December 2, 2008
America Saved. Chambliss Wins.
Read it, liberal cretins, and weep:
Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss handed the GOP a firewall against Democrats eager to flex their newfound political muscle in Washington, winning a bruising runoff battle Tuesday night that had captured the national limelight.
We here in the central east heartland can sleep easy tonight, somewhat assured that stalwart Republican opposition will maybe possibly shave entire nickels from the trillion dollar government outreach programs currently infesting their way through the country.
Good work, America!
More free stuff
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is likely to consider a plan this month to auction public airwaves with a mandate that the winning bidder set aside some for free Internet nationwide […]
Yessir, you win the bid trying to develop or expand your wonderful business, and with it comes the obligation to roll out a nationwide wireless internet service more or less FREE to one and all.
Who wouldn’t go for that?
Or maybe: That’s really going to decrease the attractiveness of the government’s kind offer of dispensation, innit?
Well, it’s got to work, hasn’t it? Economics be damned. The Law trumps all!
I want the free healthcare
A testimonial…
It took four doctors to push a tube through the ribcage to drain the lung; three to hold the patient down and one to do the job. There was no anesthetic, but there was a lot of yelling during this Dickensian bad dream in the wee small hours of a nightmare.
Once in the relative safety of a ward, there was no warmth, no blanket, only the clothes he came in. There was nothing to eat or drink. Nobody, least of all the torture squad of doctors, came and took a temperature or the other little rituals that reassure patients somebody’s looking after them.
Hauled off to a freezing cold shower because "you stink" after three days on inattention, a gaggle of crone-like harridans in nurses’ uniforms gathered to cackle at the unfortunate’s shriveling manhood. No soap, no towel, but finally a surgical gown to put on.
Food and painkillers? That’s up to your family. They’re on the other side of the Atlantic? So what? Go Home or words to that effect. Luckily, by then a colleague had tracked the patient down.
On the fourth day, a doctor who had nothing to do with the case suddenly turned up, evidently worried about what was or was not going on. Told that enough was enough, he reluctantly agreed, removed the tube and the fluid collection bottle to which it was attached, found a phone on a desk just outside the ward, and signed the patient out to be taken home by a friend who’d been wondering where he was.
Be warned. If you’re visiting Venezuela, don’t believe you can busk it on health insurance. Unless, that is, you want to risk learning the hard way. It’s enough to make one miss Britain’s National Health Service.
As to that last, there, I do believe the NHS does use anesthetics, but of course, the service isn’t as quick.
Fortunately, we have a newly elected, forward-thinking leadership (along with a new cross-aisle camaraderie) chomping at the bit to bring the benefits of universal sub-mediocrity to the American middle class.
The only thing that might save us is if the economy collapses and takes the government down with it.
Yes, we think nothing but cheerful thoughts in Tennessee, these days.
December 1, 2008
Cry me a Riviera
A group of would-be cannibals have gone Madison Avenue in the hopes of luring more meat into the big pot:
There’s [sic] is more to American car companies than three CEOs. Literally millions of Americans – automotive employees, retirees, American car owners, businesses that cater to factory workers, auto supplier employees, and dealership workers – all depend on this vital industry. The Engine of Democracy Coalition developed this website to tell our story and help ensure our voices aren’t lost in the debate over the future of America’s auto industry.
Spearheaded by suppliers and dealers in all states, this effort shows the massive, nationwide support for the federal loans the automakers need. Unlike the bailouts offered in the financial sector, car companies are seeking bridge loans that will help ensure the national security of the United States, the continuation of a robust automotive manufacturing base and the economic well-being of the nation and its citizens.
The Engine of Democracy coalition includes automotive supplier and dealership employees, affiliated organizations and individual men and women who are concerned about the future of the domestic auto industry and what it means for America’s economy and security.
I wouldn’t bet a nickel on these clowns. Even bankruptcy is too good for them. I mean, don’t these people understand what’s coming?
The U.S. Big Three auto industry as it exists now is kaput. It’s been teetering for years, staggering around under the weight of union obligations and of managements afflicted with executives educated at the same diploma mills as the people afflicting the banking industry and the various seats of government. While they ran their businesses in ways best for themselves, no one noticed the customers were starting to look after themselves. Too bad, so sad, but that’s the way it goes in business.
And nothing can change any of that. There aren’t any do overs in this life. Giving GM a loan will only prolong and deepen the inevitable crunch-o-la, unless the government can force people to buy GM cars all next year, but I haven’t heard that even the Soviets could pull that trick off.
