Recently in Say What? Category

I wrote a polemical piece several days ago about the man the State Department was sending to the Near East on the taxpayer dole. I am neither happy with that nor with the lefties at State declaring Feisal Abdul Rauf a moderate.

Well, thanks to Neal Boortz's linking to an Andrew McCarthy piece, this guy is even worse than I had let on to you, my gentle readers.

Matt Drudge shows us our Alien-in-Chief. "I was born in Kenya, suckers!" And I remember how bad Jimmy Carter was. This guy is ten times worse.

In response to the amazing Daily Mail article--the UK press going where the American MSM criminal enterprises fear to tred--a commenter at Lucianne.com writes in response to Zero supporting the Ground Zero mosque (What, off the Teleprompter for six seconds?):

Reply 26 - Posted by: Joe Btfsplk, 8/15/2010 8:19:58 AM     (No. 6775613)
This could well be the tipping point where American Patriots take action against the enemy within. This cannot and will not stand in a free America. We have a rogue president that is dismantling our values, our economy and our traditions. We stand together now or we will be buried together in the future. The government has become one with the enemy.....

Many in Washington are wondering why more businesses aren't hiring. Anyone in business could give all kinds for reasons, many of them emanating from those self-same folks in Washington. With all kinds of new regulations, taxes, and other burdens coming why should anyone in business, large or small, want to hire when there are far too many unknowns? The answer: they wouldn't.

A life in business is filled with uncertainties, but I can be quite sure that every time I hire someone my obligations to the government go up. From where I sit, the government's message is unmistakable: Creating a new job carries a punishing price.

And what happens when the provisions of ObamaCare kick in and adds thousands more to the cost of hiring a new employee? The probability of hiring that new employee goes down.

More than one commenter to the op-ed piece linked above made it quite clear they had absolutely no understanding of business and why businesses hire new employees. To them all that was needed was for the business to hire new employees and the economy would start its recovery. They didn't understand that businesses won't hire them until they are needed. To do otherwise places a burden on those businesses with little or no prospect of generating any more income for that business and quite possibly turning a marginally surviving business into a money losing business. Businesses hire only the amount of employees they need to provide the goods or services their customers require. But these economic morons either can't or won't understand this simple concept.

My wife and I own a small business. (We both have other jobs.) While it is surviving it is barely viable. The economic downturn saw our income for the business shrink by almost 70%. My wife stopped taking a salary a year ago in order to ensure the business would survive. Both of us put in countless hours without pay in order to make sure we can pay our bills, our taxes, and meet our payroll. If the economy recovers we expect our customers to return as well (though not necessarily to the pre-recession level). But until then there's no way we could even consider adding another employee because if we did we wouldn't take in enough to pay them and pay all our bills, taxes, and business loan. In a short period of time we would be out of business and 5 employees would be unemployed. Yet this is exactly what the aforementioned economic/business morons want us to do.

Need I say more?

Dumb idea, as Caroline Glick writes. BTW, it's likely some of this lands in the hands of Hezbollah, the group that killed over 200 Marines in the early 1980s.

It appears so in the hiring of convicted (and apparently unrepentant) embezzler Lillian Emerson as business administrator for the Franklin/Hill school district. But in the story Concord Monitor reporter Trent Spiner commits a basic grammatical error that's not surprising. In the third paragraph it should read "two weeks' notice," with the apostrophe. The story was re-printed in today's UL with the error intact.

I used to be paid by the Meredith News to fix faux pas like that.

I don't know if you've noticed it, but I have. So has John Stossel.

What am I talking about?

A host of ever growing laws and rules that make it more difficult to be a law abiding citizen.

Something's happened to America, and it isn't good. It's become easier to get into trouble. We've become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.

Cross them, and we are in trouble.

This problem is getting worse all the time. We hear stories about some poor sap ending up being fired or expelled or arrested for breaking some nonsensical and totally useless rule or law that no one in their right mind would ever think were necessary or desirable.

One of my pet peeves when it comes to this kind of nonsense? Zero tolerance policies.

I've written more than once how such policies are crutches for the weak willed pencil-pushers and bureaucrats too damn afraid or too lazy to apply a little common sense and make a judgment call.

Stossel also provides a few examples of zero tolerance laws that do nothing more than make the local policymakers look like imbeciles. My favorite is this one:

Ansche Hedgepeth, 12, committed this heinous crime: She left school in Washington, D.C., entered a Metrorail station to head home and ate a French fry. (Emphasis added) An undercover officer arrested her, confiscating her jacket, backpack and shoelaces. She was handcuffed and taken to the Juvenile Processing Center. Only after three hours in custody was the 12-year-old released into her mother's custody. The chief of Metro Transit Police said: "We really do believe in zero-tolerance. Anyone taken into custody has to be handcuffed for officer safety." She was sentenced to community service and now carries an arrest record. Washington's Metro has since rescinded its zero-tolerance policy.

