If Couch Potato Conservatives had their way, the kind of cowboy behavior of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would be the order of the day: white monarchs would receive the proper greeting protocol and non-white royalty a simple hand shake. It's no wonder President Obama has to do so much work to do in restoring America's popularity around the World.

There seems to be this macho idea that American Presidents have to show they're tough and one way to do that is to avoid bowing to the Emperor of Japan, or for that matter Saudi King Abdullah, as President Obama did in April of this year.

Moreover, some Americans forget that kings and emperors are not elected officials, they're royalty.

Labels: Obamarama

incredible:

For the second time in three weeks the Fort Scott Greyhounds defeated the Butler Community College Grizzlies in football. With Sunday's 13-12 win at home, Fort Scott claimed the NJCAA Region VI crown, to go along with its Jayhawk Conference championship it won earlier this season.

While I was honored to sit with ehart at last week's playoff game, today I had to be content with listening to it on the radio*. It was muddy. It was nasty. It took six players to carry the gourney of one hospital-bound player because they simply could not roll it on the field. The short version is that midway thru the fourth, FS blocked a punt for a TD, then held on for the win.

Where and when the final game will be played is still up in the air, but if all goes well**, they will play the national junior college championship game in Pittsburg on Dec. 9th. If it's not in P-burg, well, I've still got a radio and pretty decent wine cellar.

* The game is here, but it's also drizzling cold outside, and with Rogue still en route from California, I can't in good conscience subject a 3-year-old foster kid to that weather, not even for a really, really important game. So I brought up a bottle of 2001 Sterling merlot and built a fire instead.

** meaning that if I can score box seats.

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Can't really call this a DEmotivator

Happy Anniversary, sweetie.

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An abashed socialism

The governor of the Republic of Texas issues a timely warning:

Gov. Rick Perry had some pretty strong comments about the Obama administration on Wednesday in Midland, saying, “This is an administration hell-bent on taking America towards a socialist country.”

The only problem is that Obama is not hell-bent, but rather heck-bent.

Even on those occasions where politicians have a good point, like Ted Kennedy's* "Robert Bork's America" speech** it seems they cannot help removing from it all sense of proportion. So it is with Perry and the conservatives' complaints about "socialism." Even El Presidente Pasado, as responsible as anyone - or more responsible, because all the while he was doing it he warned against it - for the current move toward government ownership of everything, is making such a complaint. The problem is, it's not really socialism, or at least not in the "hell-bent" sense.

At the turn of the twentieth century, socialism was on the rise worldwide, not just as a reality, but more importantly as an ideology. The combination of a modernist belief in the perfectibility of man and a faith in the omniscience of science led people to believe that an enlightened and scientific government could impose upon its subjects an organization of the means of production that would benefit them all***. Mises, of course, showed the impossibility of socialism "working" in theory by demonstrating that the lack of a market-driven pricing mechanism meant that socialism ran blind - it simply could not determine how much of what should be produced. The socialists who had the chance the world over showed its impossibility in practice. As a result, no one today truly believes that socialism is more efficient or more rational than capitalism. If you don't believe that, find the quote where Obama says the government would be better at making cars than its quasi-private agency, GM.

And yet, the government now owns (or at least insures) through its various agencies nine-tenths of all new mortgages, and at a tremendous loss. It provides insurance through its 80%-owned AIG. It owns parts of Citi and other huge, failing banks. And yet it seeks - at least in print - to get rid of these as quickly as it can make a profit doing so. What kind of socialism is this?

It is not the socialism of the ideologue but of the slacker; it is the short-run easy way out of the problems caused by half-assed capitalism combined with credit excess. It is a socialism that is ashamed of itself. It's not a belief in the efficiency of government direction: not even the proponents of "public option" insurance believe that it will provide better service, they assert that the increased competition will force the private insurers to provide better service. This is a huge distinction, and one that is missed by those like Perry because they are more interested in making political hay than in making widgets efficiently.

Now perhaps this latent belief in competition is traceable to Reagan's assertions about government, but it is no mere ideological leftover; rather it is a demonstrated truth. Obama is taking us toward socialism - the government ownership of all means of production - but it is not the confident socialism that forcibly communalizes farming, it is the bureaucratism of a people too comfortable to put up with the risks and losses that competition necessitates. They demand the benefits of competition without its costs. If, against all odds, the "Public Option" should prove so competitive that it actually bankrupted private insurers, they simply would ask for, and receive, a bailout.

Of course, it will not work: tying mountain climbers together may save one who slips, but when half of them slip they all die. But at least we won't be forced to call each other "comrade" all the way down.

* Ted Kennedy: keeping the world safe from Mary Jo Kopechne since 1969.

