The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Solyndra: Feel The Brutality

Posted on | September 17, 2011 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

Amid the sending up of the idiot Lefty ‘Day of Rage’ noise, Dana Loesch drops this little YouTube grenade:

“Now, that’s the SOLYNRDRA advantage: clever acronyms. And child labor.”

Category: Uncategorized

Freaks of Nature

Posted on | September 17, 2011 | 19 Comments

Anatoly Strakhov discovered this rare mutant — a baby seal with reddish fur and blue eyes — among a family of seals on Tyuleniy Island, Russia:

According to the London Daily Mail, this bizarre creature was rescued after the other seals “took an instant dislike to the ginger pup, leaving it to fend for itself.” A similar genetic anomaly was recently discovered in the United States. Read more

Category: Family, Science

Political Correctness Fail: Firshein And Manland

Posted on | September 17, 2011 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

Manland doesn’t have any design flaws, to my eye, (emphasis mine):

An Ikea store in Sydney, Australia, has either set retail shopping forward by three decades or set gender equality back by three decades—you decide: they’re testing out Manland, which is, as one local newscaster describes it, “basically a creche for husbands and boyfriends with short retail attention spans, a place to hang out while their wives and girlfriends run the aisles of Ikea.” Think ultimate man-cave stuff such as video games, foosball tables, free hot dogs, and pinball machines. (Apparently reading books is not encouraged in Manland!) As with Ikea’s childcare creche, women dropping off their husbands and boyfriends are given a buzzer. “After 30 minutes, the buzzer goes off, it reminds you that you have to come pick up your man or else, you know, we may have to all the authorities,” explains one Ikea sales associate. Clearly there are a number of loopholes in this whole program, not the least being the fact that it overlooks gay couples.

It’s not a loophole; it’s a design choice. Ikea is about making money, silly rabbit, not advancing a social agenda. The only business case for advancing a social agenda is that it somehow make money. It’s a furniture store, not a gay bar, Sarah: know the difference.

Update: linked at Three Beers Later.

Category: Uncategorized

Has Walter Russell Mead Figured A Way Around The Iron Law?

Posted on | September 17, 2011 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Maybe he’s explained a way around Pournelle somewhere. I should like to see such an explanation in the context of this:

Ultimately we must either ration health care (death panels and all) or restructure it top to bottom so that it is able to deliver the same or, preferably, much higher levels of care much less expensively. Proponents of a single payer health care system (basically, the kind many European countries and Canada have where the government collects premiums for everyone, sets prices, and pays bills) argue that it is cheaper than our current hybrid (and grossly inefficient and excessively) pricey system.

I agree with the single payer crowd there, but a single payer system only really makes sense under two conditions. The first, as the Spanish are discovering in a very unpleasant way, is that single payer only works if the single payer has plenty of money. If you count on the government to cover your health care, and the cost of health care bankrupts your government so that the health care system goes down as well, it’s hard to call that a success.

The second problem is related to it: single payer would be more feasible if the technology of health care has frozen. That is, if we already knew the best way to treat all diseases, manage hospitals, divide up responsibilities between different types of health care professionals and so on, a single payer approach might make sense.

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy, just to rephrase it for fun, says that homo bureaucratus lacks predators. That is, for all these metrosexual creeps may do nothing useful to add to the population of the country, they sure now how to make an org chart ‘splode.

One huge question here, pertaining to health care and everything else, is: ‘How in the world are we offering feedback to stabilize the size of the bureaucracy and trim it?’ Our first task on the path to sanity is to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the federal government should manage individual health. Yes, some in our society continue to want to make that mistake, but that doesn’t make it any less bloody-minded.

Category: Uncategorized

Ruth Marcus, That Is Some Highly Ignorant Noise You’re Emitting

Posted on | September 17, 2011 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Daily Pundit saw it, and zeroed in on the same section I did, but let me slice it differently, emphasis mine:

It is, at bottom, an argument against the 20th century — specifically against the notion that the Constitution envisions and empowers a muscular federal government able to ensure that its citizens have clean air, healthy food and safe workplaces.

To grasp the radical nature of the constitutional conservative approach, consider the record of every Republican president since the New Deal.

In the first bold place, Marcus, you’re doing nothing more than echoing FDR. In essentially latching onto a Second Bill of Rights, which has never properly been ratified, you tacitly admit you’ve blown by Article V. Way to go.

See, the Constitution precedes the Nude Eel*. If you wanted to show that Constitutional conservatives are radical, you should show their records against the original document, not FyoDoR’s Folly.

Can I recommend some reading to you? Amar’s books on the Constitution and Bill of Rights are actually some decent scholarship. You should read them, Ruth. They might help you look less silly in print.

And these Constitutional Progressives. Workin’ hard, trying to paper over the fact that FDR pulled a masterful Article V end-around. Screw them, their crappy ideas, and the lame web server to which the ideas were published. In its way, it is amusing to see Progressives tacitly admit that they’ve really screwed up, lost the public debate, and now have to work to re-frame the debate. Seventy years late, $14+ trillion short, ya jackwagons.

*Will I burn for that link? Probably.

Category: Uncategorized

Daniel Hannan, Doors Fan

Posted on | September 17, 2011 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

“This is the end,” says Hannan, in the face of a 98% likelihood of Greek default in the bong* markets.

That calls for Morrison:

And then, Ace thinks that America is going to bail out Europe? That had better occur before the end of this administration, then; the likelihood of an opportunity for bloody stupid policy like that shouldn’t come again soon, or the country deserves its fate.

(h/t The Corner)

*Hey, it was a fun typo.

Category: Great Britain

Paul Krugman Remains Free To Drop An Upper-Decker

Posted on | September 17, 2011 | 18 Comments

by Smitty

People may object to the use of a scatalogical term to describe a Krugman excretion, but I submit that the level of perversion on display by the gentleman supports the label. Allow me to object to Krugman’s choice of historical time frame, scope of analysis, boring guilt play, and refusal to understand federalism.

Time Frame Read more

Category: New York Times

Solyndra: Pump and Dump

Posted on | September 17, 2011 | 6 Comments

A Wall Street Journal article quotes an investor in Obama’s bankrupt “green energy” boondoggle describing what the half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee meant: “There was a perceived halo around the loan . . . If we get the loan, then we can definitely go public and cash out.” Ed Lasky at American Thinker explains:

The huge loan would be a selling point in an initial public offering. The company promoters could point out that the loan gave them credibility — that the government had vouched for their viability and prospects.
The private investors would cash out and when the loan came due and the company was unable to pay, taxpayers would be the ones left holding the IOUs.
Take the money and run.

It was a straight-out scam, in other words, with a major Democratic donor as one of the primary beneficiaries. An environmentally-friendly three-card monte game — burning taxpayers instead of burning CO2.

Category: Barack Obama, Scandal
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