Recently in Stupidity Category

In light of the upcoming summer season, this little tidbit by way of Maggie's Farm hits a little too close to home. But considering where it comes from we shouldn't be all that surprised, should we?

The Obama Administration seems to be doing all it can to make sure life is "fair", even if it has to destroy long standing traditions, activities, and other bits of American culture to do so. The latest bit of "fairness" comes by way of the rather overused and severely twisted ADA, or the Americans with Disabilities Act. The most recent salvo threatens to close down both public and commercial swimming pools because they don't have easy access into the water for the severely disabled.

Last week, news was made as today's deadline approached for commercial and municipal swimming pool owners to install means, by which disabled swimmers could enter the nation's swimming pools. It is the kind of regulation that would make a great punch line for the conservative version of the Daily Show, if conservatives were that funny. The Obama Administration has recently construed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Standards for Accessible Design to apply to the act of swimming.

Today, this regulation was supposed to go into effect, opening up the owners to $100,000 fines as well as trial lawyer liability. However, thanks to the kindness of the Justice Department, existing pools now have until January 2013 to comply. "Newly constructed or altered places of public accommodation, commercial facilities and state and local government facilities" operating swimming pools will now be required to install permanent structures that lower physically disabled patrons into the pool.

How many municipalities, hotels, and other facilities will close their pools rather than worry about facing fines or spending money they can't afford to comply with this latest application of the ADA, particularly when it was never really meant to be used in such a punitive fashion?

Call it yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences punishing the innocent all in the name of "fairness".

Much as cities in California have made mistakes when it comes to their finances, it appears here on the East Coast the city of New York is about to shoot itself in the foot, but in a different fashion.

While New York also has problems with its public employee unions, it's nowhere near the level seen elsewhere. Instead, the City Council is proposing rules that will help drive the last surviving industry out of the city - the financial industry.

For the life of me I can't figure out how making it too difficult and too expensive to remain in New York City is going to help the city's finances. Is it possible the City Council has been infected with the "California disease"? After all, California's state and local level governments have been doing their best to drive businesses out of business or out of state. They have succeeded. That's why California is in the fiscal mess it's in. And now New York City wants to do the same thing?

Yet in the wake of JP Morgan's massive losses last week and the continuing controversy surrounding the Wall Street bailouts, the New York City Council is debating a measure that would require city banks to publicly disclose their efforts at "socially responsible" banking.

--snip--

Many bankers, as well as Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have voiced their opposition to the new plans. The regulations, they say, would add another burdensome layer to the web of regulations that already exist at the federal and state levels. The Council, however, appears unmoved, and support of key council leaders...give it a fighting chance at making it into law.

If it does, its supporters on the Council will hail it as a major victory, but it will be a loss for the city as a whole. The financial industry is the one industry keeping the city alive, yet New York's blue politicians seem unconcerned about the risks of antagonizing their major cash cow.

This is the same attitude held by many politicians in California and we've seen how well that's worked out for them. The City Council doesn't seem to understand that the banks and other financial institutions will have no problem departing the city for greener pastures. As the post linked above states, Fortune 500 companies have been leaving New York for decades. Wall Street firms will have no problems following them to places with better business climates. And with today's telecommunications infrastructure, those greener pastures can be anywhere, even here in New Hampshire.

Bret Stephens addresses members of the graduating Class of 2012, exposing them to some hard truths they haven't had to face until now. One of most salient points is something that will stand them in good stead, assuming they're willing to listen: "But if you can just manage to tone down your egos, shape up your minds, and think unfashionable thoughts, you just might be able to do something worthy with your lives. And even get a job. Good luck!"

Bret brings up a number of problems with our existing college and university system today, that being they are less about preparing students to face the real world and more about students "getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree." What's worse is that many of these students put them and/or their families deep into debt, yet they won't be able to find jobs that will pay them anywhere what it is they owe.

Some of those commenting to Bret's piece miss the point, trying to make it seem that he's saying the only worthwhile degrees are in STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine), but that's not what he's saying at all. Instead he's warning students who get degrees in Womyn's Studies, Urban Graffiti, or Transgendered Native American Studies shouldn't expect to be snapped up by corporate America when there are more than enough graduates with degrees in Business Administration, Statistics, Finance, Graphic Arts, Culinary Arts, and an almost endless list of other BA and BS degrees that are far more applicable to the real world.