Examples of that kind of stupidity and sloth abound. Yet Congress and the federal government continue to crank out new laws that criminalize the most trivial behavior, or in some cases non-behavior in an effort to control every aspect of our lives. And it's not just the feds, but state and local governments and institutions that have fallen into the same mindset.

How do we solve this increasingly monstrous trend?

I can think of a few remedies, including a constitutional amendment that requires that for every new law passed, an old one must be repealed. And not just any old law, but one of equal import and scope. If not for that condition we'd be seeing all kinds of new laws passed that end up being balanced by repealing trivial laws that have outlawed things like spitting on the sidewalk.

Another tactic is to file a class action suit against every trivial, wasteful, and mind-numbing piece of legislation or regulation that comes out of government at every level. Bury them in endless litigation, making it difficult, if not impossible to enforce.

One of the tactics I like best? Ridicule. Make it known far and wide the abject stupidity of any law, rule, or regulation that defies common sense and has a profound negative effect on the citizens and relieves the bureaucrats from actually having to make any decisions about anything. Let the people know of the unintended consequences of imposing such laws, rules, or regulations and let them know who it is that created them. Show them for the lazy dunces they are.

A follow up to this last tactic: Vote them out of office or fire them. People this stupid or lazy shouldn't be holding positions of authority over any of us.

It looks like it's a video night tonight, with this great piece by comedian Louis CK on Conan.

What makes it so good is its truth, that being that people today are too darned spoiled. They take today's technology for granted, either forgetting or being too young to have ever experienced what it was like before cell phones, ATMs, the Internet, and cheap airline fares.


I know I'm dating myself here, but I remember doing all the things he talks about in regards to how everyone used to do things. Of them all, dialing the phone was probably the most annoying. And back then we did actually dial the number, not like now where all we have to do is punch some buttons or, if your phone is fancy enough, merely say "Call Mom" and the phone automatically calls your mom.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

Is it any wonder 'green' jobs haven't been created here?

With the US government spending far too much time trying to kill off traditional energy sources, they really haven't spent nearly as much time trying to promote production of green energy sources as they should. Could that be why a lot of potential American energy jobs have been heading to China instead?

It seems any time there are alternative energy projects that actually look like they may actually work as advertised, the government wants nothing to do with it, or worse, works to kill them. But they'll sink tons of money into questionable projects with little chance of return on investment, or that will require endless government subsidies to survive.

Despite the ABC report above that the government of China controls the economy from top to bottom, meaning they can make offers others can't, the reality is quite different.

According to report from Cornell University, China's free enterprise economy works from the bottom up.

Entrepreneurship is taking off in China and with little input from the government, reports a new Cornell study. It is the capitalism of the private sector -- not government -- that is powering China's huge economy, say the researchers, making the rise of capitalism in China very similar to the West's.

"The surprising finding is how little government actually is needed to enable entrepreneurial activities," said Victor Nee, Goldwin Smith professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell, who led the study. "Where markets rule, profit opportunities naturally draw in new entrepreneurs, no matter how adverse the institutional environment may be initially. Once a critical mass of private firms operates in specific niches, social norms and networks fulfill many of the functions that textbook economics assigns to government and legal institutions."

So ABC says one thing, and a study from Cornell says just the opposite. Who am I willing to believe?

Cornell, of course.

Chinese entrepreneurship is echoing that of the US long ago. Entrepreneurship is an endangered species here in America, seeing that the government doesn't appear interested in keeping US innovation, ideas, and inventions here where they can create new jobs, if not entirely new industries. We are indeed becoming far too much like Europe, where the government has taken control of many aspects of the economy. They stifle innovation, either by making financing new ventures more difficult or less profitable, or burying them under an avalanche of regulations that all but prohibit new economic activity unless the government can exercise control over every aspect of it.

Is it any wonder US companies are finding China far more receptive to new ideas and new technologies than the US?

Hasn't this 57-year-old lady heard of going to the deli on a Friday night? Great place to meet people. That's where I met my wife. Actually, it was in the bakery. But that was right next to the deli.

There's been smoke; perhaps there is now a flicker of fire.

Tolerance and diversity, people. It's a lifestyle choice.

Though there have to be limits. Das ist nicht gut. Das ist nich richtig, der Professor.

White Aussie women apparently find the Zimbabwean circus hand irresistible: hundreds feared at risk for his HIV. And he's only 32. He's been busy, though he can only remember a small fraction of his lovers' names.

If you're like 99.8 percent of people, you can find the answer here. Excellent Dennis Prager column!

