Smartz...I haz it.

Found this interview over at the wonderful blog by David Thompson, and I am dropping it here because I love Thomas Sowell, and because I WAS RIGHT! Or, to be precise, Mr. Sowell agrees with me. And that's even better than being right, because it also means I'm smart! Damn, I'm good.

The entire interview is worth listening to (not just the part where he agrees with me) for his theories on the intersection of wealth creation, geography and isolation. Basically, to sum it up, if you happen to get stuck in a shithole part of the world, like the Eskimos or the Aborigines, you will stay poor, backwards, and stupid. People need to interact to create wealth and to progress culturally.

Good stuff.

I would also interject into his thesis that FREEDOM is absolutely required for the creation of wealth because it ALLOWS people to interact on their own terms. You can't force creative interaction. You can only inhibit it.

Just my two cents, but seeing as how Mr. Sowell and I are BFFs now because we agree on "The Donald," I thought he wouldn't mind if I critiqued him a little...HAHAHA!

The Madness of King Barry

Brought to you by the hilarious and irreverent Joe Dan Gorman of Intellectual Froglegs.

I have his videos on continuous loop in my Drinking Closet.  

Rush to judgment.

Indeed.

H/T: Moonbattery

"We don't need no stinkin' badges!"

And these bikers don't need no stinkin' permit.

Let'em roll.

Apparently our National Park Service didn't think a parade on the anniversary of 9/11 to honor our fallen citizens and soldiers who have died in the last twelve years because of Islamic extremism was important enough to issue a permit.

So the bikers came anyway.

There is a lesson here, folks. The government is only as powerful as we allow it to be. If we, as free citizens, say not just, "No!" but "HELL NO!" then the government must stand aside or use force, because force is all it has. Force is all it is.

And the moment the government uses force, the game is ON. Because we will see it for what it is. Power. Control. Force.

Jon Stewart said he believes in "good government" even as we learn of spying, drones strikes, attacks on the Constitution, coverups, use of power to destroy political enemies, and flat out lies. I say there is no such thing as "good government." There is only big government and small government.

The smaller the better.

A Private Idaho

Anyone who is lucky enough to have ever lived in Idaho feels that it speaks to them in a unique and private way. Everyone I have ever met from Idaho feels so connected to the spiritual qualities of the place that even mentioning it always brings a secret smile to their faces.

We all of us know that secret smile.

Idaho isn't just rugged, forbidding, immense. It is also deep, quiet, and soulful.

Tequila Shots

It used to be drinking tequila meant something. It gained one a certain place. Recognition. Respect. The fiery, soul-searing liquid needed all your courage, and just a little stupidity, some salt and a redemptive burst of lime to make it down.

The act of drinking such rotgut was a performance in heroism. It would begin with the in drawn breath. The anticipatory swallow readied the tongue and throat for the caustic liquid. Shoulders were squared. Resolve tightened your hand around the shot glass.

A lick of salt and your eyes would close to the inevitable. You had made your decision. The full shot was tossed back. A gasp of recognition. Then the salvation of cleansing lime juice....Another round!

But now we have tequilas that are as smooth, complex and enticing as a beautiful cognac. Needing a salt lick and then chomping down on a lime wedge like a piece of leather during unanesthetized surgery is no longer necessary. Or even tolerated.

With the truly exquisite tequilas one can obtain now, presentation and thoughtful pairing are required.

SANGRITA

12 servings

12 limes, ends trimmed, cut crosswise in half

2 1/4 cups fresh orange juice
5 tablespoons grenadine syrup
1 teaspoon (generous) salt
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper (to taste)

Premium tequila (and I do mean PREMIUM!) HAHA!

Squeeze the limes in citrus juicer to extract as much juice as possible. Use 3/4 cup for recipe. Save remaining juice for another use. Using scissors, cut out as much of the membrane as possible. Freeze lime halves.

Mix all other ingredients together. Refrigerate until cold, about 2 hours.


Serve the tequila and sangrita in the frozen lime halves to your guests.

Dance! All night.

Oh...and fuck Bette Midler.