What's even worse for many of these still unprepared grads is that is that a lot of their contemporaries who didn't go to college are doing far better than they can ever hope to do. This is particularly true of those who went into the trades. They don't have huge student loans to pay off. They started earning their way years earlier than their college-bound friends. And in many ways they've grown up while their friends lived an extended adolescence in college.

On a slightly different thread, one commenter fell into a semantic trap, claiming students are being taught how to think. He went on to claim that they're being brainwashed into being good little progressive puppets. But what he really meant was that they're being taught what to think, which is entirely different.

Being taught how to think, meaning being taught critical thinking skills, is something we need more of in our educational system. If one can think critically, then they can reason from available facts and their own experiences rather than being spoon fed radical and, in the end, socially destructive ideologies masquerading as knowledge and wisdom. Unfortunately we aren't seeing much in the way of critical thinking being taught in our schools any more, and it shows. (This is particularly true in many of our liberal arts colleges.)

Could it be that the lack of critical thinking skills and the abundance of money through loan programs has caused this rampant problem of students studying majors that don't prepare them for life in the real world? I don't know, but it's something worth pondering.

The WP Dad forwarded this to me, an e-mail he wrote to the pastor of our local church. To say my father and the pastor do not see eye to eye politically would not be an untruth by any means. However it is illustrative of the chasm that can exist between friends, at least when it comes to politics.

I cannot say with any certainty how much history the pastor has studied, remembers, or understands. But it appears to me that he does have blind spots when it comes to the actions of those who do not hold freedom dear and would prefer to run things, even if it means killing millions in order to enforce their will.

This e-mail has not been changed other than some formatting and corrections made to some typos.

I apologize for labeling Pres Obama as a Fascist. I should have done that only after presenting arguments that satisfy me that he deserves the label. I have listed below a variety of reasons I have for believing he is a socialist and will become a Fascist.

1. The President's major political asset is his charisma. Polls show that more often than not voters disapprove of his policies, yet he has a high personal approval rating. His accomplishments are meager other than getting elected. Even there his foray into local Chicago politics succeeded because his opponents for the nomination were mistakenly omitted from the ballot.

2. His cabinet appointments have been disappointing. I think that Eric Holder's major accomplishment has been to shield the President. Prior to his appointment his only noted achievement was to obtain a pardon for a major donor who had fled the country after conviction. He slipped the pardon into the list of Pres. Clinton's last day pardons as if it had been vetted and approved in the normal manner by the justice department. His appointee to the Energy Department, as late as two weeks ago was that it was necessary to drive up fossil fuel costs to make green energy more attractive.

3. Assistant Cabinet members require approval from the Senate. Rather than follow the Constitutional requirement, The Pres. appointed numerous Czars who became de facto Assistants without approval. We got ideologues who were avowed communists or revolutionaries.

4. Under Pres. Obama's stewardship, the nation is being reshaped into a secular society. There has been an increasing effort to drive religion from our society. Witness eliminating prayer from our schools, removal of any religious overtones (like the Ten Commandments) from public buildings. Morality is officially suspect, to be replaced by legality and regulation. Each year we add multiple thousands of pages of regulations to control behavior and Congress feels they have accomplished nothing if they haven't passed batches of laws. Is all of this to replace what was once accepted as morals and ethics.

It is documented that those that call themselves liberals do far less charitable work and give far less to charity. I suppose if Government is responsible for the welfare of every individual, then I have met my obligation to my fellow man if I simply pay my taxes That looks to me as an inducement to accept socialism. Socialism always fails because as Margret Thatcher said, "Eventually you run out of other people's money." When Socialism fails the most common result is despotism.

5. Charismatic leaders tend to have cadres of militant supporters. Cuba and Venezuela, Castro and Chavez have co-opted their armies. Mussolini, Hitler and Lenin/Stalin had Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, and Red Shirts. Pres. Obama has Purple Shirted goons. How else would you identify the mobs of union members who descended on Wisconsin in an attempt to over throw the duly elected Governor. They claim that the Tea Party is violent and racist. Not as violent as the Purple Shirts.

6. Pres. Obama and his administration have diligently worked to expand their natural base. We are reaching a point where too great a portion of the voting populace either work for or are married to someone working for a government. Their unions negotiate for improved pay and perks. On the other side of the bargaining table are the unborn generations who will have to pay the wages and perks "someday".

Another huge constituency are the poor. If we are in danger of running out of poor people we simply change the threshold. Of course we have always had a very mobile society. Thomas Sowell had a very revealing essay about mobility. Many of those who are poor were wealthy less than a decade ago. Many recent graduates from high schools and universities are poor until they get work and earn promotions. Many of the wealthy are recipients of one time windfalls and they won't be wealthy ten years from now.