November 26, 2008
“Gently down the stream … “
The Eton Boat Song (YouTube recording):
Jolly boating weather,
And a hay harvest breeze,
Blade on the feather,
Shade off the trees;
Swing, swing together,
With your bodies between your knees.Rugby may be more clever,
Harrow may make more row:
But we’ll row forever,
Steady from stroke to bow,
And nothing in life shall sever
The chain that is round us now.Others will fill our places,
Dressed in the old light blue;
We’ll recollect our races,
We’ll to the flag be true;
And youth will be still in our faces
When we cheer for an Eton crew.Twenty years hence this weather
May tempt us from office stools:
We may be slow on the feather,
And seem to the boys old fools:
But we’ll still swing together,
And swear by the best of schools.
Via: Dissecting Leftism
November 24, 2008
CSS Holy Grail Utility
It’s the layout, man. After seeing, a couple days ago, how Internet Explorer 7 behaved with the site layout (the left column was somewhere out in space, man), I had to make the rounds, read the comments, rejigger lines of code here, there, and the other place, and finally drag my little Three Column CSS Parameter Generator utility out of rehearsal into Show Time. Which I’ve done, beyond all necessity.
There’s no need to click the link above unless you’re interested in CSS-driven three column layouts, and the history of such things as they’ve played out over several years, from BlueRobot, to Glish, to Position is Everything, to A List Apart, and beyond. Layouts here (pre-kayak2u included) have followed the evolution of the technology as highlighted at those links, with the present layout an incarnation of A List Apart’s wrapper-free Holy Grail.
BUT! Though the HTML and CSS that go into the Holy Grail Three Column layout are uncluttered and simple (why I like ‘em), the calculating of the values of the margins and paddings that go into the style sheet is tedious, never mind the inserting of those values into the proper place in the CSS file. If you decide to change the width or padding of one column even by one pixel, everything has to be recalculated and the style sheet repopulated with the new figures. More than a couple iterations of that can get real boring.
Therefore, I created a utility to do most of the grunt work for me, generating the CSS with the values I give it. Written in PHP, it’s at the first link above. It can be run as is, or at the bottom of the page is a link to a .zip of the PHP source, meaning you can download it and play with it at your leisure.
Yes, it’s hard wired to the "wrapper-free" version of the layout, but can be modified rather simply for other versions. I like the "wrapper-free" version because it works without hacks in IE7 (Oops, or so I thought. Now fixed, it looks from here.) Yes, it still may not work in all browsers or select versions of different browsers, but that’s the way it goes. When I can see it broken, I’ll try to fix it.
Thank you. Yer Welcome.
Hippocratic curse
The folks up at Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Health Care aren’t nearly ready to stop hitting themselves in the head with that two pound sledge. It’s the recession this time, ya know, getting the finger for failings that were already well in the works. Suggested treatment?
One short-term alternative to the cuts would be to assess all the state’s hospitals and insurers an equivalent amount for the State Health Safety Net fund. A congressional stimulus package with increased federal Medicaid spending, as Representative Barney Frank has proposed, could help. But the state should find a way to ensure this year and in years to come that healthcare for all - the promise of the new law - does not fall victim to the recession.
All the looneyness you could possibly want, right there in that last paragraph, right down to "the promise" that pigs will fly, just because, you know, it’s the law, now.
In the comments Dr Barry Mills makes the correct diagnosis, but the state isn’t interested in not making a problem they created worse, so fuck him.
I can’t wait for Tommy Daschle health care.
Kayaking da bomb
A couple of Canuckistan kayakers find some sort of military ordnance floating in the bay outside Victoria, BC, call 911 for the fun of it, and mild hilarity ensues:
Eventually the 911 operator passed us on to the Military Dive team who said they’d be there in 30 minutes. Except they didn’t know where McNeil Bay was and didn’t seem to know where Beach Drive was. A half hour later we get a return call asking us to describe what we had found and telling us not to keep it on our decks but to take it to shore.
With the device stashed we paddled circles around the bay taking phone calls from the navy. Naively we thought either the coast guard auxiliary or a police officer would simply come by and collect the damn thing. Well Jimmy we live in a more complicated world.
Eventually we got so cold from paddling nowhere that […]
No word yet on whether any of Canada’s vast fleet of submarines have been found.
November 23, 2008
Hack notes
Sweet Cheeks unpacked her new super computer yesterday afternoon, and it was late evening before she reeled off to the sofa, leaving me my first keypressing whack at seeing what Vistafication is all about. First thing up was Internet Exploder (in which I can’t find a version number) and wouldn’t you know, my lovely three column site layouts were breaking all over the place. I got most of it fixed last night, but am now hacking this blog CSS into shape up through a couple of neglected revisions. Please stand by…
November 22, 2008
Road hogs
Took two days for an up and back to the old estate in West Virginia this week, the third time this year along the southern portion of Virginia’s I-81, and once again the Virginia troopers were out in force; miles and miles of blue flashing lights protecting and serving the hapless shnooks unlucky enough to be barrelling along with the flow at the wrong point and time. The vast majority of those people, there’s no sense in it. Speed limit of monotonous 65.