** I don't agree with the speech. In fact, I think it was unadulterated rubbish. It just serves as the best example I can think of of a politician taking a defensible position, de-contextualizing it, and driving it to such an extreme that it becomes, well, unadulterated rubbish.

*** Though it was a given that it would benefit the organizers most of all.

Labels: Socialism

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Can you believe this crap?

Now I've got to buy another new computer.

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The Missouri Bogeyman

So anyway, the lovely and gracious Rogue is on the west coast this week, so I figured that since I had to shuffle TK to and from day care today, I'd take a day of vacation and start plotting out this thesis. I penciled in what I needed to prove and how I was going to prove it, scratched out the chapters, identified more than a dozen recurring themes; basically I decided how I was going to expand the Good Hater term paper by an order of magnitude. Then I started organizing one of the "internal" chapters. It all went well until I discovered that the speech that would serve as that chapter's crescendo was on my computer, which not coincidentally is also visiting the west coast this week. Train of thought, meet Cliffs of Insanity.

The chapter had to do with the use of John Brown's name to scare Suthrins, specifically how an abolitionist preacher named Higginson wanted to create a regiment of cavalry, led by John Brown, Jr.*, who would invade and terrorize Virginia as soon as they seceded. It didn't really work out that way, as the regiment that was supposed to harry Richmond eventually ended up a mere company burning houses in Westport, Missouri.

But then I remembered meeting a guy from Missouri who told me that, when he was a little kid, if he was making noise in his bed late at night, his mom would come into his room and warn him in hushed tones, "If you don't be quiet, Old Brown is going to get you."

So maybe it worked after all.

* Then he explained that the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no Virginian would surrender to the Dread Pirate Westley.

Labels: history, Obscure Movie Quotes

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Who needs stimulus?

We've got him:

...with unemployment surging and the President’s poll ratings sinking, there’s growing debate about what—if anything—the President can do about the situation...

The President took his first public step in confronting the issue as well as restless voters Thursday, saying he would hold a December summit to joblessness. The brief news conference also appeared to signal that the administration had ruled out another stimulus package.

Whatever comes from the "summit to joblessness" will not be called a stimulus package, even if its ostensible purpose - to create jobs by spending oodles of newly-printed money - is identical to the original stimulus*. To call for another stimulus is to admit that the prior one failed, and that's not going to happen.

But then again, we don't need a stimulus package if the mere spending of money is sufficient to generate economic growth. The government is currently injecting into the economy 176 thousand million dollars, or about the amount of El Presidente Pasado's stimulus, every month. It is incredible that two years ago, Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Edwards were talking about spending $25-$50 billion to jump start the economy. Now we are hitting that supine equine with such a tazer shot every single week in hopes that it will get back up and run.

It won't, maybe never again. That economy where we all got rich selling our houses to each other is gone, and all those people who were employed building and inspecting houses or running strip-mall drapery stores are going to have to find other work to do.

And it might not be paid work. With the Fed starting to talk about a jobless recovery - which is shorthand for "jobs are not coming back" - what is not going to change is the economy. What's going to change is the attitudes of the people whose buying and selling and eating and dying make up the economy. If there are fewer jobs, eventually fewer people will look for them, which will bring the unemployment numbers down naturally**.

When debt falls, and it will, then the standard of living will fall, because our dearly-departed recent prosperity was simply a function of living beyond our means. And a reduced standard of living requires fewer people working to support it. I fully expect that we will soon see stirrings of a resurgence of *gasp* the single-income family, where one parent goes off to paid work and the other does work that is not so paid. Wow, how Ward Cleaver is that?

* Or as Huck would remind us, stimuli.

** I don't agree with those who want to add "people who are no longer looking for work" into the unemployment rate. If you're not looking for work, then the fact that you don't have a job is hardly a failure of government. Of course, if you want a job and don't have one, that's usually not a failure of government either.

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More like commiseration

Even while we deny it, the Brits think we're going to come knocking for more men:

President Obama is to ask members of Nato to provide up to 4,000 more troops to help to break the deadlock in Afghanistan.

Mr Obama is poised to confirm a surge of more than 30,000 US combat troops, according to senior military sources. He will also urge the rest of Nato to provide thousands of soldiers to train new recruits to the Afghan National Army (ANA).

His appeal is set to be largely ignored, however...

The Brits will suck it up and send more, not because there's any chance of "winning," but because they are being good allies. So is Turkey. But I do wonder about that last sentence. Wasn't Obama supposed to be the guy who would wow our allies into joining us in hopeless causes rather than just pointing and laughing from the sidelines?

But I kind of feel bad for Obama here*; he like the rest of the Democrats pinned his war hero hopes on Afghanistan, because a) it was quieter than Iraq, and b) we have absolutely no national interest there. That was supposed to make it an easy and morally pure victory.

