Cranky-D

Dr. Krauthammer:

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

Read the whole thing.

via Protein Wisdom

What is it about liberals of the non-classical bent who are under the impression that an education of any kind makes one an expert in all fields related to politics? Is it a profound lack of understanding? Is it a stunted ability to judge one’s own knowledge and abilities?

I don’t condemn any education in any field from a pure knowledge standpoint. If one has the luxury and the desire, one should pursue whatever education one wishes. What I don’t understand is this idea that once one has the equivalent of a PhD in anything that one is an expert in anything political. I have a few degrees lying around, and I will claim knowledge to many things related to mechanical engineering such as fluid flow and solid mechanics, and I will claim a deep knowledge of data mining and programming, but those abilities don’t translate to any other field, and I know it. I’m a baby in most other subjects, with much of what I know being gleaned from the Discovery Channel or the History Channel or nature documentaries or whatever, beyond whatever I had to learn as an undergrad or the smattering of knowledge from grade school.

If I were a progressive I would be shouting my “qualifications” from the hilltop while telling everyone what was right and good, and people might listen, not because I had anything new to say, but because I have the right pedigree. That is not only ridiculous from a qualifications point of view, it is dangerous because it will usually create a distortion of the facts. The best thing to happen to that ilk for classical liberals is the wholesale reveal that the progressive educated class will lie to advance their cause.

Are classical liberals just more self-aware? Is blindness to one’s own limitations a prerequisite for being a progressive? It might be something to ponder on the days I don’t want to just sweep progressives into the ditch as we attempt to fix this mess, but those days are fewer and further between as I get older.

Yes, another picture. You’re welcome.

Stolen from here

Frederic Bastiat:

What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.
1.2

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.
1.3

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.
1.4

The same thing, of course, is true of health and morals. Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits: for example, debauchery, sloth, prodigality. When a man is impressed by the effect that is seen and has not yet learned to discern the effects that are not seen, he indulges in deplorable habits, not only through natural inclination, but deliberately.
1.5

This explains man’s necessarily painful evolution. Ignorance surrounds him at his cradle; therefore, he regulates his acts according to their first consequences, the only ones that, in his infancy, he can see. It is only after a long time that he learns to take account of the others.**2 Two very different masters teach him this lesson: experience and foresight. Experience teaches efficaciously but brutally. It instructs us in all the effects of an act by making us feel them, and we cannot fail to learn eventually, from having been burned ourselves, that fire burns. I should prefer, in so far as possible, to replace this rude teacher with one more gentle: foresight. For that reason I shall investigate the consequences of several economic phenomena, contrasting those that are seen with those that are not seen.

Steven Den Beste:

Get out the tinfoil hats, folks, and let us delve into the realm of raving paranoia. Is there a different way to read the news lately?

The sane answer: they’re blithering incompetents. The paranoid answer: they’re doing it on purpose.

Glenn Reynolds asks, “Why is the Gulf cleanup so slow?”

The sane answer: because the Obama administration has sold its soul to the unions, and is reluctant to do anything that would make union leaders angry.

The raving paranoid answer: Because Obama wants this oil spill to be dreadfully harmful, because it will sour Americans on drilling in the ocean, and on oil (and other fossil fuels) in general. Never waste a crisis, my friends, and this crisis can help lead all the troglodytes (that’s you and me) away from their accustomed gas guzzlers and wasteful lifestyles towards the paradise of “green” energy and sustainable lifestyles.

I’ll be making an aluminum foil hat as soon as possible.

Victor Davis Hanson:

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was ecstatic after the Munich Conference of 1938. He bragged that he had coaxed Adolf Hitler into stopping further aggression after the Nazis gobbled up much of Czechoslovakia.

Arriving home, Chamberlain proudly displayed Hitler’s signature on the Munich Agreement, exclaiming to adoring crowds, “I believe it is peace for our time. . . . And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”

But after listening to Chamberlain’s nice nonsense, Hitler remarked to his generals about a week later, “Our enemies are little worms, I saw them at Munich.” War followed in about a year.

…

In addition, Obama has bowed to Saudi autocrats and Chinese dictators. In morally equivalent fashion, an Obama subordinate brought up to human-rights violator China the new Arizona immigration law. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that we would be neutral in a new and growing Falklands Island dispute. And America has put Israel on notice that the old close relationship is changing.