Once you start subsidizing poverty you get more poverty. Much of what we give the poor is not counted as income - food stamps, rent subsidies, unemployment is counted. I've often wondered how many of those who collected unemployment for the full ninety-nine weeks had a working spouse and the unemployment benefit amounts to wages for staying home and being a house husband/wife.

7. The stimulus package was going to 'kick start' projects that were 'shovel ready', but a very large portion of the money went to state and local governments to cover their shortfalls. Instead of shrinking payrolls, these government employees were shielded while productive workers in private employment were laid off or downsized. In particular the stimulus money went to Unions, specifically the teacher's and autoworkers unions. In the case of both Chrysler and GM the bond holders who were legally entitled to protection got cents on the dollar and were not allowed to reorganize the companies. I don't understand why there weren't lawsuits. By the way, it is my contention that the UAW created the Asian and European invasion of our market. Every increase in productivity went to overpaid employees and never to the consumer. Eventually prices for domestic cars were so high that they created a spacious umbrella for competitors to emerge.

There was a time when our technology improvements helped us to protect our markets. The unions couldn't organize the Asian companies, but technology is easily exported. It was thought that the Asian workers were not capable of utilizing our technology, but in reality the 'worker bees' were better educated and better motivated than our domestic scholars.

8. The President has been decrying the Do Nothing Congress, but it is the Democrat controlled Senate that is doing nothing. Pres. Obama is complaining that the days of cooperation and compromise have gone away. In those good old days there was a fair consensus about where the country should go and the compromise was about the best way to get there. Today, there are two opposing ideas about where to go. One side says a democratic capitalist society has served us well and the opposing side says the wave of the future is European style socialism. Compromise is seen by both sides as surrender. Progress will hinge on the will of the people. Even if Pres. Obama is reelected, I'm betting that the Tea party will control both houses.

9. Education has been in decline for decades. The only country that spends more per pupil is Switzerland, but the U.S. has continually slipped in the hard sciences. I believe the Universities have become the home of Lenin's 'useful fools' Government subsidized Universities and tuition increases matched the subsidies. Government began to guarantee student loans and in response to fairness dicta Universities began admitting unqualified student and the dumbing down curricula. Lots of students took gut courses and many flunked out. When these ungraduated student began reneging on the loans, government made student loans ineligible for bankruptcy. One drag on the housing industry has been the large numbers of graduates who owe so much that they are not able to get mortgages. They move in with Mom and Dad, don't get married but they do have children. The government subsidizes unwed mothers.

We castigate greedy Wall Street, but Wall Street can't hold a candle to institutes of higher learning. Too many classes are taught by itinerant instructors that move from campus to campus teaching for meager wages without benefits, while professors retire handsomely. There was a recent article by a retired Sociology professor that recounted his perceptions. There are excessive classrooms and laboratories because neither students nor professors want to start work before 9:00 or work after 3:00, The facilities are less than 50% utilized. Administration used to account for about 20% of payroll and today it is closer to 50%. Part of the reason for this is the excessive regulations impose by government.

Colleges aren't the only culprits. Public schools are also overloaded with administrators. My speculation is that teachers who fail in the class room can't be fired, so to protect the students the under-performing teacher become part of the administration.

In the meantime 'shop' has virtually disappeared from high schools. We now have VoTech. Let me tell you of a recent family experience. One of my grandsons had perception problem that made book learning very difficult, but he was good with mechanical tasks, particularly small engines. He was denied access to a Vocational school because the classes he wanted were over-subscribed by college bound kids that wanted easy courses to improve their GPA. Naturally we now have a shortage of skilled mechanics, carpenters, electricians and plumbers. My son has a neighbor that drives his high school kids around Concord and points out the best houses. He tells them that is where my plumber lives...

Goodness gracious. That certainly enough and I really want to go to bed. I have to add, I am slightly optimistic about the future. Life is going to be difficult for a while but the nation will survive even if Obama is reelected.

Indeed.

At first I thought it was just me, being an older and much more experienced driver. Not that I am a curmudgeonly driver who loafs along at 10 to 20 miles per hour under the speed limit just to be safe. On the contrary, I tend to be one of those driving just above the speed limit and often get impatient with drivers who can't make up their minds about what they're going to do.

