Category: Uncategorized

by Smitty

Instapundit links a shiny new dating idea. “Grouper Makes Group Dating Fun & Fashionable“:

It’s a simple yet genius idea that you’re going to wish you had thought of, but two Yale grads, Jerry Guo, 23, and Michael Waxman, 24, beat you to the punch. Launched in June 2011, Grouper is an online social club (currently only in New York City) whose goal is to get you offline as quick and easily as possible and onto a great night out on the town with people you may have never met before. You can use it to find your next date or just to expand your social circle – a Grouper is whatever you make it.

Who, besides those lunatic Christians, would have thought of the notion of getting together in groups for low-stress fun?

The notion of a social middle ground between hermitry and a continuous partner swap seems startling to the modern degenerate hipster. Still, this blog rejoices that technology has enabled said hipster to duplicate online the place where church youth groups have been for a few decades.

Is this an early harbinger of creeping Christianism, though? Could there be some future where post-Goth girls are not State-dependent psychological wrecks, having children by random fathers whereever unpronouncable diseases haven’t sterilized them? Could future generations of Ricky Martin fans rediscover heterosexuality as a path to long-term happiness?

I’m warning the world right now that the World’s Youngest Blogger will be raised in an environment of good, old-fashioned Christian chivalry, where girls are to be respected, protected, and kept at a healthy distance until Destiny has things aligned for maximal enjoyment with minimal stress. In other words, marriage. Sure: he’ll gaff me off, particularly between the ages of 14 and 21, when I enjoy my bout of paternal ignorance. And maybe he goes totally off the rails. But it won’t be for lack of trying on my part.

by Smitty

Fer cryers, Tim Stanley: first, there was the entire George W. Bush administration, but then the Left’s Joeseph Goebbles Memorial Anti-Conservative Hate Fest picked up fresh vigor with the arrival of the Tea Parties:

The slandering of the conservative movement has begun. For the past month, American newspapers have been awash with stories about the religion of various Republican presidential candidates.

For normal, honest people used to extending the benefit of the doubt to others, it has been shocking and disheartening. It would be great if we could have a reasoned, well-tempered discussion with the Left, but the typical Lefty cannot or will not engage in a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. Conservatives have inadvertently arrived at Abuse, instead of the Argument Clinic.

The trick now is to keep up the pressure, as the Left dissolves into a quivering pool of hate, without becoming the Left.

by Smitty

Mead:

It is fun to curse our leaders and throw stones at them, but we should realize that cursing politicians will not create answers where none exist. Sometimes, cursing politicians is a way of whistling in the dark; by grumbling about how stupid and inept they are, we reassure ourselves that answers really do exist and that if more competent people were in office our problems would all be solved.

I’m not sure that’s true. I do think our politicians are getting it wrong: too many on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to shore up the blue social model rather than thinking about how to move beyond it. But in fairness to them, what comes next is not so clear.

The economic impact of the internet has been to wreck the middle man, most recently, Borders.

By breaking the grip on communications enjoyed by the Ruling Class, the internet is exposing and claiming nanny states the world over.

Some are retreating into fascist religious expression, particularly the neighborhood from which I write.

In the West, the Ruling Class is so used to bribing the people of today with the wealth of tomorrow that they lack all courage to do what’s necessary. When a Perry states the obvoius, that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, it’s seen as some raging blasphemy. And it’s hardly a start.

Sorry, Paul Ryan: the Roadmap, while a noble effort to save Holy Progress, is mostly a fool’s errand. The Progressive Era is toast. What is called for is a top down scrub, and transition plan away from the centrally managed system, in favor of one that respects liberty and rewards initiative. Sure, the transition will have to respect the dupes who’ve been worshipping the Golden Calf of Progress the last century; folks under 50 (e.g. me) are going to have to step up and take a haircut. For all our Ruling Class has been pissing down our back and telling us it’s raining these years, the lying swine, they’ll find a surprising maturity in the American populace. You know, the common folk who ran the better part of a million people through the Mall last year and left it cleaner than they found it.

We’re going to have a painful few years, while we get through the trough on the economic sine curve. TANSTAAFL, though we’ve behaved as though Heinlein was wrong for quite a while. The crucial thing at this point is to locate and support the sober leadership necessary to get us off of the road to serfdom, and headed back toward our birthright of liberty.

Don’t know or care who that leader is. Cain? Perry? Bachmann? Palin? McCotter? Santorum? Who cares? As long as they are not a Ruling Class tool, it’s fine by me. Reducing the Presidency from a cheap personality cult and back to a simple, Constitutional executive is what matters. Leave the despair to the Ruling Class worms and their sycophants, say I.

It will get better.

by Smitty

Isn’t this an admission Obama has not been doing all he can for jobs?, asks Prof. Jacobson of BHO’s direction:

Obama directed several federal agencies to identify “high-impact, job-creating infrastructure projects” that can be expedited now, without congressional approval.

Doesn’t this go beyond the usual “What if a Bush had said that?”

It may sound like a reactionary take, but, given the last two years of creepy hijinks from this Administration, one is left to wonder where this is all going.

Furthermore, just what is the Administration going to do that won’t cost more money, when there hasn’t been any for some time? Oh, and this is the last month of the fiscal year. What strange, graft-laden mockeries will emerge?

This is the time to go after the nanny state with a cleaver, not expand it. I hope John Boehner tells the good President to talk to the hand, and that the American people back Boehner to the hilt. Enough of this noise.

by Smitty

Via Memeorandum, the Hill posts: “Obama targets GOP for fall offensive“, emphasis mine:

“Kill the body, and the head will die.” — Joe Frazier

President Obama is preparing to fight a political war this fall on two fronts — the first against Republicans who want his job and the second against Republicans who want to make his job more difficult.

Obama is taking dead-aim at the latter group, targeting Congress in a fall offensive that the president’s reelection campaign hopes will bruise the overall GOP image beyond repair.

Not that I’m in the GOP, but I live close enough to DC that collateral damage from all of this anti-New Tone rhetoric is a concern.

Would that the young man who is whipping himself into a bureucratic frenzy with all this pugilistic talk could come over to someplace ending in -stan and walk around a while in some body armor. I daresay that might help him burn off a little bit of blood sugar. Read the whole thing.

The country needs a calm, serious, honest look at the problems caused by federal overreach, not this silly attempt at a high-school halftime pep talk. Read the whole thing, and then point and laugh. After the chuckle, get back on task brushing these Lefty nitwits aside, in that exceptional American fashion.

That is all.

by Smitty

That’s Krauthammer’s take:

He checks all the boxes. We saw his charm. He’s got the right ideology. He’s well spoken. And he’s got a great story, second generation immigrant. I mean, he gives a story of hope and restoration, which would be I think his theme. I think he’s prohibitively the favorite for number two. And at the very least he’ll be the keynote speaker if he’s not going to be number two.

I don’t know. The GOP ?/Rubio ticket is going to have tough sledding against the Democrat’s Wasserman-Schultz/Schumer ticket. Just sayin’.

by Smitty

Yesterday I wrote a post generally lamenting the fact that the U.S. space program is languishing. That we’ve traded the gosh-wow inspiration of boldly going where no human has gone before in for standing in socialist lines, where everyone has gone before, consuming a significant chunk of their lives.

And I mentioned that I was glad not to be libertarian on this topic, which was deemed a careless friendly-fire incident on Twitter by @GaltsGirl. I asked that she use this as a teachable moment, and she did: Continue reading Libertarians In Space →