Turkey is growing increasingly anti-American. A newly aggressive Russia is beaming that we have caved on a number of contentious issues.

The Japanese are distancing themselves from America. British, French and German leaders are increasingly wary of the United States. The Mexican president criticizes Arizona from the White House lawn.

War is now more, not less, likely in the Middle East. In Latin America, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela are as hostile to the U.S. as ever. Brazil is now seeking to assert new authority contrary to U.S. policies.

Historical examples have demonstrated what happens when a strong power shows too many signs of appeasement. The result is that aggressive nations will move forward and take what they can. Russia rightly knew that invading Georgia (the nation) would probably go unanswered with a lame-duck president in his last few months in office, and a new president who had already vocalized a lack of interest in policing the world.

The problem is, America is the world’s policeman, whether we like it or not. At least one nation has to be willing to do that, and I think the U.S. of A is the best choice for that role. As a whole, we have no interest in imperialism, as we have demonstrated many times in the past. Sure, we played a bit with having colonies (the Philippines, for instance), but it was pretty much half-hearted and we were never all that serious about it. Most of us are interested in getting other nations on their feet well-enough to take care of themselves, so we can move on to the next police action.

Yes, I know, there are places right now that could use our policing, and both parties share the blame and the shame for us not doing something about it. However, our policy also seems to be that as long as a nation confines its insanity to its own people, and does not threaten our security, then they get to pretty much do evil as they please. I’m not sure if that’s a good policy, but there you are.

Obama seems bent on giving our police powers up. That is his choice, since the president gets to decide foreign policy pretty much on his own. However, he thinks he is making friends, and saving money, by acting the part of the appeaser and apologizer. This is simply not true, and sooner or later the bill will come due, and it will cost much more to fix the problems he has created and will continue to create than it would have to just have been another “cowboy” like George Bush.

People in other parts of the world complained about Bush the cowboy, but that probably made them feel better. I’ll bet they were secretly happy that the USA was there, just in case we were needed. Now, people are getting the idea that the USA may not be there for them after all, and the world is less safe for that.

Here’s a piece by Victor Davis Hanson that I think is worth reading. A sample:

Then after the requisite degrees I left academia, and returned to farm 180 acres with my brother and cousin-and sadly was quickly disabused of the world of the faculty lounge.

Oh yes, I came back to Selma thinking, “I am not going to be the grouch my grandfather was, yelling at neighbors, worried all the time, nervous, seeing the world as rather hostile, hoarding a tiny stash of savings, worried as if bugs, the government, hired men, weather, and markets were out to destroy him. I’ll farm with my Bay Area manners and sort of think, “I will reset the farm, and things will at last work as they should” (not thinking that my grandfather raised three daughters, sent them to college while mortgaging the farm in the Depression, and spent on himself last, and was a saint compared to my pampered existence in the university).”
…
I was shocked to hear that, and assured him that there would be no such incitements on my part on the new age of the Davis farm. No more ‘me first’, no more disdain for newcomers and upstarts. And then after about 3 months of sizing me up (at 26, I confess looking back I was not 1/8th the man my grandfather was at 86) he began stealing water in insidious ways: taking an extra day on his turn, cutting in a day early on mine, siphoning off water at night, destroying my pressure settings, watering his vineyards on days that were on my allotment. Stealing no less! And in 1980!

Here’s how I rushed into action. First, I gave a great Obama speech on communal sharing and why the ditch would not work if everyone did what he did. Farmers simply would perish if they did not come together, and see their common shared interests. He nodded and smiled-and stole more the next week.
…
Then I appealed to his minority status, and remarked how wonderful it was that he came from dire poverty abroad and now farmed over 500 acres. He growled-and stole even more.

I took the UN route and warned that that I would be forced to go get the ditch tender (a crusty, old hombre who enjoyed watching fights like these for blood sport); he pointed out that the tender was, in fact, on the alleyway across the street watching us, and meeting him for coffee in an hour.
…
Then in a trance-like fashion, I went out to restore deterrence. I got a massive chain and lock, and simply shut down his communal lateral. Locked the gate so tight, he couldn’t even get a quarter-turn. He’d be lucky if he got a 100 gallons in a week. Then I got a veritable arsenal of protective weaponry, got in my pickup, drove back over to the gate, and waited with ammo, clubs, shovels, etc.