Lately I've noticed that drivers in general have become more aggressive, less attentive, and prone to doing more stupid things. Like I said, at first I thought it was just me, perhaps lapsing into that aforementioned curmudgeonly behavior. But after a discussion with a number of co-workers at lunch earlier today, I knew others had seen it too.

This was brought home to me this afternoon after work as I was making my way to the local BJ's for my usual bi-weekly purchase of bulk items. In the stretch between work and BJ's I came across eight different drivers who were pushing the limits on safe and/or courteous driving.

The worst offender was a young driver, likely in his teens, who had a tough time maintaining lane discipline. In one two mile stretch he crossed over the double yellow line into the oncoming lane a half dozen times and darn near ran off the road and onto the shoulder at least 4 times. I don't know if he was texting or fiddling with his iPod, but something sure as heck was distracting him. Another thing: he couldn't keep his speed where it should have been, varying between 20 miles per hour below the speed limit to 10 above. I finally managed to ditch him at the traffic lights at the junction of one of the state highways. He went straight and I turned right. (It was there that I found out he was a young driver. At first I thought he might have been elderly or drunk and incapable of operating a motor vehicle. But it turned out he was just dumb.)

My second memorable encounter occurred on my way home from BJ's. It was at three different sets of traffic lights between BJ's and a stretch of highway that bypasses downtown Laconia that a driver laid on his horn if the cars in front of him didn't move the microsecond the light changed to green. Mind you, it wasn't that there was a two or three second delay after the light changed before the first couple of cars would start to move, causing this guy to hit the horn. He started on his horn the instant the light changed. Farther up the road he would pass cars in front of him, sometimes forcing them to take evasive action to keep from being run off the road or hitting his car. At the next light the same thing would happen: light changes, horn starts blaring, jerk starts trying to pass traffic as soon as there's even a smidgen of space for him to force his way in.

Ironically, once we got to one of the local malls he pulled into the mall and raced up to the drive-up window lane at the Dunkin' Donuts. Was he really that desperate for a caffeine and donut fix?

About 4 miles from home I came across another driver who seemed to think it was necessary to swing wide in the opposite direction of the turn they wanted to take. It's one thing if they were towing a trailer and needed to make a wider than normal turn to accommodate the additional length of the trailer behind them, but this wasn't the case. They were driving a Jetta.

Three times I saw this driver make the wide swinging turn. (Unfortunately they appear to live somewhere in my neighborhood which is why I saw this action more than once, though I didn't recognize the car.)

I've seen more incidents of incipient road rage, rudeness, impatience, and outright stupidity in the past six months than I usually see in six years. I wonder what's been causing this?

First it was ABC with its shoddy characterization, purporting from police video a lack of a wound on the back of Zimmerman's head. Then yesterday NBC apologized (sort of) for its unconscionable editing of the audio tapes to make Zimmerman appear to be motivated by racial animus. Now CNN is withdrawing its claim that Zimmerman used "coon."

I still see the Detroit Free Press--just today!--still persisting in using a photo of a cutsey Trayvon Martin from five or six years ago, while using a photo nearly as old of Zimmerman with the prison jump suit. We don't need the late Andrew Brietbart to see how ridiculous & biased that is.

How is Democrats can claim to be the "friends of the working man" when legislation they pass make thousands of good paying jobs disappear? In this case the 16 Democrats in the Wisconsin Senate shot down a bill that would have brought over 3000 mining jobs to their state and given an economic boost to related businesses also located in their state.

How did these supposed "friends of the working man" justify killing this bill?

They did it at the behest of the public employee unions (SEIU, etc) because they wanted to make sure that Governor Scott Walker wouldn't get a 'win' that might make him even more popular with Wisconsin voters. So these corrupt public employee unions urged their bought-and-paid-for Senate puppets to sacrifice jobs their union brethren wanted and needed. The labor unions supported the bill, showing up to rally at the state house rotunda to plead their case. But their supposed public union allies shafted them all in order to 'get' Scott Walker.

With the failure of the bill, a new $1.5 billion (that's "billion" with a "b") iron ore mine operation disappeared as the owners of the company wishing to open the mine decided to take their money and their jobs and go someplace more inviting. Yet somehow the public employee unions see this as yet another win for their cause. These are the same folks whose bought-and-paid-for Democrats in the Wisconsin legislature have created an increasingly hostile business environment. Is it any wonder jobs have been leaving the state? You'd think these fools would learn the lessons of California, Illinois, and New Jersey and do everything they can to promote more business and jobs in their state.

