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Quote of the Day – Jonah Goldberg Edition

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From his NRO review of the book The End Is Near and It’s Going to be Awesome by Kevin Williamson, Leviathan Fail:

While new iPhones regularly burst forth like gifts from the gods, politics plods along. “Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use,” he writes. “Resistance to innovation is a part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business — despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, mistreating its customers, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.” Hence, it is not U.S. Steel, which was eventually washed away like an imposing sand castle in the surf, but only politics that can claim to be “the eternal corporation.”

The reason for this immortality is simple: The people running the State are never sufficiently willing to contemplate that they are the problem. If a program dedicated to putting the round pegs of humanity into square holes fails, the bureaucrats running it will conclude that the citizens need to be squared off long before it dawns on them that the State should stop treating people like pegs in the first place. Furthermore, in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.

RTWT. I had Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey lined up next in the nonfiction queue, but I think I’m going to have to get a copy of The End is Near and read it next instead. Kevin Williamson echoes some of the things Bill Whittle has been saying of late, but I have some disagreements with Whittle’s optimism, and it seems Jonah Goldberg has some (albeit minor) disagreements with Williamson. I’m looking forward to the read.

Quote of the Day – Roger Simon Edition

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I don’t have a brief for Snowden. He seems to be a new form of narcissistic international creep, similar to Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame. I hope he gets dysentery in Ecuador or wherever he winds up.

But he may have done us a favor, putting an exclamation point on the activities of the NSA so there are no doubts. He also has made obvious the utter contempt with which Russia and China treat the Obama administration. (Evidently this was surprising to Dianne Feinstein on Face the Nation Sunday. Go figure.)

Also interesting is that the heightened concern for our civil liberties under government digital surveillance crosses political and party lines. Given the plethora of scandals confronting the administration, this presents an opportunity for dialogue we haven’t had for many years. Who knows if it will happen?

But if it does, I hope it will be intelligent and substantive. — What Snowden Knew

Don’t hold your breath waiting for that one, Roger.  What I find most interesting is who has come out in defense of essentially unlimited government snooping.  That crosses political and party lines as well.

114 Days

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That’s how long it took for my Arizona CCW permit renewal from the day I mailed it until it came back to me.

Nice to be all legal again.

Still pretty much on hiatus.  Sorry ’bout that.

Falling Down on the Job

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First rule of blogging:  Post Something Every Day.

FAIL!
I’ve been busy with work.  Three days in a row in Phoenix, leaving at 0500 and not getting home until well after 1700.  Too burned out to post.

Free ice cream machine is on the blink.  Read the archives or somebody else.  I’ll get back to this thing sooner or later.

UPDATE:

From the comments to this post.  I’ll just leave this here:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbNymZ7vqY?rel=0]

Thanks.  I needed that.

Game of Thrones

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Yeah, I’m a fan.  Don’t get HBO, but I caught an episode during the first season when I was on the road.  I’d read the first book in the series several years ago and really enjoyed it, but when I bought the second one I was put off by the “23 characters in search of a plot” storyline.  I didn’t pick up the third.  But having watched one of the shows, I thought it very well done, as a lot of HBO productions are.  It was available on Netflix, so I put it in my queue.  Watched the first disc, then the second, then went to Amazon and bought the whole thing.  My wife and I were hooked.

I pre-ordered Season 2.  Waited the better part of a year for it to ship, and we blew through it the weekend after it arrived.

Season 3 is on pre-order now.

I discovered that I could order the five available books as a set in eBook format, and I had some Barnes & Noble gift cards (and the Nook app on my iPod Touch), so I did.  I just finished reading A Feast for Crows, and I’ve come to a conclusion:

George R.R. Martin is a sadist.

Four thousand or so pages into this, and not one character has had anything good happen to them (at least that didn’t later turn to sh!t).  Major sympathetic characters have been slain horribly.  Major evil characters have been slain horribly.  Major characters have been maimed.  (And there are a LOT of Major Characters.)

And it.  Keeps.  Dragging.  On.  And.  On.  And.  ON.

HBO has done, as far as I can tell, the almost unheard-of:  It has turned the movie version of a book or books into a BETTER product than the text version.  Granted, this is because the live-performance version FORCES the screenwriters to prune viciously and excerpt only those parts that will make good cinema, but in general this editing process destroys the story being told by the book.  Not in this case.

I appreciate the grand, sweeping vision – the breadth of the world that Martin has built and the characters he has filled (FILLED!) it with, but I have the uneasy feeling that at the end of this series (assuming Martin finishes it before he shuffles off this mortal coil) the Others will rule that world, and everyone we’ve come to love and hate will be horribly, horribly dead.

Hodor.

UPDATE:  Joke from the comments – G.R.R. Martin’s Twitter account has been closed.  He killed all 140 characters!

I Don’t Like Your Face, Obama. Either One of Them

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8?rel=0]
Not that I expected anything different.  But it’s got to be a shock to those who thought him a “Lightworker.” 

Thanks to Grumpy Old Fart for pointing to this one in a comment.

Let’s add this one, too – also from a comment by QuadGMoto:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4-H8tbcQP4?rel=0]

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!

As Glenn Reynolds notes, all the scandals are about abuse of power:

(I)s it plausible to believe that a government that would abuse the powers of the IRS to attack political enemies, go after journalists who publish unflattering material or scapegoat a filmmaker in the hopes of providing political cover to an election-season claim that al-Qaeda was finished would have any qualms about misusing the massive power of government-run snooping and Big Data? What we’ve seen here is a pattern of abuse. There’s little reason to think that pattern will change, absent a change of administration — and, quite possibly, not even then. Sooner or later, power granted tends to become power abused. Then there’s the risk that information gathered might leak, of course, as recent events demonstrate.

Most Americans generally think that politicians are untrustworthy. So why trust them with so much power? The evidence to date strongly suggests that they aren’t worthy of it.

Let me repeat the GeekWithA.45’s warning again:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.

We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.

We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

—

We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.

Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”

But the President advises, “Don’t listen to those voices.”

And here’s Bill Whittle’s voice on the subject from last year:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgrktRgjBXk?rel=0]

Your Moment of Zen

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Arizona photographer Mike Olbinski has an interesting website.  In addition to doing wedding photos and such, Mike’s also a storm chaser.  I stumbled across him because someone posted a link to a time-lapse series of a supercell over Booker Texas he shot.  For YMoZ, here’s a picture I call “Smite.”

Smite photo smite.jpg
(click for full size)
He describes it as “Lightning over Casa Grande, Arizona.”  He doesn’t just do weather shots, though.  (THAT was a close second for YMoZ!)

If you live in Arizona and you’re looking for a professional photographer, you might want to contact him.  And if you like beautiful photographs, definitely check out his site.