In an hour he drove up in a dust cloud. He was going to smash me, get his football playing son to strangle me, sue me, bankrupt me, hunt me down, etc. He swore and yelled-I was a disgrace to my family, a racist, a psycho, worse than my grandfather. He was going to lock my gates, steal all my water, and indeed he leveled all sorts of threats (remember the scene in Unforgiven when Eastwood walks out and screams threats to the terrified town?-that was my neighbor). I got out with large vine stake and said something to the effect (forgive me if I don’t have the verbatim transcript-it has been 29 years since then), “It’s locked until you follow the rules. Anytime you don’t, it’s locked again. Do it one more time and I weld it shut. Not a drop. So sue me.”

I left a lot of the “negotiations” out, as well as the outcome. You should go and read it yourself.

Here is an article on what happens to health insurance costs when programs like the one the Fed is adopting in a few years are actually implemented. The opening paragraphs:

The best guide to how President Obama’s historic health-care legislation will reshape the nation’s medical marketplace and fiscal future is the pioneering model in Massachusetts. The Bay State’s reform program started in late 2006, and it shares virtually all the major features of the new federal plan.

Both programs greatly expand Medicaid coverage for low-earners, and provide heavily subsidized policies for a broad swath of the middle class. They tightly restrict the range of premiums for customers of different ages and medical conditions; they bar insurers from charging older patients, or even couch potatoes who abuse their health, anywhere near their actual cost. Both plans impose a long list of expensive benefits insurers must provide whether patients want to pay for them or not, ranging in Massachusetts from in-vitro fertilization to chiropractic services.

The article goes on and spells out what has happened to costs under such programs:

When Massachusetts launched its reform program in 2006, it already had the highest medical costs in the nation. Today, the burden is still rising far faster than wages or inflation, from those already lofty levels. A report from that state attorney general in March — remember, this is a Democratic administration — asked rhetorically “Can we expect the existing health-care market in Massachusetts to successfully contain health-care costs?” The report concluded, “To date, the answer is an unequivocal ‘no.’”

Costs are rising relentlessly for both families and for the state government. The median annual premium for family plans jumped 10% from 2007 to 2009 to $14,300 — again, that’s a substantial rise on top of an already enormous number. For small businesses, the increase was 12%. In 2006, the state spent around $1 billion on Medicaid, subsidies for medium-to-lower earners, and other health-care programs. Today, the figure is $1.75 billion. The federal government absorbed half of the increase.

The fact that government programs inevitably increase costs should not be a surprise to anyone with a functioning brain and an ability to accept a reality that exists outside their own imaginations. Hopefully we can kill this before it smothers us.

Go here and be enlightened, or perhaps just have your current view of Obama reinforced. Either way is fine with me. A sample:

Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that, for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job — that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

There are some incredible statistics (and some humorous writing) from P.J. O’Rourke here:

In March the Cato Institute issued a report on the cost of public schools. Policy analyst Adam Schaeffer made a detailed examination of the budgets of 18 school districts in the five largest U.S. metro areas and the District of Columbia. He found that school districts were understating their per-pupil spending by between 23 and 90 percent. The school districts cried poor by excluding various categories of spending from their budgets—debt service, employee benefits, transportation costs, capital costs, and, presumably, those cans of aerosol spray used to give all public schools that special public school smell.

Schaeffer calculated that Los Angeles, which claims $19,000 per-pupil spending, actually spends $25,000. The New York metropolitan area admits to a per-pupil average of $18,700, but the true cost is about $26,900. The District of Columbia’s per-pupil outlay is claimed to be $17,542. The real number is an astonishing $28,170—155 percent more than the average tuition at the famously pricey private academies of the capital region.

I think the idea of public schools is a grand one. I think everyone should be provided the opportunity for an education, and I think overall it benefits all of us, even those of us who don’t have children (but are still paying the taxes for their education). I have many aunts and uncles who taught in public school, and my sister current teaches in a public school. However, the costs are simply out of control. The system is broken. It needs to be fixed.

As always, my solutions are simple. We need to introduce competition, which means we need to have portability in the form of vouchers. Perhaps this would be a part of an all-private school system, perhaps not. But whatever it is would likely be more cost-efficient than what we have now.

