Field Trip

I'm taking #2 Son to the National Infantry Museum at Ft. Benning.  It's getting back in the car after the trip from Texas, but it's good time together for just the two of us.

Back later.

Ronnie Dunn - Cost of Livin'

(Image source)

Stalin famously said that one death was a tragedy, but a million was a statistic.  What we hear on the news reports of the unemployed are statistics.  It's easy to miss that these events are millions of tragedies.

And so we look to artists to remind us of the human side of the cold, clinical numbers.  There's a Country Music song for that.

Ronnie Dunn is best known as half of the duo Brooks and Dunn.   Dunn is performing on his own now, with a timely song that reminds us that behind the statistics, are the tragedies.  In their millions.



Cost of Livin' (Songwriters: Ronnie Dunn, Phillip Coleman)

Everythin' to know about me
Is written on this page
A number you can reach me
My social and my age

Yes, I served in the army
It's where I learned to shoot
Eighteen months in the desert
Pourin' sand out of my boots

No, I've never been convicted of a crime
I could start this job at any time

I got a strong back, steel toes
I rarely call in sick, a good truck
What I don't know I catch on real quick
I work weekends, if I have to, nights and holidays

Give you forty and then some
Whatever it takes
Four dollars and change at the pump
The cost of livin's high and goin' up

I put Robber down as a reference
He's known me all my life
We attend the same church
He introduced me to my wife

I gave my last job everythin'
Before it headed south
Took the shoes off of my children's feet
Food out of their mouths

Yesterday my folks offered to help
But they're barely gettin' by themselves

I got a strong back, steel toes
I rarely call in sick, a good truck
What I don't know I catch on real quick
I work weekends, if I have to, nights and holidays

Give you forty and then some
Whatever it takes
Three dollars and change at the pump
The cost of livin's high and goin' up

I'm sure a hundred others have applied
But rumor has it you're only takin' five

I got a strong back, steel toes
I'm handy with a wrench
There's nothin' I can't drive
There's nothin' I can't fix

I work sunup to sundown
Ain't too proud to sweep the floors
The bank has started callin'
And the wolves are at my door

Four dollars and change at the pump
The cost of livin's high and goin' up

In this political season, remember that it's not all about scoring points.

Four Star sez: it's secure because it's teh cloud

Can't hack the cloud.  Wait, what?

Alan finds a Four Star who needs to wipe the drool from his chin.  Seems that the Brass thinks that moving crappy security from the physical realm into a set of Datacenter racks will magically sprinkle the security dust on everything.

Ooooooh kaaaaaay.

Because nobody would ever figure out how to hack the cloud.  I mean, that's just crazy talk.  Next thing, you'll tell me I can't play Playstation Network or something.  Or that Popular Science tells people how to hack the cloud.

I mean, the security of the Cloud is as solid as the Euro.  Srlsy.  You can take that to the bank.

Transparency in 9-9-9

A couple people have commented that one thing they don't like about Cain's 9-9-9 plan is that the national sales tax is new, and a camel's nose under the tent.  While it starts at 9%, what's to keep it from rising - to Europe's 17%, or more?

Cain has a good answer - transparency.  It would be obvious to everyone that the tax had just gone up.  That's in great contrast to today's tax code, where large changes are made every year to the tax code.  One sound bite I remember from yesterday's interview (I don't know if it's true, but it sounds plausible) was that the tax code contains ten million words.  That number changes every year, and the changes always result in more taxes being owed.  A lot of people only find out when they file their tax returns.

With Cain's plan, this sort of "back door" tax increase becomes much more painful for Congress.

Is increased transparency a panacea?  Of course not.  Is it an improvement?  Seems that way.

Herman Cain is a pretty impressive guy

On the drive back home yesterday, I was scanning the radio waves, and ran across a Cain interview at Sean Hannity.  I'm not much of a Hannity fan, but I stuck around to listen to Can.  He's very impressive.

The problem with the debate, he said, was not that the other candidates pig piled on him.  Rather, it's that the format only allowed 60 second answers.  He has a serious program with 9-9-9, and one minute doesn't give enough time to do more than sound bites.  Hannity told him OK, take as much time to explain it.

And Cain did, in depth.  He took probably 5 minutes on why the business depreciation tax implications of his plan will spur job growth.  As I listened, my thought was there's nobody else running who understands this.  Romney and Bachman would understand depreciation, but only from a financial model perspective.  They don't have the background to see how it could energize the jobs market.

I'm not necessarily convinced about Cain's plan - I think that it's a truism that corporations collect taxes, they don't pay them.