The second is quite important. After years of chanting "No War for Oil" there was no way the Dems were going to get into a position where they can be accused of the same**. So while the Dems love war just as much as Republicans - and while their PI*** demands they go to war somewhere - they prefer it be in places like the Balkans where we so obviously have nothing to gain that their motives cannot be brought under suspicion.

Who knew war could be group therapy for liberals?

* Much like I feel bad for the Bears.

** Are we still in Iraq? I can never tell.

*** Patriotic Insecurity. If a person complains that someone else is questioning his patriotism, the complainer is guaranteed to be a Democrat. Republicans seem immune to having their patriotism questioned, which fact makes Democrats cry bitter tears into their chablis.

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Labels: technology

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The Arrogance of Sports Columnists

on full display:

Brad Childress spent Sunday watching football, and it didn't surprise the Vikings coach to see the Bears lose to Arizona and the Packers fall to the Bucs.

The losses by the Bears and the Packers gives the Vikings a three-game lead in the North Division.

"Yeah, I'm surprised, but anything can happen on any Sunday in this deal," he said.

Sometimes I wonder if reporters don't believe the answers to their stupid questions, or simply don't care.

Labels: press

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Labels: demotivators

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Good Hater and etcetras

You've doubtless noticed that it's been a bit slow around here, but it hasn't been slow around here, if you know what I mean.

Last week was the first half of my history geek assessment test, 15 essays in three hours in which the department picks out 8 people or events in US history and the student has to identify and explain them. They are also bracketed in pairs and you have to write an essay on each of the four pairs explaining why one of them is more significant. The four winners "advance" and you write two more essays, then the winners, well, let's just say the War of 1812 beat out the Fourteenth Amendment in the finals.

I was talking to Rebel Nun afterward and she expressed astonishment that George Hoyt didn't win. Good thing he wasn't in it, I guess. But since the world half is Monday, I've spent the last few days studying up on the Silk Road, the French Revolution, and Charles De Gaulle rather than blogging.

That doesn't mean Good Hater has been forgotten, as I did find some more information on the first guy he ever killed (with more on the way), my mother let me piggyback on her genealogy website subscription so I now have the full text of one of his speeches that was carried in William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, and I found in the comments here a 6-month old note from a guy whose grandfather served in the regiment and who has info to share. I guess I need another filing cabinet, too.

So after Monday I'll have only two tests on medieval Europe to worry about and then I can turn my attention back to the Border War.

That said, though the Vikings don't play tomorrow, Fort Scott (now ranked #2 in the NJCAA) has a playoff game here at 1:30, so no history for me.

After all, a guy's gotta have his priorities straight.

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Jozum says

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Time to man up

Obama seems to forget he asked for this job:

MADISON, Wis. (Reuters) - A year after his historic election, President Barack Obama sought to remind Americans on Wednesday the biggest problems he is grappling with -- from the economy to the war in Afghanistan -- are the legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush...

"We had record deficits, two wars, frayed alliances around the world," Obama added.

And a year later, we have record deficits (four times as big as Bush's), two wars (one of which Obama is looking to expand), and frayed alliances around the world (that Obama seems to be doing his best to further unravel). That's a hard year's work. Makes me wonder why the article claims Obama is struggling with Bush's legacy. In many ways, he has surpassed it already.

But the sad part is not that Bush left the gas tank on E when he turned over the car of state, it's that Obama is constantly complaining about it. And it seems that the further and faster he drives, the louder his complaints get. It's unseemly. You wanted to drive, amigo, so quit your whining and drive.

Labels: Obamarama

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Mom the Bible Scholar

is going to teach us about history and gay marriage:

grow up people.

The Romans practiced it (The men would marry women and the men would have boyfriend sexual partners....).

In other words, the Romans didn't practice gay marriage. In fact, no one has practiced it in 6000 years of recorded human history; we suddenly discovered it a decade or so ago and now it's supposed to be self-evident? I do find it interesting, though, that given that marriage has always been heterosexual - even in nations that existed long before Christians or Christianity - and those nations have also practiced homosexuality, that after all this time the most sophisticated pro-gay marriage arguments still come down to, "Christians sure are mean" and "It's not faaaAAAAIIIiiir." It's as if these nations never had any reason to design marriage the way they did other than to be mean.

Now, doubtless the Romans on occasion practiced homosexuality (else Paul would have little to complain about in Romans 1) but if we're going to look to the Romans for our laws, we might want to consider the law known as adulterium, under which both adulterers were stripped of half of their property and banished to separate islands, while if a husband found out his wife was cheating and refused to prosecute her in the courts, then he could himself be prosecuted for running a whorehouse. This law, passed under Augustus sometime around 18bc, was actually a liberalization of the Roman code; under ancient Roman law, an adulterous wife could be legally killed by her husband*. The Romans were not exactly swingers.