Wow, it turns out that government intervention in the economy was the cause of the great depression. Wow, who would have thought that the Fed could be blamed for high unemployment? I mean, threatening to raise taxes and ramming new taxes down our throats in the form of “health care reform” should have had the economy going like gangbusters! I know if I had a business I would be hiring right and left, hidden fees be damned.

I have had hamsters with better sense than the current administration.

There is a huge piece of history most of us don’t know. I didn’t know until I watched this Glenn Beck show. For the Beck haters, this isn’t one of his rants, this is a pure presentation of some facts that need to be put forward. America was not created only by old white guys.

P.J. O’Rourke speculates on the notion of creating obituaries for those living whose deaths should be celebrated. Liberals, or those with a lack of a sense of humor (but I repeat myself) need not click over and read.

I don’t think I’ve directly pointed out Iowahawk before, but he has written some really funny stuff. His latest piece is about the Sarah Palin that lives inside the head of progressives, especially the one who just moved in next door to her and is writing a book about her.

Here is an article on how Obama fit in with the Hollywood narrative of the “Black Angel.”

The first signs of the spiritual zeal that would eventually play a significant part in Obama’s election came not from Washington or Chicago but from Hollywood. Our moviemakers are adept at measuring the zeitgeist of the nation—of its liberal half, anyway—and are a powerful force in shaping it. And for more than a decade, they’ve been churning out what critics call “black-angel” movies. These films feature a white protagonist guided to enlightenment by a black character, usually of divine or supernatural origin or, at the very least, in touch with spiritual experiences that the main character lacks. With the black angel’s help, the white hero finds salvation.

via Ace

Jonah Goldberg makes a case that Obama is following a path paved by incremental socialism. It both gives him some cover to deny what he is doing and results in a road that will never actually reach a destination. Historical references are provided as well. It’s a long read by internet standards, but I think it’s worth it.

Go here for a piece by Penn Jillette on freedom and the demise of the Humvee. A sample

Hummers are stupid and wasteful and if they go away because no one wants to buy one, that’ll be just a little sad. It’s always a little sad to lose some stupid. I love people doing stupid things that I’d never do—different stupid things than all the stupid things I do. It reminds me that although all over the world we humans have so much in common, so much love, and need, and desire, and compassion and loneliness, some of us still want to do things that the rest of us think are bug-nutty. Some of us want to drive a Hummer, some of us want to eat sheep’s heart, liver and lungs simmered in an animal’s stomach for three hours, some us want to play poker with professionals and some of us want a Broadway musical based on the music of ABBA. I love people doing things I can’t understand. It’s heartbreaking to me when people stop doing things that I can’t see any reason for them to be doing in the first place. I like people watching curling while eating pork rinds.

But if any part of the Hummer going belly-up are those government rules we’re putting in on miles per gallon, or us taking over of GM, then I’m not just sad, I’m also angry. Lack of freedom can be measured directly by lack of stupid. Freedom means freedom to be stupid. We never need freedom to do the smart thing. You don’t need any freedom to go with majority opinion. There was no freedom required to drive a Prius before the recall. We don’t need freedom to recycle, reuse and reduce. We don’t need freedom to listen to classic rock, classic classical, classic anything or Terry Gross. We exercise our freedom to its fullest when we are at our stupidest.

That’s it. We are all free to do stupid things. Lord knows I do lots of stupid things. The government seems to want to protect us from doing stupid things, which is wrong. We have a right to be stupid. Along with the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of stupidity.

Song parody using a Kenny Rogers classic. The performance is off-key if that bothers you, but it’s just a couple of guys in a living room somewhere.

found in the comments at PW

Thomas Sowell:

Contrary to clever political spin that likened those who refused to join the “global warming” hysteria to people who denied the Holocaust, no one denied that climates change. Indeed, some of the climate scientists who have been the biggest critics of the current hysteria have pointed out that climates had changed back and forth, long before human beings created industrial societies or drove SUVs.

It is those who have been pushing the hysteria who have been playing fast and loose with the facts, wanting to keep crucial data from becoming public, and even “losing” some of that data that supposedly proved the most dire consequences. It has not been facts but computer models at the heart of the “global warming” crusade.