If this isn't a good reason to bust the public employee unions then I don't know what is. This action shows the these unions are nothing more than corrupt influence peddling criminal organizations using taxpayer dollars to to bribe Democrats at all levels of government to ensure they maintain control of the public purse and their ever less sustainable benefits packages, and the taxpayers be damned. Perhaps a few RICO prosecutions might help break their hold on the legislature.

Probably one of the best proponents of the "skeptics" view on AGW, Lord Monckton, gave his "Climate of Freedom" lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Monckton, being no fool, was well prepared to parry the claims and fallacies put forth by the indoctrinated "watermelon" environmentalists (green on the outside, red on the inside) either attending the lecture or protesting outside the lecture hall.

One of his better encounters was with Erin Delman, president of the Environmental Club at the college and one of the unthinking indoctrinated.

As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). "There's a CONSENSUS!" she shrieked.

"That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk," replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle's codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy?  From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.

Ah, yes. The ever popular appeal to authority, the usual device of those who know their argument is a losing one. It's certainly one of the more used tactics of the warmist camp - if the facts don't support your beliefs, then make the appeal to authority as if that's all one needs to do to prove the unsubstantiated claims.

But for the moment let us return to to Erin Delman's refrain - "There's a CONSENSUS!" Monckton blew the consensus argument out of the water with a few examples of consensus that were anything but proof.

[Monckton] said that, unlike the IPCC, he was going to speak in plain English. Yet he proposed to begin, in silence, by displaying some slides demonstrating the unhappy consequences of several instances of consensus in the 20th century.

The Versailles consensus of 1918 imposed reparations on the defeated Germany, so that the conference that ended the First World War (15 million dead) sowed the seeds of the Second. The eugenics consensus of the 1920s that led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka (6 million dead). The appeasement consensus of the 1930s that provoked Hitler to start World War II (60 million dead). The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s that wrecked 20 successive harvests in the then Soviet Union (20 million dead). The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s that led to a fatal resurgence of malaria worldwide (40 million children dead and counting, 1.25 million of them last year alone).

You could have heard a pin drop. For the first time, the largely hostile audience (for most of those who attended were environmentalists) realized that the mere fact of a consensus does not in any way inform us of whether the assertion about which there is said to be a consensus is true.

And there is the crux of the argument. Consensus, particularly when the term is applied to science, means absolutely nothing. It is merely a tool used to push unsubstantiated and, in some cases, wholly unprovable "scientific" gobbledygook. Consensus means nothing in regards to the validity of a scientific hypothesis. All it takes is one person outside the consensus to prove it wrong.

What made Monckton's lecture even more eye opening was using the IPCC's own data and conclusions to prove them as nonsense. As Monckton stated, the IPCC's reports were not peer reviewed, something the warmists claim ad nauseum is the only thing that is the measure of whether something is true or not. (Never mind that the only peers the AGW folks want reviewing anything are those who are firmly in the warmist camp. The open-minded need not apply.)

In the comments to the post linked above, Lord Monckton replies personally to some of the warmist trolls who tried to discredit his claims by making strawman arguments, misrepresenting what he stated, or trying to attack his data. Ironically, much of the data he used came from the IPCC itself, which he goes to great lengths to explain in his reply. Using their data he shows a number of faulty or unsubstantiated assumptions made by the IPCC to make their grossly overestimated projections about AGW. He shreds every one of the trolls' accusations and shows them for the indoctrinated and unthinking drones they are.

As more than one commenter opined, they'd love to see Lord Monckton debate Al Gore about AGW. Too bad we'll never see that happen. Monckton would bury him.

I see the double standard as applied to conservatives by liberals still stands.

Rush Limbaugh calls an advocate for employer provided birth control a "slut", and the leftist media goes nuts and he loses 9 advertisers. Bill Maher calls Sarah Palin a c***, and not one word of protest is uttered by the Left, nor do his sponsors abandon him.

So by their rules, the Left and their minions are free to disparage any conservative woman, using the most offensive language. But should someone on the Right use a disparaging term that is orders of magnitude less offensive against a liberal woman, it's tantamount to rape and the tar and feathers come out.

These a**holes need to grow up.

Some times great minds think alike.

In this case Gerard Vanderleun attacks one of the "insidiously deceptive lines of the socialist-liberal agenda" which is "Violence doesn't solve anything." As the story he links to states:

Pacifism is a sickness, an actual moral perversity, and dangerous when its effects spread to anyone else beside the pacifist. You may choose to walk to the cattle car, but damn you if you let your children be led up the ramp. You must never allow any group or government to steal your right to exercise armed lethal force in a just situation.