Other than my usual complaint with more and more people the last few years riding in the passing lane (fewer this week earned my ire), it’s gotten pretty tame out there. Maybe it’s everyone texting as they go, but people just don’t motor like they used to.
I was but a mile and half down the road on the way out when I jammed the brakes on for these guys:
A little further up in Tennessee, what I think was an ocelot started to dart in front of me, stopped as I reacted, and then dashed behind me, to make it across ahead of the vehicles behind me. Then there was the German Shepherd outside Parkersburg, chasing cars on I-77. I can’t imagine that ended well.
Imperial airheads
It’s impossible to capture and convey the vastness of the mountain of stupidity currently piling up across the land, but one can drive up into the foothills of it.
The Washington Times has the inveterate loser Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) managing to cite fellow member Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY)…
Mr. Boehner noted that Rep. Louise Slaughter, New York Democrat, earlier in the week expressed relief her vote in the Dingell-Waxman conflict would not be public. "It’s a secret ballot, thank the Lord," she told Congressional Quarterly.
… almost making a useful argument by juxtaposing her quote with the proposed Employee Free Choice Act that would eliminate business’s current legal right to call for secret ballots on the matter of unionization. Where Boehner found the backbone is unknown, but, of course, it’s just a little too late:
"I have no doubt it will pass and will be singed [twice the same typo in the one piece — another sign of the times –ed]," AFL-CIO government-affairs director William Samuel said in an exclusive interview.
Democracy in action!
In the midst, Nancy Pelosi cameos as the dishonest scumbag/intellectual pigmy she is with:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, says a card check would not take away workers’ right to a secret ballot. Instead, it would guarantee that when a majority of workers want a union, they get a union.
Don’t anyone tell her that a majority of secretly cast ballots is still a majority.
Via: Protein Wisdom
November 18, 2008
Let’s do it
I tell ya, it’s just about ghastly enough everwhere I look to start stumping for this:
So here’s my proposal. Let’s start turning surplus houses into biofuel! Studies have shown that in houses where the owner has defaulted, 95 percent of all the material can easily be converted to clean, green biofuels. It’s clean because wood products don’t contain all that nasty stuff that’s in coal. (Just pick up a piece of coal and see how easily it comes off on your hand.) It’s green because houses are made of wood and wood is organic, coming directly from the natural environment. And it’s good for the environment because burning up surplus homes will return thousands of acres to their natural state, replacing suburban sprawl with natural wilderness.
The Homes-to-Biofuels Movement provides us with the opportunity to solve at one stroke two of our most pressing economic problems — the mortgage meltdown and energy independence. It will require no new authorization of federal funds and will not discriminate against anyone by race, class or sexual orientation. Rats and other animals that have taken up residence in abandoned structures can be transferred to new homes so that no member of the animal kingdom will suffer as well.
I suggest you call Washington to express your support right away. Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress will be happy to undertake this effort when the new Administration takes office in January. After all, they’re eager to burn down the rest of the economy as well.
November 15, 2008
Twisted
David Brooks of the New York Times pulls a fast one, mid-article:
It is all a reminder that the biggest threat to a healthy economy is not the socialists of campaign lore. It’s C.E.O.’s. It’s politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state.
Nancy and Harry and Barry and all the rest of them are merely tools of the capitalists’ "influence", is that it? I bet Nancy and Harry and Barry would beg to differ.
And, of course, the union thugs hold no "influence" with the liberal — just coincidentally socialist, union coddling — political elite, do they?
It’s got to be those CEOs… with Nancy and Harry and Barry as goofy puppets.
It’s a wonder the New York Times has stayed the forces of "creative destruction" as long as it has, with blithering idiots like David Brooks biting the air in public like that.
Glenn Reynolds linked that quote without comment. I wonder if he finds it pithy.
Not clear on the concept
You’d think the people of Wadebridge, Cornwall would be happy. The council there erected a "graffiti wall" in a local park to distract the local yobs, and then some malcontent spray painted a message on it.
"I paid my tax and all I got was this lousy wall".
There’s a picture. There may be a criminal investigation. And, of course, the wall must be repainted, at additional taxpayer expense.
How did people get so stupid, I wonder.