Doug hit one out of the park with this entry at GraniteGrok in 2008 about a suspicious and disturbing incident in Bristol, NH.

NH must consider doing what Maryland does with that state's recent passage of SB 447 in response to the summary execution of the Labrador retrievers: require detailed statements by all SWAT organizations every six months to the governor's office of crime control and prevention. As I currently understand it, Maryland is the first state in the union to have this level of oversight.

These paramilitary units need oversight. It's common sense. Their ability to inflict death, destruction, turmoil, and psychological terror is unprecedented. Second only to the KGB IRS. And I doubt the latter does the 3:43 am wake-up by the muzzles of M-4 carbines by men in combat gear. Some bullies grow up to be police officers and are too cowardly to face the enemy in real combat with the Army or Marines. It's much easier to take on civilians, even though they sometimes reach for a gun. In that case it's legit to riddle their bodies with bullets. After the dogs, presumably.

LONG, LONG OVERDUE, PEOPLE. Meanwhile, you can join the Facebook page of the mayor of the small town in Maryland who suffered the hideous execution of his dogs because of a botched SWAT raid. It's so easy for the testosterone-laden authorities to rain devastation on hearth and home and the peace in a way that lasts forever. I'm sorry for Cheye Calvo. What he had to endure is completely unacceptable in the United States. And it could happen to you.

A bad combination.

NOTE: Sorry for this slightly incoherent posting, but I threw out my back yesterday and am under muscle-relaxant drugs that are making me woozy.

In 2007 there was the now-famous "kitty corner shot," a rifle that can shoot around corners.

Now there's a new way to break down doors without the risk of having to go up to it and place explosives. HT: Say Uncle

This is obviously racist. Well, then again, maybe not.

When is reward detrimental to the wellbeing of of those receiving it?

When it is undeserved.

Unfortunately the mindset of too many of our educators is that rewards are needed to build self-esteem, and self-esteem was far more important than actual achievement. The side effect of this esteem building? Increasing academic failure because there are no negative consequences for failure. With no consequences no one bothers to try. Such a system is set up to ensure failure and minimize success. That's no way to build a future for our kids.

Leland Teschler writes:

"When I was a kid, we'd just have first, second, and third-place winners for stuff like this," he remarked. "Most of the time you didn't win anything. When that happened, you'd just shrug and go out for a milkshake. I'm not sure giving everybody a prize is healthy."

There is a body of research that shows that accolades handed out too generously may cause kids to underperform. In one case, researchers did a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders, some of whom were praised for their intelligence, others for their effort. It turned out that kids praised for their intelligence tended to give up when confronted with tough tasks at which they didn't excel. They assumed their poor performance was evidence they weren't really smart after all. Kids praised for effort, however, reacted to failure differently. They generally just assumed they hadn't focused enough and bore down on the problem.

The "everyone wins" philosophy is nothing more than means of imposing leftist egalitarianism, where equal outcome is far more important than equal opportunity. Far too often (every time, actually) the "equal outcome" is worse than if actual competition were allowed. Even the 'losers' in a competitive atmosphere will, more often than not, perform better than the 'equal' outcome of the "everyone wins" scenario. The equal outcome scenario always pulls everyone down to the lowest common denominator, which is usually pretty bad. The true competition scenario tends to pull everyone up, though not to exactly same level. Call it an effect of the Law of Unintended Consequences, sort of. It's like a scene out of Harrison Bergeron, where everyone is forced to be equal.

I suspect the everybody-gets-a-gold-star movement arose from misguided attempts to bolster kid self-esteem. After all, the self-esteem bandwagon started rolling downhill with such momentum that in 1984 California created an official self-esteem task force. But there's evidence that performance doesn't rise with self-esteem. One study in particular conducted by social psychologist Roy Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn't improve grades or career achievement. Nor did it reduce alcohol usage or use of violence. (In fact, other studies show that criminals have plenty of self-esteem.)

It seems all kinds of bad ideas, particularly when it comes to education and social engineering, start in California. The self-esteem movement started there and spread like a cancer. Self-esteem became more important than actually learning anything useful. Self-esteem became more important than performance. When I'm flying in a commercial airliner, give me a pilot that knows what he's doing over a pilot that is a marginal performer but has great self-esteem.

Self-esteem only gets you so far. Beyond that you actually have to know something and know how to perform, no matter what type of job you have.

Here.

Scott has obvious fun with it.

Or is it the "whinerines"?

President Obama speaking to sixth-graders armed with the duo of TelePrompters. Are they his "binky," or baby blanket? Apparently they go everywhere with him.

Ain't democracy grand? I'm laughing, but I'm sad at the same time. What harm will this guy go to the country, but be too ignorant to realize it as it unfolds?