Rule 5 Sunday

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by Smitty

Rule 5 Sunday. Last night on Twitter I happened into the #thankaliberal hash tag. And an argument with someone, presumably in CA, that Liberals invented the Internet. Whatevah. I need this post so that ah can get mah head right again.

  • Here’s My Thing brings the Shannon Elizabeth, and Emmy Rossum.
  • The Pirate’s Cove had a pinup reminiscent of my correspondent last night, albeit probably more attractive. I’ll leave her nameless for the sake of good taste.
  • Richard McEnroe brings the Juliana Moreira Spanish lesson. And then there is Orstrylia. Juliana Moreira also checks out the winter games. Finally, there is Brinke Stevens.
  • American Power had a Genevieve Morton SI clip. AP’s camera has weird time travel effects, as he seems to have caught Stacy & Mrs. TOM at the beach during the upcoming road trip out West. Wasn’t aware she was going. Surf’s up!
  • A Conservative Shemale, in a guns & guns moment, juxtaposes Clint Eastwood and Denise Milani.
  • Carol’s Closet had a ‘ladies only’ Rule 5 post. Rule 5 Sunday decrys these blatant outbursts of sexism, and pleads vigorously for a golden, Platonic future in whi–*THUMP* “Shut up!” said Stacy.
  • Dustbury brought out a couple of leap year lovlies. Dustbury is also concerned about Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue:

    …each year the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue seems just a (simulated wayward) hair less inspired than its predecessor, and I think it’s just that the young ladies sporting the suits, or semblances thereof, are just freaking bored with the whole concept.

  • TrogloPundit reported that Danica’s chariot now matches him for attractiveness. Also, Trog’s etymological skills reflect great credit upon the American public school system. And then he wants to use a manufactured malady to excuse his incorrigible behavior. The Trog may be going liberal on us. We must watch his posts carefully for signs of decay.
  • GSGF brings the goth in a post about Israel. I just think GSGF is stone cold brilliant. Also, a PLA cutie dressed as a salad.
  • Yankee Phil brings what may be the ultimate Rule 5 pic. A hottie in uniform on a bike in hip boots firing a gun in full auto. One is tempted to decree that the eschaton, not content with immanentization, has arrived. Not content with that, though, he brings Rissi Palmer. Helena Bonham Carter plays both the Red Queen in AiW, and is linked to Tim Burton. But no Led Zeppelin tie-in, apparently. Finally, a selection of retro clips.
  • SI VIS PACEM brings the culture with Jean-Léon Gérôme and Frazetta.
  • Pegu Blog offers the recipe for the ‘Bosom Caresser’. A libation sensation, no doubt.
  • Pop Crunch has a post on the 35 hottest women of wrestling. Annoying audio warning.
  • The Huffington Post has a shot of a bald model. I wouldn’t want to embarrass Baldilocks by including her in a less-than-serious post, but consider this a tip of the hat.
  • Proof Positive brings you Nadine Velazquez.
  • Eye of Polyphemus has gone for a sci-fi makeover (like), and Urkraine’s Yulia Tymoshenko (also like).
  • The Reganite Republican Resistance continues its Czech focus with Helena Houdová.
  • The Classic Liberal enlists Katie Cassidy to remind us all that freedom is not “Public Policy”.
  • House of Eratosthenes’s orgy of Sue Grafton-ism nears its end, as he gets down to Xenia Seeberg and Yasmine Bleeth. Or will he devise some other scheme to traverse the alphabet again? He catches up with Hot For Words, who is apparently no longer a blond.
  • Paco Enterprises brings the Bing and the Andrews Sisters.
  • Fishersville Mike noted some lady Mounties looking fetching in red.
  • Nation of Cowards salutes the entrepreneurial Angie Sanselmente Valencia.
  • No Sheeples Here noted a Duke cheerleader.
  • The Camp of the Saints declares Waterloo on the Boob Wars.
  • The Mind Numbed Robot features Lucy Pinder.
  • At the Point of a Gun had a variety of entries:

Rule 5 Sunday salutes all. Keep the inbox happy. Peace.

Why Do Charles Johnson’s Beliefs Keep Turning Out to Be Delusional?

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Professor Glenn Reynolds has linked my essay about narcissism, scapegoating and paranoia. Speaking of paranoid narcissists, remember when Charles Johnson called the Pentagon shooter an “anti-government right wing extremist of the Ron Paulian persuasion”? 