This is a subject I've covered in the past, showing the old leftist saw to be nothing more than a pipe dream.

Violence does solve things. It has ended brutal dictatorships, saved citizens from the predation of criminals, prevented injustices on a small and large scale, and prevented wars.

Perhaps the old saying needs to be modified. Instead, it should be "Violence never solves anything if it is used at the wrong time in the wrong place." Violence in and of itself solves nothing. It is the proper use of violence under the right circumstances that solves problems.

Indeed.

I promised myself I wasn't going to give any more coverage to the Occupy Wall Street protests, but this was too good to pass up. This came by way of my friend at work, Cathy.

Adam Corolla nails it when it comes to the OWS protesters. As Cathy writes, "This is what happens when you have a generation of 'No one is wrong, no one loses, and we all get trophies.' " (Warning: Strong Language.)



A few highlights of Adam's rant, all of which with I happen to agree.

"They're feeling shame. They've been shamed by life because they haven't been prepared for life. They've had so much smoke blown up their...collective asses, by the time they get out in the real world and they realize the real world doesn't give a f**k about where you're from or about what your mommy said you were, or how pretty you are, or what you do."

"All those lies that were told to you by your parents about how special are and how no one was created like you...doesn't mean s**t when you get to the real world and you're just looked at as Peon #27 who's putting in an application."

"Now your plan is to come back and throw a brick at my window. That's your plan...it's this envy and shame and there's going to be a lot more of it."

"We are creating a group of self-entitled monsters."

Indeed.

After weeks of hullabaloo about the various OWS protests across the nation, it appears the whole thing was much ado about nothing.

Between unfocused or contradictory messages, hypocrisy, mob violence, rape, murder, theft, drug overdoses, totalitarian 'councils' confiscating donated money, and just plain foolishness, the Occupy Wall Street protesters have proven one thing to the public at large: they're spoiled children filling the role of useful idiots, showing the worst side of society, not the best as they have claimed.

What have they accomplished other than showing the rest of the country that they're mean-spirited wackos with little understanding of history, economics, or human nature?

It shows in hundreds of different ways, with one of the overriding themes I noticed being "We want you to pay for our stuff even though we could pay for it ourselves, but we don't want the rest of you freeloaders to take our stuff that someone else paid for!" This theme has recurred at more than one protest location, with the protesters not recognizing the hypocrisy of their demands.

Some want to replace capitalism with socialism, even though the socialism they're promoting has never lived up to the promises made and usually end up creating nothing but poverty, misery, and terror. It isn't until countless lives are sacrificed that the socialist utopias implode.

Some seem to think that anarchy is the answer, but all that ever leads to is destruction, lawlessness, and in the end, tyranny.

They claim they represent the 99%, but 99% of what? 99% of the spoiled privileged children of the 1%? 99% of the clueless drones feeling entitled to what others have earned through hard work? They sure as hell don't represent 99% of the American people.

In the end, OWS has been about nothing but selfishness, greed, and a sense of entitlement. In other words, a world class FAIL.

It's only a matter of time before this kind of nonsense kills someone here (assuming it hasn't already):

In Scotland, fire officials who were so hidebound to official health and safety procedures allowed a woman who'd fallen down a collapsed mineshaft to die rather than allow rescue personnel to retrieve her and get her to treatment. Her fall had given her life-threatening injuries but if she had been rescued and transported to a hospital she would likely have survived. Instead, she died due to severe hypothermia because she was partially immersed in water for hours. It wasn't that they couldn't reach her. Firefighters already had, one of them staying with her for over four hours before being ordered to abandon her.

Why have rescue services if they aren't going to be allowed to rescue the very people they're trained to serve? It seems the chief in this case was too much of a paper-shuffling bureaucrat and not enough of a firefighter.

Think such a thing won't happen here? Don't bet on it. It's only a matter of time before someone like the fire chief in question allows something like regulations, budget restrictions, or union rules to kill someone that might otherwise have been saved.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

I find it interesting that President Obama sincerely believes that those of us Americans still working have gotten lazy.

WTF?

I don't know about you, but all three of us here at The Manse are working our butts off. Deb is working at the local veteran's home and going to nursing school. BeezleBub is going to school, taking part in some extracurricular activities, and working at the farm. Me, I'm working, working, and..umm...working.