November 14, 2008
Cannibal recruiting is at an all time high
Reading Greg Swann’s pointed and correct criticism of the National Association of Realtors reminded me of the story of a few days ago:
In a letter to Obama, the Business Roundtable, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, AARP and the Service Employees International Union urge that a healthcare overhaul be a priority in the administration’s first 100 days.
Everyone and his brother are trying to get a seat at the big pot, and nobody is being done any favors. In fact, like voters, these groups are legitimizing and abetting the whole corrupt, incompetent, anti-freedom, anti-success, big government process.
I’m sad to say that some twenty years ago, when I was running a business (which earned more for all the tax collecting bodies than it ever did for me and my employees) and still naive, I joined the NFIB in the hopes that their lobbyists could somehow finagle me a lousy break or two, somehow. There was nothing to be done, apparently. I dumped the NFIB eventually, and gave the business up later, and will never run a business for the government again. It just isn’t worth it to me to be a funnel for someone else who does nothing but point a gun at my head.
When the only freedom I have is to quit, I’ll exercise it.
Back then, though, I thought the NFIB was fairly libertarian (though I wouldn’t have thought to use that word then), but go to their web site now to see what they mean by "healthcare overhaul" and you’ll find the usual socialist horseshit gobbledegook:
Healthcare costs to individuals, providers, governments and businesses must be reasonable, predictable and controllable.
Says fucking who? Every time I go to Kroger the price on a case of Coke is different, and sometimes it’s just plain unreasonable. I can’t control it, and I can’t predict it, but I understand it’s a function of the marketplace, and I know that the instant the state steps in and tells Kroger to make it "reasonable, predictable, and controllable" the supply of Coke will be sporadic at best, and problematic in the long run. Health care is a commodity exactly the same as Coca-Cola, and subject to the same laws of economics, and the NFIB might as well be arguing that health care should be gravity free.
Here’s more NFIB horseshit:
Laws, regulations and insurance arrangements should direct healthcare spending to those goods and services that will maximize health.
That’s beautiful, innit? It’s delusional, but it’s beautiful. Yes, all we need is someone to apply a one size fits all solution to 300 million diverse problems. Should be a piece of cake. Except that even to posit it is insane. To print it as part of one’s platform is something else I can’t even fathom. Maybe fraudulent would go a step toward describing it.
If the NFIB (and the rest of them) really wanted to "maximize health", they’d be spending their member’s money demanding that the freedom and responsibility on which this country was founded be returned to the earnest citizens who are, individually, in the best position and have the utmost incentive to look after themselves. The free market is what allocates goods and services most efficiently. The unfettered marketplace is what maximizes the supply of whatever people need. "Laws, regulations and […] arrangements", in contrast, are what send Canadians over the border for MRIs.
Read the rest of what the NFIB advocates. It’s all completely nuts. It’s insane. The rest of them, above, more of the same. And they’re making money on it.
I’m telling ya, it’s going to blow, and it’s going to blow big.
November 13, 2008
The unlearned lesson
Billy Beck, in his inimitable style, surveys the blasted landscape, and points unerringly at the negligence underwriting the last two centuries:
The economic consequences of socialism (the morality) may justly be called socialism (the well-known disasters).
The economic consequence of individualism must rightfully be known as capitalism, for all the reasons having to do with value-production and preservation, and it must be known as a consequence — a cause-and-effect product — of its necessary foundation: the morality of individualism.
To divorce "economics" from morality, as if it had no moral component and people really were the virtual lab-rats that they are taken for in contemporary "models", is to invite endless debate of the sort that many have very foolishly thought settled. That folly is now being demonstrated.
And that folly is of a magnitude not seen before in any age. The greatest nation the planet has known has lit the exploding cigar and drawn deeply, and is preparing to take an even deeper drag, one that will blow its head off. And the funny (or sad) thing is, everyone watched the cigar being loaded.
I propose a toast to all those who manage to duck just before the denouement. With the cacaphonies of stupidity currently blaring from every soapbox and microphone, it’s hard to imagine that people on the other side of what’s coming will be able to finger the real cause in hindsight, to finally get it written down in stone somewhere, but here’s hoping. (Ah, Wild Turkey.)
Note to Beck: Good choice on those books. I’ve got that set (Random House, no date) on a shelf here, inherited from my dad, and was already thinking, in light of unfolding events, of having a go at them. Once I finally send Horatio Nelson packing, I shall. I remember taking great interest in the fall of Rome as a kid, and even then seeing parallels (hubris, arrogance, assorted follies as above) in unfolding events. History never repeats itself exactly, of course, but there are still a lot of barbarians in the world, and at least fifty ways to kill your country.
Take care, man.