But I am utterly convinced that Cain is no dummy, and may in fact be the smartest guy running.  His vision is big, radical stuff.  It's aiming to fix something that is clearly broken. It convinced me to go download his plan and read the details.

This guy might have what it takes.

Seen on I-20

Nothing was left of the truck, as we rolled past it in Vicksburg:

VICKSBURG, Miss. — A Louisiana truck driver was hurt and Interstate 20 at Vicksburg was tied up for hours after an 18-wheeler rolled onto the median and caught fire.

The driver of the FedEx truck told Vicksburg police he was westbound when he heard a pop and lost control of the truck. The truck rolled across the median, almost reaching the eastbound lanes, and burst into flames.

The accident happened at about 4:30 a.m. The truck was still smoldering at 9.

The only thing left of the truck was metal, although it looked like someone had taken a can opener to it.  Traffic wasn't too bad at 2:00 when I went past.  It turns out that the driver is OK.  I thought for sure that something that bad would have killed someone.

Blog later.

Epic Win

... is epic.  Yeah, that's two in a day.  It's a travel day.  Besides, you don't want uberposts two days in a row ...

Blogroll update

I can't believe that I missed this, but SpeakerTweaker is blogging.  'Nuff said - get you hence.  Sorry it's taken me so long.

And Rock In A Sea Of Chaos has himself a sweet, sweet new gat.  Nice gun pr0n, there!

Welcome to the blogroll.  I keep saying - and people keep ignoring - that I have a reciprocal policy here.  If you've added me to your blogroll, let me know.

Dear Outdoor Marketing Company

If you're going to spam your target, and if one of them (despite his better judgment) replies to try to see if you're legit or just a clueless droid, it's considered Best Marketing Practice to actually, you know, reply.

You sent me this:

Kindest Editor:

This is Jeff Thruston from the Nevada based outdoor marketing company Bernard & Associates and we love your gun site! We have been in the outdoor industry for some thirty years. You may have seen our work with clients like Bass Pro Shops and Sporting Classics Magazine.

How very nice for you.

We want to reach out to you with a gift from the Boone and Crockett Club, made possible by our friends at Hornady -for you or your website's readers. In addition, we have some important news that affects all of us within the hunting and fishing industry.

We have identified your site as one we wish to partner with. We would like to invite you to participate in Boone and Crockett Club's Blogger Appreciation Program and receive a complimentary Associate Membership to the Boone and Crockett Club.

My reply (as I said, against my better judgment):

Jeff, thanks for the kind words and the offer.

I'm interested, though.  You say that you love my gun site.  What particularly do you like?

[crickets]

Manners cost you nothing, Jeff.  To anyone who thinks I'm being harsh, I replied a week ago.  All I hear are crickets.

So no thanks, Jeff.  Although it is a very kind offer indeed.

XXOO,

"Kindest Editor"

P.S. To the nice folks at Hornady's marketing department, you might consider a different spammer.  kthanxbai.

You made Baby Cucumber cry

Jesus wept

Fortunately, the Idiot Crossing is much easier to move.  You should be good to go, Scooter.

Gonna be a good day, Scooter

I'm headed home tomorrow.  Gonna be a long day, but it's always good when you're going home.

I must watch this film about Seventeenth Century musket and pike battle

It looks pretty realistic.  Viggo Mortensen's Spanish even sounds pretty good, at least to my untrained ear.

Or you could go hard core re-enactment.  I knew we Colonials liked to dress up in "Civil War" garb, but didn't know that they liked to do that in Her Britannic Majesty's  scepter'd isle:

TheOnesDay® No. 16

It's Wednesday, time to mock our Communist-In-Chief.  And who better to mock a commie that the biggest commie of all time?



Laugh, kulak.  Louder.

The Fifth American Republic

Barack Obama is a communist.  That's a low schoolyard insult, even though it's true, but it doesn't matter.  You see, Mitt Romney is also a commie.  No, this isn't yet another Mitt Romney rant.  All of our political establishment are commies, and have been for a long time.  Buckle up, because this is an uberpost.

I often hear the expression "we're not going to vote ourselves out of this."  The older I get it seems, the longer the pelt of my Wookie Suit becomes, and so I can sympathize with people who think we've lost something, something that we won't be getting back easily.