What it comes down to is that he doesn't think we're working hard enough to support his socialist agenda. This requires people to give selflessly by working harder to support those who can't work and more specifically, those who won't work.

When productivity from those of us starts falling off it's somehow our fault. Never mind that all he's done is given those of us still working more than enough incentive to not work nearly as hard as we have in the past. After all, why should we? All he's going to do is take it away from us.

How do we know this? Because he's said as much during the beginning of his still ongoing presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber?)

It must be remembered that socialism is based upon two principles: envy, and the belief in altruism.

Of the first, it is envy by those who actually produce little or nothing who have been told that those actually producing the wealth are somehow beholden to them. It usually takes the form of class warfare egged on by the very people who see themselves above all of that. (They aren't.)

The Left sells the idea that the best way to make sure everyone has what they need is to take it away from those who actually provide it. The problem is that eventually the providers will decide it's no longer worth it to do so and they'll stop doing it. Then who benefits? Obviously, no one.

Second, socialist believe big time in altruism, that human condition where individuals put aside their own wants and needs for the benefits of others. There's a problem with this belief: no one can be altruistic all the time because by nature humans are altruistic only now and then, and then only under very specific and limited conditions for a very limited amount of time. Once their 'altruism' starts hurting them and their families it fades away. If we need any proof of that all we need to do is look at the two biggest experiments in socialism to see how well the belief in altruism fared: the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Both tried it for generations. Both failed to live up to the ideal. One utterly collapsed when their socialist economy collapsed like the house of cards that it was. The other one gave up on the idea when they watched what happened to their neighbor and decided they didn't want to suffer the same fate. They backed away from the socialist 'ideal' and embraced a limited form of capitalism, and so were saved (at least for now).

But now we have a president who has been working very hard to take us towards an ideology that has failed by appealing to ideals that have been proven to be false, and in the end, deadly. And he baits those who actually provide jobs, goods, and services by telling them they aren't working hard enough?

What a putz.

It is said the truly smart will learn from the harsh lessons of others' failures. I can say that one member of the WP clan is that smart, that being the youngest of the WP sisters. (As she says, she made her own mistakes while growing up that our parents never found out about.)

It would be great if the political class presently ruling the US was as smart as my youngest sister. Unfortunately they are not.

They see the economic meltdown occurring in the Euro-zone, yet refuse to learn the lessons countries like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain are teaching us, the primary one being that eventually you will run out of other people's money to fund all the wonderful social programs that have been used to bribe the electorate.

Italy is the latest to teeter on the brink of insolvency, and should it go over the edge it is quite likely it will pull the rest of the Euro-zone with it. Greece's default damaged the European economy yet it has only a fraction of the GDP of Italy. Should Italy default Europe will take an additional $2 trillion hit it cannot afford. Is it any wonder Germany is considering abandoning the Euro and going back to the mark? Can anyone deny that this problem has been driving the British public to demand a referendum about whether or not to remain in the EU? At least those two countries see the problem and realize they'll have to bankrupt themselves in a doomed effort to prop up economic policies from Brussels.

But too many of our own politicians at the state and federal level, regardless of party, seem oblivious to the fact that unless we make some drastic changes in how our federal government taxes and spends we will be headed down the same path. Labor leaders ignore the fact that neither businesses or taxpayers are a bottomless source of funds, shortchanging their own members by making promises no one can keep.

Should the US fail to put its financial/economic house in order, and right quick, it will pull the world economy down with it into a depression unlike any we've seen before.

The Jawa Report has a handy dandy checklist comparing the Tea Party folks to the #Occupy folks. Again, it's no surprise the OWS folks come out on the short end of this one.

There are also a couple of related links at the bottom of the list you should check out.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

I saw this by way of Instapundit. It reveals some harsh truths the #OWS folks won't admit to, but something We The 53% understand completely.

We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work until 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that. For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime, and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply...will he? and will they?"

So if the OWS folks get their way and kill off Wall Street and the corporations, what they'll get in return is an economic collapse that will make the Great Depression look like a minor market correction in comparison. But what do you expect from economically illiterate and spoiled children who feel entitled to what the rest of us earned?

Taking a look at many of the protesters involved with #OWS, you realize most of them are quite young, generally college age. This is quite telling as in the past it has been the so-called 'enlightened' youth that have led protests and revolutions. But in this case their cause célèbre is not one of justice or rights or racial harmony. Instead it's borne of a belief in entitlement to things of which they have not earned. In other words, they want someone else to pay for the things they want.