Seeing the "we" in me.

When I watched this video, it at first seemed compelling in its timeless message. It isn't what happens to us that matters - it's what we think about what happens -- how we internalize it. And when we see others as ourselves, with empathy and understanding and acceptance, then it expands our awareness from the small center of "me" to the larger, more complex world of "we". This expansion increases our compassion, tolerance, capacity for forgiveness, and, ultimately, creates fertile ground for love.

And we're happier.

Of course, his message would have been even more convincing if the author hadn't committed suicide.

Just saying....

************************************

Okay...okay...okay.  I was going to just leave it at that but the risk of appearing like a total asshole instead of the lovable asshole I try diligently to project was too great. An inspirational speech about how to stop focusing on yourself and your problems from someone who couldn't get out of his own head and, after years of depression, hangs himself? Seriously? This is simply so depressing that it is funny in a miserably, painfully, wretchedly dark, and utterly macabre sort of way.

Just once I want someone who is "coaching" me on some inspirational way of thinking or living to demonstrate just how fucking wonderful his life is because of doing what he is telling me to do. Just. Once.

I am sick to DEATH of "experts" in any number of fields telling us all how to think, feel, make tons of money, live amazing lives, find the perfect love, manifest all our dreams and desires while they stumble along fucking things up just as badly or perhaps even worse than the most remedial among us. Marriage counselors on their fifth marriage. Success speakers who have never done anything except sell the idea of success to others. Fat doctors who smoke. Therapists who take anti-depressants.

The list is endless.

And what does it say about us? The two observations that I can make are:

1. We have become a nation of life-long children. We look to "adults" (aka "experts") throughout our lives. Buy a book...go to a seminar...take a course...because someone else has the answer. We certainly don't have to figure it out ourselves. Why, we wouldn't even WANT to. There is an expert for everything who can tell us anything - how to have a happy marriage, raise our children, find the perfect job...

2. This idea of an expert for everything implies that there is a solution for everything. UTOPIA! Yeah! HOPE AND CHANGE! No wonder our generation is the one who elected President Peace Prize. We have been conditioned from grade school to turn over our self-reliance, common sense, and responsibility for just about everything to someone else, some "expert", some speaker, author, politician...

And now we have President Hope.

Serves us right.

Still, I would like for uplifting, inspirational messages like this one to work once in a while. It would soften my cynicism, that's for damn sure.

Freedom isn't free. And it isn't safe, either.

I won't win any friends for saying this, but I am ashamed of my country today. That we should be so quickly reduced to cowering in our homes, so happy to see armored trucks and SWAT Team-style para-military police squads roaming all over a town, so willing to comply meekly in the face of overwhelming force, is shocking to me. These are not the actions of a free people. This should not be response of a free state. It looks perilously close to a totalitarian police state, to me.

I see these scenes, and I think, "Kittens, we are being conditioned."

In watching the highly militarized police response to the Boston bombings and the massive manhunt for one piece of shit 19 year old boy, which has now effectively shut down an entire area, I cannot help but wonder if this is an instance of not letting a crisis go to waste, to use our dear Mr. Emanuel's famous phrase.

Only in America could this happen and we all still think we're the "Land of the Free."

Kittens, we are being conditioned.

While I fully understand the second-by-second potential for more death and bloodshed in an unstable and rapidly unfolding situation, I can't see scenes like these and not be sharply aware of the greater danger in a police force that could put together this kind of response over the escape of a single 19 year old kid, scared, on the run, his brother dead, his family far away. When did this kind of military style show of force become acceptable on the streets of our country? Did I miss something? Can someone fill me in on when, exactly, as a nation, we became so tremblingly, pee-our-pants-terrified that we sheepishly beg for this kind of massive fascistic over-the-top manhunt to find one stinking little shithead of a kid?

If they find him, will they really need all those bullets and all that protection?

Kittens, we are being conditioned.

Do tell, darling. Yes, we do "get it."

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." - Rahm Emanuel (Emphasis totally mine.)



Kittens, we are being conditioned.