Wrong again, Chuckles. John Patrick Bedell was a dopehead peacenik loser of the “No Blood for Oil” persuasion who slowly descended into paranoid psychosis:

Bedell . . . had vigorously objected to the government’s role in the 1991 Persian Gulf War since high school, telling relatives that the United States was trying to enrich itself and oil companies, said his brother, 33-year-old Jeffrey Bedell.
But, in about 2002, after the breakup of a long-term relationship with a girlfriend, his skepticism began to turn to deep-rooted suspicion. And soon it became paranoia, his brother said.
Patrick would point skyward, convinced that “they” were watching him. He believed songs he heard on the radio were meant as warnings.  . . .
“There were symptoms of a mental disorder, approaching paranoid schizophrenia,” said Jeffrey Bedell, a former California deputy attorney general who is a financial adviser. . . .
Patrick was perpetually in and out of school, enrolling in undergraduate or graduate programs and sometimes auditing courses. Jeffrey could not recall whether he had worked anywhere. . . .
The Bedells pleaded with him to seek medical help, but he refused. “I would have conversations with him, trying to convince him to stop smoking marijuana, that it was making his thinking more disordered, but he was not receptive to that,” Jeffrey said.

The Pentagon shooter was not a “Paulian.” He was also not a Hayekian, an Objectivist, a Rothbardian or any other sort of libertarian. Nor was he a creationist, a Belgian neo-fascist or a “climate-change denier.”

Patrick Bedell was suffering from a mental illness that cannot be blamed on Charles Johnson’s ideological Scapegoat of the Week. 

The sycophants at Little Green Footballs are enabling Johnson’s delusions of adequacy. He’s so out of touch with reality, he wouldn’t know the difference between a libertarian and a lamb chop.

Analysis Of Lefty Reaction To Sarah On Leno

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by Smitty

Dan Riehl has Stewart’s analysis. Riehl on Stewart, emphasis mine:

Any grand conclusions are silly at this point. But as for the Palin versus Romney match up on TV he looks at, he’s spot on. These types of match ups just don’t work well for Romney. Unfortunately, that’s as much about Romney’s trouble connecting with audiences and crowds, as it is about any Palin charm. Someone with a more Romney-like resume and a dash of Palin’s looseness and grassroots appeal might give her a run for her money in the big picture that matters most, assuming she’s serious about running in 2012.

Only Governor Tim Pawlenty comes to mind.
The Recovering Liberal alludes to Stewart, and then shifts to analyzing Lee Seigel from The Daily Beast. Trying to get into the Lefty head, RL finishes:

Siegel concludes that Palin’s mastery will lead to “the joke being on us” (the left) as she ascends the podium at the 2012 Republican Convention” The only thing that might prevent this is others on the thinking left waking up to the very real threat Palin poses to them and instead of continuing down the same, aloof, strident, attack path recognise that they have, in no small part, created a rod for their own back and create a real opposition to her (which oddly has only come from the, condescending, intellectuals on the right). If they don’t, then they should sit back at enjoy her ascent from a purely social observer vantage and wonder at the blindness of their colleagues.

The Left is giving Sarah the stress test they never gave BHO, possibly out of guilt.
The “condescending intellectuals on the right”, fearing the loss of primacy and priesthood to an outsider, pile on.
All this is more ‘feature’ than ‘bug’. If the lady survives the napalm shower, then she’s answered the mail on whether she can become ‘the American Margaret Thatcher’. If she decides to hang out on the fringe, then fair enough. If she decides to run in 2012, then it’s all over but the get-well-soon cards for the opposition, on the left or right.
I commend her sticking to something she knows, energy policy, but think that hydrocarbons are peripheral to the #1 problem we face: the debt/deficit. It remains to be seen whether anything can be done by anyone about that, however.

Paco’s Struggle Against Homo Bureaucratus

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by Smitty

With some formatting help from me, Paco notes the sad state of the State:

The ostentatious policy-wonkishness of the Obama administration is something that I now have the misfortune of living with every day at my own agency. The primary feature of this bureaucratic fantasy world is an unprecedented number of political employees solidly committed to carrying out Obama’s big-government agenda, but not having the first clue as to how to go about it (or even what “it” is). These people have

  • an insatiable need for information,
  • a congenital inability to effectively process it,
  • a misplaced sense of urgency, and
  • a naïve belief in their ability to influence national policy from within the bowels of a small federal agency that exists pretty much at the margin of economic activity.