Some ideas which had been stewing in my subconscious since August (!) coalesced when I read a post by Kevin Baker, quoting a John Ringo novel:

(The party) leadership recognizes that in return for supporting a seemingly populist agenda, they can obtain all the votes they require to remain in power. Even the most cursory analysis of their actions and attitudes, however, indicates that they are not populists but, in fact, are strong antipopulists who actively despise their voting base. This....is proven by their efforts to reduce public educational systems to a level most grade-school children (in other countries) have surpassed, with the excuse that this curriculum is all that the students can handle. They have made the inner-city population base totally dependent on the government, which they control.

Well yeah.  Our elites are contemptible - everyone agrees with this, and by "everyone" I mean everyone.  But the issue isn't whether we can restore a lost past of Ordered Liberty.  The question is whether, like Plato's mistaken idealization of Sparta, we yearn for a past that never really was:

Bertrand Russell wrote of this in his A History of Western Philosophy (Allen and Unwin, 1946, p. 114):

To understand Plato, and indeed many later philosophers, it is necessary to know something of Sparta.  Sparta had a double effect on Greek thought: through the reality, and through the myth.  Each is important.  The reality enabled the Spartans to defeat Athens in war; the myth influenced Plato's political theory, and that of countless writers.

And so to our Republic.  What is the reality, and what is the myth?  It's here we go down Moldbug's rabbit hole, but a marvelous rabbit hole it is:

A few things must be dispensed with. The more obvious is that the US is governed by the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment as encoded in the US Constitution. We are in fact governed by the Puritan concept of ordered liberty, and all the revolution, liberty, freedom, representation blah blah blah crap was only used to transfer power from the British aristocracy to the Puritan merchant and banker elite, and to keep it firmly there. They are assisted by various hunchbacked toadies, notably the Quaker/Methodist/other pacifist Christian bourgeoisie and the Jewish merchants and bankers, but these people should not be mistaken as having any executive function.

...

The PQJs [Puritans/Quakers/Jews - Borepatch] nonetheless thought communism was an excellent form of social organization for the rest of the world- Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America- and the preferred replacement for older authoritarian social systems. Representative democracy could too easily be hijacked by the old elites, as was the constant danger in the West.

And Moldbug suggests that it's not just Eastern Europe, either:

First, I believe anti-Americanism is best described as an epiphenomenon of Universalism. The single most significant fact about the world today is that sixty-two years ago it was conquered by a military alliance whose leader was the United States, and whose creed of battle was this nontheistic adaptation of New England mainline Protestantism. I don't think it's a coincidence that the European ruling class holds essentially the same perspectives that were held at Harvard in 1945. The US Army did not shoot all the professors in Europe and replace them with Yankee carpetbaggers, but the prestige of conquest is such that it might as well have.

...

In the 1940s, America invaded Europe, rather than the other way around. Therefore, we would expect to see more political diversity in America than in Europe, for much the same reason there are more dialects of English in Britain than in the US. The Englishmen who came to the US were by no means uniformly distributed across England, Scotland and Wales, and the randomizing process of migration tended to homogenize their speech and create a lingua franca. Just as the English of Appalachia retains Elizabethan tropes which have long since disappeared in the home country, the Universalism of Europe has a kind of New Deal purity which the fray of American politics has long since diluted.

The idea is that what we're seeing today with elitist government goes back very, very far.  The Cold War was not a Kabuki dance between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.  It was a Kabuki dance between Western traditions in the United States, the elitists vs. the Populists:

Recent American history is plagued by dishonesty. One of my guiding principles when thinking about recent American history is to assume that every prominent American from the mid-20s to the mid-50s found a way to make himself acceptable to the communists. If an American during this period was unable to find a way to make himself acceptable to the communists, he wouldn’t have been prominent. [Sarah Palin could not be reached for comment. - Borepatch]

...

I assumed – last week – that Eisenhower would have similar connections.

So, in response to Ike’s defenders, I planned to dig through Ike’s connections and see what turned up.

Fortunately, Moldbug chimed in to the comments to point out that Ike chose Joseph Fels Barnes to ghostwrite his memoirs. I guess he couldn’t find any non-CPUSA members to write his book. Moldbug also adds, "Eisenhower did not keep Acheson as Secretary of State, but he kept the Acheson-Hiss State Department – and indeed collaborated quite enthusiastically in purging its enemies. This was not an accident or a mistake." Indeed, what could be more complicit with communism than not purging the State Department post-Hiss?

...

The Birchers believe that Ike stopped short while the USA was defeating the Germans so that the Soviets could capture more territory. I have no idea if this is true. It probably doesn’t matter anyway, since the Acheson-Hiss State Department was going to make sure the Soviets got more than their fair share.