Conditioned to the idea that the police are the military and the military are the police, and that it's all hunky dory. Conditioned to the idea that only a MASSIVE response of government power is appropriate to track down one single 19 year old boy -- for everyone's safety, of course. Conditioned to the idea that this kind of scene is not just appropriate but welcomed and necessary. Conditioned to the idea that an ever more militarized police force is just what we need to be "safe."

But it's not what we need to remain free.

This kind of power will not stay within the boundary of responding to terrorism for long, in my humble opinion. It has very nearly burst those bounds as it is. The bombings in Boston, while horrific and deeply saddening, were the work of two loner brothers, one of whom is already dead, if not by the hail of police bullets, then by the car driven over him by his fleeing brother. If we accept this down-town Baghdad style response from our government as appropriate in America ever, mark my words, we will see this kind of force used in more and more incidences, slowly broadening the acceptable use of force for transgressions against the ever more virulent state.

Rachel Lucas asks the same question, albeit not with the fascistic inference I've given it, and she raises the highly salient point that: 

"certain journalists and leftist commentators are either (1) going silent over the fact that the confirmed suspects are in fact foreign and Muslim, rather than dirty little honky redneck tax-opposing homegrown domestic terrorist teabaggers like they were hoping for, and/or (2) saying now – and only now, after it turns out not to be a cracker teabagger – that it’d be unwise to rush to conclusions or to make assumptions based on demographic factors.

There is a reason for this, kittens. Yup. You guessed it. Conditioning.

As long as the media maintain the drumbeat that the right is inherently dangerous and that it is reasonable to immediately suspect them of just about anything, while simultaneously insisting that there is simply no way to know why anyone who is not a rabid, snarling right-winger would ever DO such a thing, the government can continue to increase its power and use of force without pushback from a frightened and polarized population that is not allowed to even openly discuss the possibility that Islam is a danger to society and should be severely restricted in a free country.

So if you refuse to take reasonable measures to ensure the security of the population, you will inevitably be allowed all manner of UNreasonable measures when all hell breaks loose and the citizens cry for safety.

I think our government wants that. Badly.

And we are giving it to them. And thanking them for it.

Jeremy Irons eats Nanny Bloomberg for lunch. And also something he finds in his teeth.

Chew on that, stupid liberals.

One of the points Mr. Irons so eloquently makes as he thoughtfully ruminates on whatever he retrieved from his back molars, is that liberalism insults your intelligence. It is a philosophy based on the belief that most people just aren't that smart and need to be taken care of. With force, if necessary. Oh...and force is always necessary. Just ask any liberal. When was the last time a liberal looked for a solution to ANYTHING from anywhere other than the government -- nicely accompanied by the use of force? A law, a regulation, a ban, a tax...a jail sentence? As Mr. Irons points out, the government COULD just try to convince us, you know, like the evil corporate giants apparently do every day. So much power do corporations wield over our puny minds that we need a law or a regulation or a ban or a tax or a jail sentence to make us stop doing whatever they deliberately and easily program us to do. Why not use these supposedly highly successful marketing techniques that create, direct and virtually guarantee all kinds of behaviors, from buying a certain brand of soap to, well, perhaps using dental floss regularly? Okay...obviously they need better commercials for that last one...but oh well...

We could have some really interesting TV commercials, billboards, viral YouTube videos. Think of it. The government could rediscover its early and highly successful marketing techniques.

Remember? They used to be really good at it. Actually, they still are.

And while we're at it...public schooling must have sucked back then, too. What's with the little darling's countdown?

"One...two...three..four...five...seven...six...six...eight...nine...nine..." 

Oh...someone just hit the button, will you?

Leo Terrell is an attorney.

He reminds us of that fact repeatedly because apparently it gives him carte blanche to comment on anything in the political arena, while, in sharp contrast, being...say...a pediatric neurosurgeon like Dr. Ben Carson means -- SHUT UP!

Leo is the wordsmith who put his hands over his ears in a attempt to win the argument during a recent appearance on Hannity. Apparently such behavior makes for good TV because he was back on Hannity last night.