But that's not all, we also have a lesson in ancient writing:

Hell it was practiced even before the Bible was 'invented' and you don't know how accurate the 'Bible' because most of it was verbal until written word 'was invented' , (and you know the telephone game goes, not everything is passed 100%)......is ... if you want me to go into that, I will but that will be a whole new post about it.

That would be quite a post, I'm sure, filled with all manner of momly wisdom. But it is rather funny to see such scholars claim that most of the Bible was "verbal until [the] written word was invented," as writing was widespread in the Ancient Near East some 16 centuries before Moses is supposed to have set chisel to stone. "No writing in Moses' day" is an ultra-modern** scholarly assumption; fortunately it was one of the first assumptions of bible scholars proven incorrect when grave-robbing was promoted to science 150 years ago.

But I do wonder about the word "most" here in conjunction with the scriptures. While some (poorly) argue that Moses is based on oral tradition, and while a few argue (even more poorly) that the Gospels are, I wonder how they manage to make the letters of Paul and the general epistles (which make up nearly half of the books of the Bible) oral. The minor prophets (another dozen books) are generally considered, even by liberal scholars, to have written some or all of the books named for them, which takes us over half, and the major prophets with the exception of Daniel are all believed, even by liberals*** to have been written rather than passed mouth-to-mouth. So even if we assume all the historical works from Moses through Nehemiah were passed via the telephone game - a very bad assumption - we still could not get to "most."

I would insert a very smarmy and condescending sentence here, but I don't want to talk bad about somebody's mother.

* Alimony? HA!

** by which I mean, 18th Century

*** As Wikipedia helpfully states in the case of Isaiah, "Critics often reject the unity of the work as such would require that the author had intimate knowledge of future events— a possibility precluded by the Naturalism under-girding much of higher criticism." In other words, the main reason for rejecting the authorship of the prophets has less to do with history than with a philosophical presumption that makes prophecy itself impossible.

Labels: bible

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A Rare Sighting

Labels: McCain

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Just making it up

It's easier that way:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan. Trouble is, only 508 people work there...

But officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.

"If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

I'm not sure how one goes about even arguing with people who insist on their own definitions for words. In no one else's universe but Obama's does giving more money to an employee to do the same work constitute "saving a portion" of someone's job. In his magical realm, you can start with 508 jobs, end with 508 jobs, and save 935 in the meantime. At least until the clever little monkeys at the AP try to make names for themselves at Obama's expense.

But given that Obama is considering a second stimulus - even though it will be very carefully not called that*, he would probably be better off from here on out just forgetting this one ever existed. It's as indefensible as it is unmeasurable, and the longer the Administration spends trying to justify it with any specifics at all, to that extent they simply make themselves look fools.

But the fact that they would be better off treating it like a psycho ex-girlfriend is irrelevant; that's exactly what they won't do. If this administration were to admit that spending money they don't have does no actual good, they would simply have nothing to do for the next 3 years.

And no one wants to be in a big, important, powerful job and not have anything to do.

* and is actually a third stimulus anyway, unless Republican spending somehow doesn't count.

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Not those kind of resorts

California resorts to highway robbery:

Starting Sunday, cash-strapped California will dig deeper into the pocketbooks of wage earners -- holding back 10% more than it already does in state income taxes just as the biggest shopping season of the year kicks into gear.

Technically, it's not a tax increase, even though it may feel like one when your next paycheck arrives. ...Think of it as a forced, interest-free loan: You'll be repaid any extra withholding in April.

Without interest, natch. California will gladly pay you* in April for a hamburger today, but in the meantime, there they go sucking a bunch of money out of the economy. I mean, how are people supposed to spend themselves rich if California keeps taking all their money?

There are a lot of people howling about how evil this is, too many to link. California is just cheating people out of the interest they are due, they say: California is forcing them to loan money they could be using to feed their families. Boo hoo, woe is us.

I guess I have only two responses. First, if one believes in the idea that withholding of income for taxes is a good idea**, how can you then complain at what rate the state sets that withholding? They are only raising that withholding 10%, which means there's 90% which they seem to think is just fine. What's up with that? But that's the small issue.

The big issue is that California will be the first state to go bankrupt, maybe as soon as next year. Purposely withholding money now they will have to refund in mere months is simply more evidence (if it was needed) that the state is in a financial death spiral; it cannot pay its bills now and it certainly cannot pay the larger bills it is accumulating. When you eat your seed corn, starvation is on the way.

Couldn't happen to a nicer group of legislators, IMO.

* with an IOU

** I don't, most people do.

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Labels: demotivators

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