Category: Painful Truths

(This is not intended to be social commentary. No, not at all.)

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Ah, my old hometown Hot ‘Lanta, how I miss you. Not.

via Gerard

jay-dubya plays with new toyz:

Do you think that’s over-the-top? Read his autobiography. It’s all right there. Everything his daddy taught him…

Found on Twitter

Rand Paul drops deuce on toilet-regulating bureaucrat, hilarity ensues http://t.co/SmkY4QTl h/t @instapundit

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 7, 2013

A calm, well-reasoned epic rant, that most of you can immediately relate to:

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I think Rand Paul (!) may be my new hero. Note the dismissive way he’s treated- “You plebeians, you proletarians, you serfs- shut up! We know what’s best for you…”

Most of our ‘representatives’ in DC sincerely think they are cut from a better quality cloth than us crackers and flyover folk. Maybe it’s time for tar, feathers, lampposts and rope to come back into style…

 

… for our current economic straits, from Samizdata:

My proposed means of stimulus is the mass firing of government employees.

Every government employee fired aids the economy in three distinct ways.

First, there is the direct cost of the salary, benefits and retirement of those employees, which must be sucked out of the rest of the economy through coercive taxation, weakening it. Each dollar we leave in the hands of ordinary people is a dollar they can then proceed to spend on things they really want, which is always better for the economy than a coerced expenditure.

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Second, there is the cost to the economy of the negative work most government employees do. Although a small fraction of government employees are engaged in jobs that would exist even in a free society, such as designing bridges and the like, most employees in a modern government spend their time interfering in the productivity of others…

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Third, there is the cost to the economy of having someone essentially idle. Most government employees do nothing of actual use, and there is an opportunity cost to that.

I think the benefits of such a proposal far outweigh any negative effects, and it (the proposal) should be implemented posthaste. The traffic improvements alone in cities such as Mobile, Atlanta, and Washington, D. C. would make it worthwhile.

Please. Mr. Preznit, you go shooting just as often as I go snowboarding outside Mobile, and I suspect with the same amount of success.

 

I have found a name for my pain. (No, it’s not Batman.)

In the past few weeks, I have been extremely distracted by the move to the Undisclosed Location and all the jarring and uprooting and just plain hard work that entailed. But there’s been another issue, an elephant in the room I didn’t want to acknowledge, partly because I couldn’t describe it.

As usual, I fall back on the words of those more educated or who simply write better than I can. One such is The Diplomad, who came up with that name.

Apologies for the light blogging these past few days. Having one of those periodic visits by what Churchill and others have called the “black dog.” A little one, mind you, but nevertheless it interferes with my ability to engage in witty repartee of the blog-type. Let me explain. I am not talking about some clinical depression. I am talking about the black dog that bites you when you read the news, and see and hear the politicians–Democrat and Republican, American and foreign–prattle on about anything and everything except the facts. There are so many facts out there the size of elephants or at least the size of CTU President Karen Lewis, yet the world’s politicians manage not to see them and to see, instead, what they believe in.

Black Dog. Yes, I’ve been bitten by that fellow as well. It’s hard not to look at what is going on in our country today and not feel just a touch of, if not despair, then a strong sense of foreboding.

I spent the last sixty-odd days working side by side with folks you would call the “salt of the earth”-  the people who fix things, make things, make things happen in the background that is never seen unless it stops working. The folks who keep society functioning. The one universal thread I saw was a sense of “preparing”, a quiet withdrawal back to the near and dear, a vibe you only feel when something like a big hurricane is coming- it’s big, it’s inevitable, and it may tear your life apart, but you ready yourself as best as you can.

I think I know what it is, and am afraid of the knowing, so I turn from the macro to the micro and just get on with things. Now is a time for casting aside the trivial and unimportant and shoring up that which really matters, for a storm is coming and none of us knows what it will bring.

The Black Dog. I like that. It fits.

“If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.”
–Mark Twain

 

a comment at Legal Insurrection

 

… in which children are used as props, a tactic as old as time.

The Constitution of the United States.

The Bill of Rights.

Simple, clear, concise. Too bad we seem to have lost them somewhere along the way. Their recovery looks dubious and problematic; I sense some blood may be spilled. Tree of Liberty, and all that.

 

Imma guessin’ this is not an entirely new or original observation, and it applies equally across all party, race, and gender boundaries.