But there is something besides the illuminating lunacy of the left going on here. Notice how quiet Mr. Innis quietly defends his quiet position throughout the theatrics. And comes off as losing.

No way, you say!

Way.

When one side is quietly acting like an adult, while the other side is having a temper tantrum, the temper tantrum always wins. Why? How can this be? Because the LoFo voters just hear passion...and feeling...and urgency...and they can just tell he cares.

And caring delivers the slam dunk, dance in the end zone, take it to the bank win, kittens. Every. Time.

Reasoning is...so...reasonable.

Bor-ring.

We have turned the news into theater and carnivals with pretty girls and men with perfect hair and great ties, and we wonder why it's all become so theatrical and dizzyingly insane.

The news used to be intentionally boring because they were informing you - which used to be their job. Now they are entertaining you - different job.

When news is entertainment, the side with the greatest entertainment value wins.

We'd better start having some temper tantrums. And soon.

Speak up. Now.

Joan of Argghh! at Primordial Slack hits it out of the ballpark with this post. Of late there have been too many chest-thumping, full-throated roars about the injustices and overreach of our government. I have even lent my squeak to the chorus. But an open revolt is not in the cards, I believe. We will lose this country slowly, as we have been doing for over 100 years. Like a handful of sand that you slowly allow to slip through your fingers, at some point, the sand is gone, no matter how impossible this may seem when you hold it full and heavy in your cupped palms and only the barest few grains are slipping through.

At some point, it's all gone.

However, ALL OF US are already being made examples. Daily we comply with all sorts of indignities and insults to our sovereign sense of human rights. We answer intrusive questions, we suffer molestation in public by the TSA, we sigh at bureaucratic sand in our economic gears.

But here’s the thing: Obama won’t send an army, he’ll send your neighbor, the one with the IRS job. Or you’ll try to travel and a local NHS satrap will show up to investigate you, express serious doubts about your online comments, and ask you to get in his car, quietly please, as your wife and kids look on– and your neighbors whisper, “I always thought something was strange about him.” Some municipal quisling will bring four or five officers and arrest you for making a video, or for refusing a smart-meter on your home. You will be shamed in the local paper, not the New York Times.

 Read it all. It's very, very good. And it's worth some thought.


H/T: Primordial Slack

This is all the warning you're going to get.

Nature happens.

And it almost always involves death.

"Give me liberty or give me...!"

Circle of life kind of stuff. Gaia in action.

Here's your sign. UPDATED!!!

One of my guilty pleasures is the comedy of the Blue Collar crew. While Ron White is my favorite, with his cigar and scotch and shit-eating grin, Bill Engvall is always funny when he gets into the numerous reasons why people should be awarded "the sign."

But it occurs to me that we have available a better sign that proves stupidity with alarming and decisive finality.

If we catch you. After the fact, of course.

However, my position that a gun free zone sign only serves to illustrate how stupid - and unarmed - you are does instead, according to my intellectual betters, clearly demonstrate how bitter and clingy I actually am. As I am completely unable to take my finger off the trigger of my gun, even long enough to pick my nose or thumb through my King James version of the Bible, I am unable to demonstrate how effective this sign really is. Apparently using a sign to indicate your desire to protect yourself with a sign works. Just watch this informative video.

I don't know how you can argue with that. Look at the way that sign stopped the violent and armed perpetrator every time.

Once again, liberals are very, very smart and are never driven by an agenda, but only by "what works." They are pragmatists. Only science is their master.  We idiots and in-bred fly-over 'tards still bitterly clinging to our damn guns are the ones who do not trust signs because we are ideologically driven. We don't care about statistics or results because we can't understand science anyway - just killing stuff.

Exactly, sweetheart. You're cute. Stupid works for you.

I just have one question. If these signs work so amazingly well, why did President Obama just sign into law a bill that gives him Secret Service protection for life? Why not just get himself one of those super-duper, fool-proof, fail-safe signs? Who doesn't want that kind of protection?

I would probably be considered a little petty if I pointed out at this time that this level of hypocrisy has rarely been seen in politics. Even from Democrats. And that's saying a lot.

**************************

UPDATED!

