abolished.
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 9:43 pm"
Ed Driscoll » The Chocolate Ration’s Been Increased!: "Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes."And the Cold War's over! Read More......
National Review Online | Print: "I’ve come to believe that corporatism (which does not mean “rule by corporations”) is the natural resting state of pretty much every political order. Politicians naturally want to lock-in and co-opt existing “stakeholders” at the expense of innovation. They love talking about “getting everybody at the table,” which really means getting the existing insiders to create rules that help themselves.This. Read More......
Stanley says that politics came before economics in the Nazi state. That’s true. But where is that not true? Certainly not in America or the U.K. Which is why conservatives, libertarians, and other champions of free-market economics must constantly put pressure on politicians to fend off the natural human tendency to fight innovation as a threat to the status quo and the powers that be. Across the West there’s a tendency among bureaucrats, politicians, academics, and other members of the New Class to convince the people to hand over the major decisions of their lives to the “experts.” These experts aren’t all in the government, but they all collude with government to convince people that the experts have all the answers and that the people need to hand the reins over to them. They will tell us what to eat, what to drive, what to think. It’s an approach that puts politics before economics. Because it is an attempt to politicize peoples’ lives. Or as Hitler put it, “Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.”"
Instapundit » Blog Archive » SPYING: UK spy agency intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users. “GCHQ files dating bet…: "SPYING: UK spy agency intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users. “GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not. In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.”Read More......
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 10:43 am"
Instapundit » Blog Archive » WELL, THERE IS A CERTAIN IRONY IN GLENN GREENWALD BEING SHUT DOWN BY . . . AN ARMY OF SOCK PUPPETS: …: "WELL, THERE IS A CERTAIN IRONY IN GLENN GREENWALD BEING SHUT DOWN BY . . . AN ARMY OF SOCK PUPPETS: Reddit Mods Bury Glenn Greenwald’s Story On GCHQ/NSA Use Of Internet To ‘Destroy Reputations.’ And, also ironically, that it happened supports his claim. . . .Read More......
Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 4:01 pm"
Ukraine crisis tests Obama’s foreign-policy focus on diplomacy over military force - The Washington Post: "From a White House podium late Friday, Obama told the Russian government that “there will be costs” for any military foray into Ukraine, including the semiautonomous region of Crimea, a strategically important peninsula on the Black Sea. Within hours, Putin asked the Russian parliament for approval to send forces into Ukraine. The vote endorsing his request was unanimous, Obama’s warning drowned out by lawmakers’ rousing rendition of Russia’s national anthem at the end of the session. Russian troops now control the Crimean Peninsula."Our "president" is a idiot child. Your children will pay the price. Read More......
News from The Associated Press: "BEIJING (AP) -- More than 10 knife-wielding attackers slashed people at a train station in southwestern China late Saturday in what authorities called a terrorist attack by Uighur separatists, and police fatally shot four of the assailants, leaving 33 people dead and 130 others wounded, state media said."... which our genius political class will soon be exhorting on us. We just need to ban guns AND knives of course. \sarc
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