They are like piano tuners who, through some extraordinary mix-up in communication, have been called in to do a plumbing job, but are not about to let their ignorance of the difference between an elbow fitting and a drain trap prevent them from tackling the assignment; and they are perfectly willing to run the risk of flooding your basement, secure in the knowledge that, by the time you discover your pool cues and your tax papers floating about like so much debris after a hurricane, they will have moved on to do the Lord’s work elsewhere.

Belief in the soteriological capacity of the State is among the chief bugaboos we must fight.

Yglesias Is As Unimpressive As Brooks

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by Smitty

Here is Matthew Yglesias at Think Knucklehead arguing against Judd Gregg. Yglesias, whose literacy seems challenged, appears to misread deliberately what he quoted from Gregg:

The Senate was structured to be the place where bills which rushed through the House because they have a lot of rules that limit debate and allow people to pass bills quickly, but they don’t have any rule in the House called the filibuster which allows people to slow things down.

The Founding Fathers realized when they structured this they wanted checks and balances. They didn’t want things rushed through. They saw the parliamentary system. They knew it didn’t work.

Sure, in a brief passage, Gregg did not enumerate the various nuances of the State constitutions which, along with the Articles of Confederation, informed the Constitution. Yglesias’s attention is drawn to Amar’s book.  Here one important point: the Constitution was written, among other motives, to minimize the likelihood of the dreck peddled by the 111th Congress and this Administration having a chance to succeed.

Yglesias then piles on:

Meanwhile, just to point out that Gregg is an idiot, where on earth has he gotten the idea that the Founding Fathers “saw the parliamentary system” and “knew it didn’t work?” There were no countries operating on a modern parliamentary system when the constitution was written.

Wow.  If he dared entertain a bit of history, would discover that the British Parliament passed, for example, the Stamp Act of 1765, which was as offensive to Americans then as this non-argument is to Americans now. He throws up this “modern parliamentary system” distinction as if, by offering a difference that makes no difference, he now has the ground to call Gregg an idiot. He doesn’t, and has successfully painted himself as such in the process.  Unless, of course, there is some meaningful distinction other than a nearly ~300 year temporal separation to be drawn.  Maybe there is.

Context-free arguments such as this seem a staple of Lefty propaganda. It’s quite easy to reference the relevant passage in the Constitution. Sure, Gregg might choose to polish the phrasing of his point, given the chance. But what is the point of such when an attacker is more intent on hair-splitting, mis-placed literalism, and weasel-wording than they are in seeking to grasp the point? Oh, yes: Gregg’s point is both

  • valid, and
  • torpedoes the Leftist agenda.

Oops.

As far as I can tell, Mr. Yglesias, far from achieving the noble liberal goal of trying to understand the opposing view, give credit where due, and offer some sort of compromise position on an issue, is more intent on ad hominem attacks, and calling attention away from the principles at stake, in favor of an agenda.

Looking at Wikipedia, I see that this chap graduated from Hahvud. Way to make your alma mater look good there, buddy.

(Via Memeorandum)

Update: Director Blue is excellent on the topic, as usual.

F(orget) The Dumb S(tuff)

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by Smitty

Via Instapundit, there is yet more talk of wrenching on the tax code. FTDS, as we used to say in my early days in the Navy.

Maybe Paul Krugman or some other Eclownomist can explain how the country is helped by

  • Having one pack of fools write an unintelligible tax code,
  • Necessitating the government to hire a phalanx of bureaucrats to implement that code, in turn
  • Generating wholly specious jobs in the private sector trying to make heads or tails of the resulting mess.

FTDS.
This is the Information Age, Americans!
Anyone with shred #1 of experience in information systems knows that complexity is Not Your Friend.
Not only do we need to take a machete to the kudzu-like tax code, we need to inject something sufficiently toxic into the root that it cannot return. Let us make repealing the 16th Amendment a serious priority, people!
In the Perfect Smith Future, we have a Federal budget that is reasonably transparent, and all of the tax code, like chess pieces, sits in plain sight. The country was founded, inter alia on the idea of ‘No taxation without representation’.
FTDS: let’s have ‘No taxation without simple, complete explanation’. There is no technical reason why we cannot hold our elected leaders accountable to the people for making the source code for all tax calculations available in a read-only way.
What we have to do is grow past the passive acceptance of whatever tyranny those who bethink themselves our betters would impose.
A photo I’d seen before but which was at Big Journalism today captures the point exquisitely:

The donkey is the engine of the economy, and the government is the cart. The government cannot drive the system. All progress is due to the donkey. More tax code in particular, and government load in general, does not improve the system.