Moldbug amplifies this battle, and then we'll get to the meat of the argument here:

It is not that the American left was the tool of Moscow. In fact, it was the other way around. From day one, the Soviet Union was the pet experiment of the bien-pensants. It was Looking Backward in Cyrillic. It was the client state to end all client states.

...

The theory of Russia as a client state of the American left helps us understand the behavior of the great Communist spies of the 1940s, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. Essentially all significant institutions of today's transnational world community - the UN, the IMF, the World Bank - were designed by one of these gentlemen, whose role in passing American documents to Soviet military intelligence is now beyond dispute. John Stormer was right.

Or was he? The thing is that while, technically, Hiss and White were certainly Soviet agents, they hardly fit the profile of a traitor like Aldrich Ames. Hiss and White were at the top of their professions, respected and admired by everyone they knew. What motivation could they possibly have for treason? Why would men like these betray their country?

The obvious answer, in my opinion, is that they didn't see themselves as betraying their country. The idea that they were Russian tools would never have occurred to them. When you see a dog, a leash, and a man, your interpretation is that the man is walking the dog, even if the latter appears to be towing the former.

Hiss and White, in my opinion, believed - like many of their social and cultural background - that the US had nothing to fear from the Soviet Union. They saw themselves as using the Soviets, not the other way around, helping to induce the understandably paranoid Russian leadership to integrate themselves into the new global order.

So a Puritan drive towards the perfectibility of mankind drives the entire political establishment - including Presidents like Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush - to support what on the face would be far left wing policy positions.

They're all dirty commies, ever one of them.  Objectively speaking, of course.  Think I'm joking?



The Cold War continues, as Moldbug relates:

Anti-Americanism, in this interpretation, is the organizing ideology of an empire. Call it the Blue Empire. The Blue Empire is an American empire, and its headquarters are in Foggy Bottom and Cambridge and Times Square. Anti-Americanists have no idea that they are in fact serving the needs and wishes of the Blue Empire. But then again, why would they?

The Blue Empire's bitter enemy is the Red Empire, whose headquarters is in Arlington and (for the moment [Written in 2007 - Borepatch]) Pennsylvania Avenue. The Red Empire is currently defending itself in Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia - former clients such as Chile, Spain, Portugal, South Vietnam and South Africa having fallen to the Blue side. (The Red Empire still has strong clients in Asia, though, such as Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia.)

If we were going to vote ourselves out of this, we would have done it 60 years ago.  But even then, it wasn't really America.  Moldbug yet again:

By my count, Anglophone North America ex Canada is on its fifth legal regime. The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.

Of course, all these coups are confirmed by the principle of adverse possession. Otherwise we would find ourselves looking for the rightful heirs of Metacom, or Edward the Confessor, or whoever. Nor is there any automatic reason to treat any of these five regimes as better or worse than any of the others. If, like me, you're tired of the Fourth Republic and would like to see it abolished, all we know about its successor is that it will be the Fifth Republic. It has no need to resemble the Third, the Second or the First.

We snicker at the French, always rewriting their Constitution.  We gloss over that our Constitution has been a "living document" at least since the time of James Polk.  At least the French had the decency to write their changes down in public.


Archaeologists unearth layers of detritus, reconstructing ancient living patterns from the cast off, scattered rubble.  Similarly, we can observe the layers of parasitic attachment to the Res Publica.  RTWT, all of the links.


And so Obama is a commie, as it Mitt Romney, George Bush major, and Eisenhower.  Non-commies (Sarah Palin) are fiercely excluded from the political Great Game.  What's different is that information flow now is possible outside of the political and intellectual elite.  The perceived legitimacy of this class is now at a historic low.  How will it end?


Who can tell?  But one thing is clear - it cannot continue as it is, with the Elite papering over the cracks with increasingly low caliber drivel.  The Republic waits, expectantly.  Maybe it will just be a higher caliber drivel.


The Fifth American Republic does not have to look at all like what has come before.

Observe your Philosopher Kings in action

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Night operation of the windmills in the North Allegheny Windpower Project has been halted following discovery of a dead Indiana bat under one of the turbines, an official with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday.

The finding marks only the second location where an Indiana bat has been found dead under a wind turbine. Two Indiana bats were found under turbines in the Mid-west, said Clint Riley, supervisor for Fish and Wildlife’s Pennsylvania field office.

“While finding the dead bat is not good news for any of us, it does show the monitoring works,” Riley said from his State College office.

The find is significant because the Indiana bat is an endangered species and is protected by the federal Endangered Species Act.