"You'd have to be a gun-toting, slack-jawed, goat-roping circus clown to miss the armor-piercing logic of my position on gun control," stated Mayor Bloomberg at his recent press conference.

"The most salient point made above, and one I feel compelled to enumerate as you seem to keep missing it, is that guns are NOT FOR THE STUPID LITTLE PEOPLE. As soon as you can grasp that concept, we'll all get along much better," he offered diplomatically. "I mean, honestly, if I don't believe that you're capable of using salt correctly or regulating your soda intake appropriately, why in the world would I believe you needed access to a gun?

"Guns are for the smart people. We need guns to stay safe--OOPS! I mean saf-ER than your government issued sign would insure--so that we can continue to run things. What would happen to all you nose-picking, bare-foot beauty queens if all the smart people were unprotected--OOOPS! again. I mean, protected only by their sign?

"Look, there are people that society can afford to take chances with. That would be all of you.

"Then there are people who are so smart and important and NECESSARY that society must break its own rules of safety in order to keep them safe-ER. That would be us.

"Remember when President Bush said, 'I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system'? Well, this is like that.

"And if you weren't so stupid...but whatever. Here's your sign."

Well, I feel safer already.

The one thing. Change.

This little video does a pretty good job of explaining the fallout of the Very Bad No Good 17th Amendment.

But it starts a line of thought which carries us back through all of human history. Bill Whittle does an extraordinary job (as always) in explaining the importance of the 17th Amendment in the context of our nation's history and mankind's history.

In short, mankind's history is the story of the struggle and pain of change, for change always brings fear and uncertainty -- even real loss. But to cease to change is to die. That is why, for all their rallying cries for "CHANGE!" progressives always bring death. At the heart of their calls for "CHANGE!" is the desire to actually stop any change which they see as a threat to their own security or power. 

The free market of a free people is the most changeable, fluid, spontaneous environment imaginable. It is fundamentally based on change. It cannot operate as a free market without the ability to radically, even painfully, change things, people, ideas, outcomes -- without answering to POWER.

To bring the inventiveness, initiative, self-expression, curiosity, imagination and spirit of a people to its knees in the name of "CHANGE!" requires a great deal of power. The power to punish and to reward, to control and to kill. The progressives' cry for "CHANGE!" is intended to destroy true change since it is always -- and only -- expressed through the power of government.

Here's my nutshell summation, for what it's worth.

Conservatives understand that principles are unchangeable, but that everything that exists because of those principles is constantly changing.

Liberals believe that principles are as changeable and fluid as the next guy's opinion, but that all the results that happen from this mishmash of "relativistic" values must be made UNchangeable.

Pick which one makes the most sense to you.

"When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Well, maybe not everybody.

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES. But necessary. Very, very necessary.

Despite its spectacular brutality, communism continues to exert its lure of something for nothing that has intoxicated man since Cain killed Abel. It appears that all we need to follow the next Pied Piper into the depths of hell is the promise of free healthcare.

Good luck with that.


H/T: American Thinker

It's not just the 2nd Amendment that is under attack.

Previously I posted a video of Laura Ingraham interviewing Dr. John Lott about our smartest president ever and his apparent TOTAL LACK of intellectual openness to the idea that the 2nd Amendment says what it says - and means it. Or, to be fair, that video was more of an indication that what the 2nd Amendment says did not matter one bit to someone, such as our Constitutional scholar and future president, who is obviously so much brighter than the old dead white guys who wrote it.

Now, it's the 1st Amendment they are after. Bill Whittle brings us a video detailing how our institutions of intense indoctrination higher learning are telling us to "sit down and shut up."




This open and unapologetic intolerance is perfectly understandable. When you have long since stopped questioning your assumptions, because, after all, all the really SMART people think just as you do, then why in the world would you give some dumb yokel, who spouts off about freedom and rights or anything with which you disagree, the time of day? Or an A, for that matter?

"...and he just kind of wrinkled his face and turned around and walked away."

Dr. John Lott, economist, academic and noted author of several books, including "Freedomonics" and "More Guns, Less Crime", relates a brief encounter with Dear Leader during their time together at the University of Chicago.

