Month: July 2013

The Left: An Analogy

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What passes for thought on the aggressive post-modern Left:  The Obama-Biden/PeaceNow/ShootTheNRA/FishWithoutABicycle bumper-stickered Prius runs out of gas.  Driver gets out, kicks the bumper, curses the car, and blames the auto industry. Later, he demands Congress raise the mileage on all vehicles to stop this tragedy from happening again.  After all, if the car had been able to go further, he wouldn’t have run out of gas.

The long-term “strategy” of the Left on mortgages and home-owning is to create market failure by bullying the banks through the CRA — with threat of punishment and draconic regulation — to loosen their loan requirements, rather than red-lining, to allow more low-income individuals to buy homes.  Then, when these people can’t pay their mortgages, blame the bank for the foreclosures and the losses and the financial crash, create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency to create regulations that require banks to do the due diligence that they did before the CRA on their own.  In summary: Create Market Failure, Declare Market Failure, Regulate the Market.  It is all about the accumulation of power.  These are people who never question a failed policy, because the solution is more power for them, less autonomy and control for the people they regulate.

Roads and Bridges

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No one has asked or considered what roads would look like if politicians hadn’t taken it upon itself to build them; how much cheaper, better, more durable, more quickly built, how much more imaginative in design. We are only told how no business can survive without them, that government builds them, and, therefore, how no enterprise can exist without government largess.  Consider what complex things those businesses create — and in what quantities — on a daily basis and consider just how idiotic an assertion it is that private enterprise couldn’t build all the roads and bridges we’ll ever need far more effectively. “You didn’t build that” becomes the lament of missed opportunity.

Why the Teleprompter

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An honest man, a man of good principles, those in harmony with those reflected in our Declaration and Constitution, i.e. individual rights and limited government, a nation of laws, not of the whims of regulators and a power-lusting President, can speak off the cuff because there is nothing to hide or finesse or misrepresent.

 

A Pragmatist, someone with _no_ principles but what works in the range of the moment, for example, Joe Biden, can speak off the cuff, because homilies, slogans, and jokes are all he’s got and suitable for all occasions.

 

A dishonest man, a man of rotten principles, those which are antinomic to our own, must lie constantly and very carefully, if he is to mask his agenda, and speaking off the cuff is a minefield that he can only pick his way across with great care and not for long. And the evil are most often the intellectually sloppy and lazy, so Obama says the most damning things when he and his handlers are not paying attention and “on message.”

 

Ask What it Accomplishes

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Re:  Yaron Brook: NSA Monitoring — Should We Be Worried?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39uZ_gpnOR0

Yes. This discussion summarizes the issue concisely. I would go further though: Rand said, paraphrase, Don’t bother to examine a folly, ask yourself what it accomplishes.

I would ask: What does this refusal to name the enemy accomplish? What does the Patriot Act accomplish?

Those are, unfortunately, at this point, easy questions to answer: They give a power-lusting progressive cadre virtually unlimited power, the keys to the government and military of the most powerful country in the world. Why in the Hell would they voluntarily give that up? Sure they express outrage, from Obama to Graham, McCain, and Boehner (I leave out Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and maybe a couple of others, right now), but that outrage seems somewhat staged and, listening to Republicans defending PRISM, merely for the benefit of the constituents, while looking for a way to make what they perceive as a little public relations problem disappear.

In the light Yaron sheds on the issue, its roots in the deliberate failure to name the enemy, The War on Terror can be seen in no other way than The War on the United States of America, a war that is enslaving its citizens and only looking worse day by day.

ELECTRIC CARS, ECO-NONSENSE ON 4 WHEELS

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http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/climatesnapshot/do-electric-cars-cause-more-or-less-climate-pollution-gasoline-cars-take-look

Well, I looked through the 43 references to “climate pollution” in the Vancouver Observer article and saw NO definition of “climate pollution.” However, in the text of the article, Mr. Saxifrage shows his calculation of “tonnes of CO2″: “Result = extra 52 tCO2 to keep driving average car.”
Despite what the U.S. EPA might say, or the IPCC, or the discredited Phil Jones, Michael Mann, et al, there is NO evidence linking manmade CO2 to global warming, merely associations that do not correlate to existing temperature records, not even to those generated out of the models powering the IPCC “recommendations.”

Please have a listen to Dr. Plimer’s informative discussion on the subject, with special attention to the bit about the ocean, limestone, and other CO2-absorbing components of our ecosphere, and certainly not forgetting the PLANTS that cover our Earth, for which CO2 is FOOD (cf. Dark Cycle in any good plant physiology or biochemistry textbook).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rLRObEhC4I

This discussion assumes facts not in evidence. Of course every generation of vehicles has been cleaner than the last; that is also true of manufacturing plants, as management and their employees have to live near them. What I object to is the vilification of technology and, specifically, the automobile and the gasoline that powers it, as some unmitigated evil, to be remedied by using only solar and wind power, while, at the same time, proposing a massive new load on the consumption of electric power, which can only be adequately generated by oil, coal, or nuclear energy, all of which are unacceptable to the epistemologically retarded greens.