Bill Whittle does a pretty good job of explaining what it is the protesters want: More. He also tells them what it is they need: To grow up.

Oh my, here we go again.

It seems the pseudoscience quacks are at it again, this time decrying the dangers of Smart Meters used for Smart Grid applications.

To hear them tell it Smart Meters will irradiate you with high levels of RF, causing all kinds of maladies including cancer, high blood pressure, scurvy, baldness, erectile dysfunction, higher taxes, and chronic halitosis. (Yes, I know these are ridiculous exaggerations, but so are the claims being made by this latest group of Luddites.) From their descriptions, you'd think these things were pumping out power equivalent to that of a microwave oven. They don't. They seem to believe they're transmitting constantly. They aren't.

To address their first point, Smart Meter transmitters have a maximum output of a watt or less on the two radio bands used for this purpose. In most cases Smart Meter transmitter output is in the milliwatt range (thousandths of a watt) because they don't need to transmit very far. Your cell phone transmits more power than that and you hold it against your head. A Smart Meter is usually located outside your home and is nowhere near the occupants.

Second, Smart Meters only transmit when commanded to do so by the utility, generally a few times a day. Even so, the exposure from Smart Meters is still a small fraction of that from a number of other RF sources in and around the home even if it transmits 100% of the time (See Figure 1 in linked PDF above.) With the low duty cycle of Smart Meters (each transmission lasts less than a second), the maximum exposures experienced will be even less. Your laptop or tablet using its wireless connection will expose you to more RF than a Smart Meter ever will. Yet none of the Luddites using them complains about this RF exposure. (Maybe it's because laptops and iPads are useful to these science-ignorant do-gooders, so they're willing to overlook the 'dangers' they pose.)

The pseudo-scientific crap these folks are peddling will do more harm than the Smart Meters they're condemning.

This is the price we pay for indoctrination masquerading as an educational system.

One would think the level of PDS would abate after a while, but it hasn't. The vitriol aimed at Sarah Plain hasn't done anything except grow amongst the leftist shills and drones, at least to judge by the comments made to this article at the Daily Caller wondering if Sarah was on the verge of announcing a run for President.

One would think the shills would at least come up with new claims, but they've been reduced to recycling the same old (and disproven) fabrications. You know the ones:

She's so stupid that she said she could see Russia from her house!

The only reason she's doing what she's been doing is because she's lazy and wants the money.

She's a quitter. She couldn't handle the job of governor.

Trig isn't her kid.

She's in the pocket of Big Oil.

Bristol got pregnant in retaliation for Sarah not aborting Trig.

The list goes on and on, ad nauseum.

One particular commenter kept making the point again and again that she quit her office as governor just to make money. I saw her comment at least a dozen times, meaning she was "pulling a Harrop", named after a regular commenter on the Wall Street Journal opinion section who used copy and paste again and again and again as if repetition would somehow make his words true.

This was the comment I wanted to post, but Daily Caller's comment system, Disqus, was having issues and I wasn't able to post. So here's my response:

Some of the commenters keep calling Palin a quitter because she stepped down as governor. Not once have you mentioned the real reason why she stepped down, have you? Let me refresh your memory since yours appears to be defective.

She quit because her legal fees were bankrupting her and her family. Frivolous ethics lawsuits were filed by a group of thirteen Alaskan Democrats (with help from the DNC). Under Alaskan law she had to cover her own legal fees. Answering those lawsuits took up almost 100% of her time and the time of her staff, meaning she couldn't govern. Those lawsuits were filed just for that reason - to make it impossible for her to govern. It doesn't matter that every single one of those lawsuits were found to be without merit and were eventually dismissed. Every single one of them. But that didn't mean she didn't end up with legal fees exceeding $500,000.

Since then Alaskan law has been changed which now covers the governor's legal fees for such legal proceedings. That didn't help Governor Palin as she still had to pay the fees she accrued during that time. Were you in that position would you have stayed in office even though it would leave your family destitute? Somehow I doubt it.

I have no doubts my words will in no way sway you true believers in Palin's laziness and greed because you have proven yourselves again and again incapable of independent thought. You can only think along those lines your programmers allow. Heaven forbid you should stray from the party line and think for yourself.

Basically, they've got nothing new while Plain has been showing she's far smarter than much of the left has ever given her credit for and has better handle on how things work than the present occupant of the White House. And that scares the Democrats to death.

Too bad.