Why do Environmentalists hate endangered species?  It's a mystery.  And why do they think they're ever so much more clever than you or I?  Same mystery.

Will every Progressive who ever said the words "Republican war on science" just shut up and sit down in the back of the room?  Grownups are talking.

Oh, and if you're keeping score, shutting the windmills down at night drops their load factor (time when they actually generate usable electricity) from around 22% to about 14%.  So electricity from them doesn't cost 5 times as much, it costs 8 times as much.  Why do Environmentalists hate the poor?

Man, such a lot of mysteries ...

(via)

I need to watch this

It sounds like "Moon over Parador" meets "The Seven Samurai".

Awesome mashup

... is awesome.

These are not the steenkin' badges you're looking for ...

Tick. Tock.

Three days until I head home.  I'm in full bore count down mode.

Any folks in the Atlanta area want to rendezvous on the 28th (Friday after work) or 29th (maybe meet up to shoot)?

Why I will not vote for Mitt Romney, version 3.0

I've been roundly taken to task in the comments here when I say that we're better off with a Republican Congress and Obama as President than we are with a Republican Congress and Mitt Romney as President.  Well, once more into the breach, dear friends.

I lived in Massachusetts when Mitt was Governor.  I got to watch him for years.  I think I know how he thinks.  It's said that a firebrand must eat fire, even if he must kindle it himself (as we see with Obama encouraging anti-semitic Occupy Wall Street protesters saying things not considered fit for polite society since World War II).  Mitt isn't a firebrand, he's a policy wonk.

Well, how much Policy can a Policy Wonk wonk, if a Policy Wonk could wonk policy?  Quite a lot, actually:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

December 7, 2005

ROMNEY ANNOUNCES STRICT NEW CLEAN AIR REGULATIONS TO TAKE EFFECT JANUARY 1

Governor Mitt Romney today announced that Massachusetts will take another major step in meeting its commitment to protecting air quality when strict state limitations on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants take effect on January 1, 2006.

...

In the development of greenhouse gas policy, Romney Administration officials have elicited input from environmental and economic policy experts. These include John Holdren, professor of environmental policy at Harvard University and chair of the National Commission on Energy Policy ...

He looks for "problems" that a well-run Government can "solve" by judicious application of policy wonkery.  And who are the policy advisors he is pleased to help his team of expert wonkers winnow the policy wheat from the chaff?

The man who President Obama chose to run his Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Oh, but that's just a one-off, a "black swan" - I mean, it'd never happen again.  Right?  Oh, wait:

It’s no secret that Mitt Romney’s universal-health-care program in Massachusetts was the model for President Obama’s federal law, but the relationship was even tighter than previously known. White House visitor logs show that three Romney aides paid Obama’s team at least a dozen visits, and had at least one meeting with the president himself to help plan the health-care legislation.

The difference between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama is a matter of degree, not of kind.  They are both aggressively expansionist in their view of Government's proper role.  Obama admittedly goes further (some might say much further, but I'm not at all sure about that), but that just describes the length of the vector.  Both point in the same direction.

And so again, let me say that this Republic will be better off with a Republican Congress and Barack Obama putting his Italian loafers on the Oval Office desk for another four years.  The Republican Congress will aggressively resist Obama's every plan, being (rightly) suspicious of his every motive.  That same Republican Congress will not rein in a Romney Administration, feeling the need to "go along to get along".

Romney is likely to be at least moderately successful (at least initially), and so we can expect the sum of wonkish legislation to be formidable indeed.  Looking at Mitt's disastrous legacy in Massachusetts, we will be in a deep pit of fail indeed.

Romney doesn't get it, what we feel in our bones:

In the minds of likely voters, Washington, not Wall Street, is primarily to blame for the financial crisis and the subsequent recession.

He thinks that you can eat yourself thin.  Because a Wonk needs to wonk.  And so this Republic must be running short of really smart policy.

Sure, Obama will have the opportunity to appoint judges, and Justices to the Supreme Court.  That sucks.  But it's unlikely to shift the makeup of the court, as it's the liberal Justices who will retire first.  Would I rather have more Scalias and Thomases?  Sure.  But dig this:

Mitt won't appoint any.

He'll appoint another David Souter.  We don't win this, however it plays out.

We may be screwed either way, but I for one refuse to go gentile into that Dark Night of Statism.  A Stupid Party loss in what should be the easiest election of the last 50 years may shock them out of their complacency.  Maybe not.  But energized, divided government beats what Governor Vector will serve up.

Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law.  Especially this tag: