Month: November 2010

Well No WONDER He Didn’t Read the Obamacare Bill!

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Remember this?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t32ckkdlcao?rel=0&showinfo=0&w=640&h=360]

It wasn’t that he needed two days and two lawyers, it was because there weren’t any pictures!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ09sKVFI7k?version=3]

Srsly, dood?  Reading Looking at Playboy on a commercial flight?  At least Nancy has the, er, “decency” to fly private.  He needs to read Chapter IX of Despotism Made Easy. Of course, Conyers’ wife is currently in prison, so perhaps the octogenarian needs a little “outside stimulus” that doesn’t involve ten-digit dollar figures, but still…

Quote of the Day – Despotism Made Easy Edition

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Nothing puts a damper on a reformer’s day like a populace that will not embrace utopia. Of course, once dissenting voices are muzzled, the objections of the people will become more like white noise; an irritant but tolerable. But, and this is an important but, if the people are armed they can really play havoc with your agenda and legacy. Perhaps most disheartening to the reformer is the realization that armed resistance signifies that the people do not appreciate all you’re trying to do for them.
History teaches that radically altering the social, political and economic order without first disarming the populace is untidy. Most citizens, given enough incentive, will get with the program, by why chance it. An accelerating program of firearm restriction, registration, taxation and confiscation will do much to ensure a smooth transition to a new era of social justice, equity, fraternity and solidarity.

Despotism Made Easy: A Self-Help Guide for the Aspiring Tyrant by Brad Lena, Chapter I: Disarm the People

H/t to Day by Day for the link. I wish I could say I thought it was funny, but it’s uncomfortably close to the truth. Runner-up for QotD, same source,

At the end of the day remember that inmates of Communist slave labor camps in Siberia openly wept at the passing of Stalin so there will always be hope for your legacy if not actual change.

From Chapter X: Know When It’s Time to Leave

Calling all Programmers!

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Still no joy on migrating the old comments.  Something’s going on, but whatever it is ain’t right.  For example, I’ve imported the Echo export file to Disqus (with “unhandled exception” error) and I can see comments on the Disqus moderation page, but they don’t link to the posts.  Case in point, the 573-Übercomment thread to My New Favorite Flag.  The link to that single post is http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/08/my-new-favorite-flag.html.  If I want to edit that post, the Post ID number is 8874806502897879244.  The link in Disqus for the comment thread to that post is “js-kit.com/api/static/pop_comments?ref=http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/&path=/8874806502897879244 comments”.  Note the “path=” number matches the Post ID number.  That doesn’t help, though, because when you go to the post itself, Disqus tells you there are 0 comments.

So this tells me that the post-December 2009 comments came through with something that identifies which post they should be linked to, it just isn’t working.  The pre-December 2009 comments on the other hand?  I don’t know.  Here’s the code for the very first two JS-Kit comments from June 29, 2003 (left and right arrows replaced with {}):

{channel}
{title}smallestminority.blogspot.com comments{/title}
{link}http://smallestminority.blogspot.com{/link}
{atom:link rel=”self” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”http://js-kit.com/rss/smallestminority.blogspot.com”}{/atom:link}
{jskit:attribute key=”md5path” value=”2ba805a528476df214be05f62ec3fe6e”}{/jskit:attribute}
{jskit:attribute key=”path” value=””}{/jskit:attribute}
{description}RSS comments feed for smallestminority.blogspot.com{/description}
{generator}JS-Kit Bulk Site Exporter 0.8{/generator}
{lastBuildDate}Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:16:10 +0000{/lastBuildDate}
{item}
{guid}jsid-1056907965-255840{/guid}
{pubDate}Sun, 29 Jun 2003 17:32:45 +0000{/pubDate}
{jskit:attribute key=”IP” value=”12.254.160.168″}{/jskit:attribute}
{author}Nate{/author}
{jskit:attribute key=”Url” value=”http://blogstudio.com/wastedelectrons.htm/index”}{/jskit:attribute}
{description}Yup. I may have to join you at Haloscan, my comments have been AWOL for almost a week now!{/description}
{jskit:attribute key=”GravatarID” value=”0fe77f30c5265ac50c01f76ba0de1052″}{/jskit:attribute}
{jskit:attribute key=”sync_peer_3″ value=”31-255840″}{/jskit:attribute}
{jskit:attribute key=”foreign” value=”3″}{/jskit:attribute}
{/item}
{item}
{guid}jsid-1056851627-255839{/guid}
{pubDate}Sun, 29 Jun 2003 01:53:47 +0000{/pubDate}
{jskit:attribute key=”IP” value=”68.63.181.45″}{/jskit:attribute}
{author}Kevin Baker{/author}
{jskit:attribute key=”Url” value=”http://smallestminority.blogspot.com”}{/jskit:attribute}
{description}Testing, testing, testing…

