Stormclouds:
(Click for full size)
Month: October 2011
Juxtaposition
For the Engineers Out There
First, some advice:
But if that advice is taken:
So… This Isn’t Racism?
Came across this ad tonight while surfing the Intertubes:
A jobs website dedicated to “Black Careers.” Hmm. Would that be careers that are open to anyone but traditionally done by black people? Such as? Or would it be a job site exclusively for people of black African descent – Caucasians, Asians and others need not apply?
Am I off base thinking that a “WhiteCareers.com” website would be – dare I say it – racist?
What Caliber for 16-foot Python?
12 gauge, apparently:
16-foot python found in Florida had eaten a deer
Officials in the Florida Everglades have captured and killed a 16-foot-long Burmese python that had just eaten an adult deer.—Hardin said the python had recently consumed a 76-pound female deer that had died. He said it was an important capture to help stop the spread of pythons further north.The python was killed with a shotgun blast.
Wow.
Quote of the Day – Peggy Noonan Edition
Several years ago Peggy penned a piece about “tough history coming.” Saturday, her Wall St. Journal column echoes that earlier piece a bit:
People are increasingly fearing the divisions within, even the potential coming apart of, our country. Rich/poor, black/white, young/old, red/blue: The things that divide us are not new, yet there’s a sense now that the glue that held us together for more than two centuries has thinned and cracked with age. That it was allowed to thin and crack, that the modern era wore it out.
What was the glue? A love of country based on a shared knowledge of how and why it began; a broad feeling among our citizens that there was something providential in our beginnings; a gratitude that left us with a sense that we should comport ourselves in a way unlike the other nations of the world, that more was expected of us, and not unjustly — “To whom much is given much is expected”; a general understanding that we were something new in history, a nation founded on ideals and aspirations —— liberty, equality —— and not mere grunting tribal wants. We were from Europe but would not be European: No formal class structure here, no limits, from the time you touched ground all roads would lead forward. You would be treated not as your father was but as you deserved.
“Shared knowledge.” Education. That had to go first.
RTWT.
Quote of the Day – Tam Edition
It’s a government database! It’s starting out in the wrong hands! I don’t know if you were keeping track in the 20th Century, dude, but Governments out-pointed Nigerian 419 Scammers by several hundred million to zero on the big International Dead Guy Scoreboard.
I Never Thought I’d be Happy to Read These Words
Setup: Righthaven (*hawk*spit*) has been told it must pay nearly $120,000 in attorney’s fees and court costs in a suit it lost to “former federal prosecutor Thomas DiBase,” who happens to run a website dedicated to “no-body murder cases, or cases where a murder is suspected but the victim’s remains have not been located.” Righthaven pursued a copyright suit without actually having standing to sue, and lost.
That’s good news, yes, but that’s not the part I’m really happy about. This is, and it’s one of those mixed-blessings:
This was by far the largest fee award against Righthaven, but likely will be dwarfed by an upcoming award in Righthaven’s failed suit against the Democratic Underground.
On the one hand, I think this spells the death-knell for Righthaven’s lawsuit-farming. On the other, Democratic Underground will probably win a major amount of cash.
Oh well, one can hope that Righthaven will vanish in a puff of smoke, and DU won’t ever see a penny!
“Quote of the MF’n Day”
Reader Addison emailed this link and today’s QotD by commenter “Astaghfirullah”
The Tea Party wants to remove the Crony from Crony Capitalism.
OWS wants to remove Capitalism from Crony Capitalism.
That’s it in a nutshell.
More Truth!
This time from (wait for it…) PBS!
“Libertarian” Professor Richard Epstein of the New York University School of Law schools PBS’s economics reporter Paul Solman on “income inequality”:
http://www-tc.pbs.org/video/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf
Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
You can tell the difference between a liberal and conservative by the following test: A liberal believes that changes in taxes have very little effect on production, but huge effects favorable on distribution. Folks like myself believe it’s exactly the opposite. Very high tax rates or even small changes in taxes have very adverse effects on production, and they do very little to produce redistribution because the money gets dissipated and taken away through the political process in ways that the most ardent supporters of redistribution will not like.
Stated at The Coalition of the Swilling: “I’m sure whoever’s idea it was has been sacked. Along with all the llama trainers.” I don’t think so. I can see the Leftists shaking their heads and tut-tutting the insane ideas of Professor Epstein. And I fully expect there to be a “grassroots” movement to get him fired from his job and his property taken.
If you’ve got a blog, post this video. Help it go viral.