"I don't believe people should be able to own guns," announced our future Leader and Constitutional Scholar.

"Well, you know, maybe we can get together sometime, have lunch and talk about it," Dr. Lott suggested.

The intellectually curious and open-minded Obama didn't think so. So do you think the chances that Obama has changed his mind since then - now that he actually has promised to uphold the Constitution - are slim? Yeah...me, too.

Heh, here's an idea. How about the Secret Service not be allowed guns either? Fair's fair.

UPDATED!
Visit Pat Dollard's site for the video. It would open automatically on my page and it was driving me NUTS.


H/T: Clash Daily and Pat Dollard

Theft is the way it has always been.

Man has not changed much since he stumbled out of the cave. His beliefs have changed, largely through an expansion of his knowledge, but his nature remains firmly unchanged. Static. We are still these primitive humans in "Quest for Fire", albeit with a better sense of fashion.

STEALING FIRE

At the beginning of this video, the commenter states that early man did not know how to MAKE fire, but could only steal it. This observation stood out for me. AH! This is the nature of man. This is his historical and political and social common denominator. Theft.

In the need for survival, in the quest for protection, man's first and most intractable impulse is to simply steal -- from nature or from others. All animals steal or kill to survive. As we became more "civilized", it was this primitive, animal impulse to steal that was recognized and around which our laws were developed, not just because this granted immense power to a few, but because these few, in turn, acted to control this impulse in society. Only they were allowed to steal. This insured order. In turn, they distributed enough of the loot to maintain order and continued cooperation. Or, of course, they killed those who didn't cooperate. The tribal leaders stole from the members of the tribe, the king stole from the serfs, or the Pope stole from the converts, wars were fought to steal from others. Finally, the modern state arose to steal from everyone.

MAKE IT OR TAKE IT

There are only two ways in which to experience prosperity and therefore insure survival through the security of accumulated wealth, be it a home, or stored food, or extra clothing. You can either make it or take it. Only man is capable of making wealth. But the idea of making wealth is relatively new in man's evolution, while the idea of taking it has been with us since the beginning. And taking it is so very much easier. It is also irreducibly simple. Everyone can understand it. Everyone can benefit from it immediately, if only to meet the smallest needs of gas in your car or a new phone.

The creation of wealth, by contrast, must first begin as an abstract idea for the wealth doesn't yet exist in physical reality. It requires mental discipline, knowledge, and often great effort. This is hard. And it does not happen for everyone.

Everyone can steal. Not everyone can create.

This is one of the greatest differences between the right and the left. The right understands and values the process of discovery and creation, the MAKING of wealth. The left is only interested in stealing it.

A RADICAL IDEA

Over two hundred years ago America said that if you make it, you get to keep it. Only in America did this radical idea take hold -- the idea that man should not be enslaved to the strong, dutifully offering up his life and efforts for the promise that power would protect him from the impulse to steal in others. This idea changed man's historical trajectory. Our Founding Fathers placed what had always been the privilege of power in the binding chains of the Constitution, written so that such power could only be applied EQUALLY to protect, not preferentially to enrich, freeing men from the constant threat of theft and releasing the economic engine of creation and discovery. At last! Political recognition that both your physical body and your mind  belonged to you, and therefore, no man, no matter his power or his "need" could take from you what you had created. This was truly a radical idea, and remains so to this day.

But on Tuesday, November 6, 2012, we rejected that radical idea to go back to the old ways of theft.

"YOU DIDN'T BUILD THAT"

At the heart of this telling phrase from our Beloved Leader is this idea that theft is still the most legitimate economic activity among men. "You didn't build that" perfectly reflects the idea that nothing belongs to you. That others with needs, or jealousies, or simply more power, can take it from you.

Whenever any society becomes more concerned with the transfer of wealth than with the creation of it, it is doomed to fall back to poverty, brutality, and the primitive impulse of the caveman.
 

Tuesday's election showed there is still the caveman in all of us - and a majority of us gave in to him.

Just wondering...