Is this thing on?{/description}
{jskit:attribute key=”GravatarID” value=”6bac8ac442a85fa679bf5b7b52db5cd3″}{/jskit:attribute}
{jskit:attribute key=”sync_peer_3″ value=”31-255839″}{/jskit:attribute}
{jskit:attribute key=”foreign” value=”3″}{/jskit:attribute}
{/item}
{/channel}

You’ll note that the newest comment came first. The postID for that post is 105685175144057251, which you can see the start of under {guid}, but not the complete, correct number.  I have the same comments saved in a JS-Kit export from December just before the switch to Echo, and that code looks like this:

{?xml version=”1.0″ ?}
{comments}
    {thread id=”105685175144057251″}
      {comment}
        {datetime}2003-06-29T02:53:47-05:00{/datetime}
        {name}Kevin Baker{/name}
        {email}[email protected]{/email}
        {uri}http://smallestminority.blogspot.com{/uri}
        {ip}68.63.181.45{/ip}
        {text}{![CDATA[Testing, testing, testing…

Is this thing on?]]}{/text}
      {/comment}
      {comment}
        {datetime}2003-06-29T18:32:45-05:00{/datetime}
        {name}Nate{/name}
        {email}redacted{/email}
        {uri}http://blogstudio.com/wastedelectrons.htm/index{/uri}
        {ip}12.254.160.168{/ip}
        {text}{![CDATA[Yup. I may have to join you at Haloscan, my comments have been AWOL for almost a week now!]]}{/text}
      {/comment}

The postID is there.  Still no joy importing THOSE export files, either.

This is MADDENING.

Quote of the Day – Discord & Confusion Edition

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Richard Epstein per Reason Magazine: “Epstein splits faculty appointments at the University of Chicago and New York University; he’s also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a contributor to Reason. In books such as Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992) to Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), and Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003), Epstein pushes his ideas and preconceptions to their limits and takes his readers along for the ride. A die-hard libertarian who believes the state should be limited and individual freedom expanded, he is nonetheless the consummate intellectual who first and foremost demands he offer up ironclad proofs for his characteristically counterintuitive insights into law and social theory.”  As an example, they say, “His 1985 volume, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain is a case in point. Epstein made the hugely controversial argument that regulations and other government actions such as environmental regulations that substantially limit the use of or decrease the value of property should be thought of as a form of eminent domain and thus strictly limited by the Constitution. The immediate result was a firestorm of outrage followed by an acknowledgment that the guy was onto something.
 
“As Epstein told Reason in a 1995 interview, ‘I took some pride in the fact that [Sen.] Joe Biden (D-Del.) held a copy of Takings up to a hapless Clarence Thomas back in 1991 and said that anyone who believes what’s in this book is certifiably unqualified to sit in on the Supreme Court. That’s a compliment of sorts…. But I took even more pride in the fact that, during the Breyer hearings [in 199X], there were no such theatrics, even as the nominee was constantly questioned on whether he agreed with the Epstein position on deregulation as if that position could not be held by responsible people.'”

Now that we have Prof. Epstein’s bona fides established, here is today’s QotD from this Reason TV interview:

All the ingenuity of gimmicks fails…We have more debt, more unemployment, and less happiness in this country now because Hope & Change turns out to be Discord & Confusion.  And there’s no way that you can stop that.  You cannot stop the blunders of one government program by putting another one on top of it.  That’s what I learned in the Yale Law School.  You don’t like what the minimum wage does, you create a welfare program.  You don’t like what a welfare program does, you have a back-to-work program.  If you just got rid of the minimum wage, you’d get rid of three programs and you’d free up lots of economies, and what people have to understand is that Mies van der Rohe was essentially a political theorist when he said “Less is More.”  You get more production out of fewer regulations, and one of the great tragedies of the modern stuff is that you spend all this time on monetary and fiscal policy, where regulatory policy taken in the round and taken in particular cases is every bit as important.

Yup.  That’s got to make the Denizens of D.C. recoil in abject horror, screaming “Heresy!  Heresy!”

Quote of the Day – Conflict of Visions Edition

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From Stop Shouting!, My Rebuttal to a Progressive who Admonished Me to Play Nice ….

Realizing that you are losing your grip on the public schools, that the youth that propelled the boy-king to victory have abandoned you, that the bitter, blue collar white workers are now Tea Party grandmas and grandpas, that you have lost control of the federal checkbook and the legislative calendar,

now you want to petition for peace?

now you cry out for civility and consensus?

I have a message for you:

Go. To. Hell.

You GO girl! The pendulum has stopped its swing, and is now going back the other way. Our job: keep it from going too far.