Stones Cry Out

Links!

1. For the time traveling Obama (not?) fan. (Tip ‘o the hat)
2. Truth to power, 4th century style.
3. Racism and hate crimes.
4. Grist for the abortion debate.
5. A good idea noted in the sporting world.
6. How did it happen? Elysium suggests lax immigration policies … although factors leading to the fall of the two parent household and the rise in divorce figure greatly.
7. Syrian notes from the guy who predicted the Russian response several days before it happened.
8. A dog with a drinking problem. Glub glub.
9. Some damn fine sports reporting.
10. Of interest.
11. For the Biden home defense network.
12. Infrastructure spending.

A week in the middle … the last few weeks big push is over … and I’m in cleanup mode for traveling to Alabama next week and the next push.

1. Jesus’ maternal grandparents noted.
2. Badum, bing.
3. I’m missing where this is a problem.
4. This is not unrelated.
5. Zombies and brainz.
6. Hum drum home drone.
7. A book list.
8. A fistful of (not dollars) but something else mindful of dirt.
9. The last frame is the kicker.
10. A teaching method with results.
11. A question, the answer … ambition.
12. A question regarding  Syria.
13. A protestant (I think) sees an Eastern Paschal celebration.
14. Not just one “red line” in the Middle East.
15. Israel not the only frakking country in the Middle East either.
16. Three essays on Syrian intervention: here, here and here.
17. On scientific malpractice.

G’day

1. Some Olde English history.
2. How to ride heroically.
3. Angry parent doesn’t think about what they are doing.
4. Biological diversity and human ability.
5. Alas, the cost of moving, fiscal and psychic is so so very high … or not. Regardless, sounds good.
6. Frodo for President.
7. Amuzing.
8. STEM shortage.
9. Who is at fault?
10. Yikes.
11. Limited liability means what?
12. And why is this not completely obvious?
13. One reason why not to bomb Syria.

A while back, I gave my cautious approval to an NSA program that said it was just collecting phone call metadata; information about calls – like the phone numbers, and date & time – but not the calls themselves. We can get this same information about government phones, so keeping ours didn’t seem that big a deal. Still, it seemed a bit of overreach.

Well, we now have more information coming out of the NSA telling us that, well, they did make a few oopsies. They told Bloomberg News that, over the past decade, very rare instances of willful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found. Clever use of the passive voice there; no actual names of agents were mentioned. Another spokesman said that the actions were the work of overzealous NSA employees or contractors. Yeah, and just a few “overzealous” IRS workers in Cincinnati were responsible for the entire scandal of targeting conservatives.

Like most government wrongdoing, this is going to come out in dribs and drabs. Had it stopped with the revelation of phone call metadata, I could have been OK with it. But now we’re hearing about a few slipups here and later a few there.

I know, I know. Give government power and they’ll first take more, and then abuse it. Wow, now who could have anticipated that?

Blogger Donald Sensing noted that someone writing at the very liberal Daily Kos website was rather irked that, due to ObamaCare, she’d wind up paying over $8000 a year for what she called “crappy, high-deductible insurance” in New York state. The writer notes, “This means we will all be required to pay steep premiums and deductibles but may not have the financial resources to actually access healthcare.”

You mean ObamaCare is not going to be the panacea its proponents claimed it would be? Color me meh.

She concludes , “I am reminded on days like today, that President Obama campaigned on the idea that people like me would see something like a $2500 reduction in health insurance costs. What was I thinking?” Don Sensing surmises that thinking didn’t enter into it. I’d say, wow, now who could have anticipated that?

The magazine The Nation is a liberal-leaning publication; that much is certain. What’s not so certain is whether or not they really understand the topics they cover.

Here’s a case in point. It recently asked it readers to sign an open letter to Wal-Mart demanding that they pay workers at least $12 an hour. However, another web site, ProPublica, reported, as good news, that, this fall, interns at the Nation Institute, who put out the magazine, will be paid minimum wage for the first time in the history of the 30-year-old program. Up until now they’d been paid at less than minimum wage, when all the while they railed against those who did just that.

But anyway, that’s good news, right? Those overworked interns will now get the federal minimum wage and have more to spend in our economy. Well, consider this. In a statement to ProPublica on the report, The Nation said that, “We are not yet certain how this will work out long term, but for the fall we are anticipating hiring ten interns rather than twelve.”

So they’re raising the pay, but hiring fewer workers in response. Wow, now who could have anticipated that?

Links?

1. Recounting Mr Obama’s shifting sands and the Middle East. Even if you don’t know what we should vis a vis Egypt and Syria, what we did do remains amazingly stupid.
2. Speaking of Syria … somebody needs to update their RSS/news feeds, ’cause that criteria touches not a single comment on the matter that I’ve read anywhere.
3. Oh, welcome back Mr Schraub … even if you abandon the Constitution in the name of defending it. A fourth of the colonies at the time of ratification felt that “Freedom” meant the authority to make local decisions about how to order their life (reference, “New England folkway and the section on “Freedom ways” in Abion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher). My guess is that Mr Schraub knew that because he has a keen interest in American political history, so he has to have read that seminal book. It seems incoherent to argue that what is meant by freedom held by a quarter of the founding population is actually not Constitutional.
4. Slick gun tech.
5. For your failing memory, future promise.
6. Killing “to make a statement” seems on its face unethical. Yes or no?
7. Epic fantasy ranked. I’d move #3 up … possibly to the top. I’d move down #4 … don’t know how far. #17 shouldn’t even be on the list, it was so bad.
8. Uh, what the heck?!
9. This not news, guy works at spy agencies … and, erhm, spies.
10. That. Is. Amazing.
11. Discussing racism.

Still busy, but trying to make time for y’all

1. Bzaaaap!
2. Hmmm, two ways to go on that … yes censuring both is in order, but only one was a family hour/children’s TV hostess/actress.
3. Here, however, is a third way you probably haven’t considered.
4. “I have not yet made a decision” and the subtext is that we all remember “I’m the guy who spent knew for 9 months where Bin Laden and it took all that time for me to make up my mind to go after him.” Somebody should remind him, not to draw a do not cross line if it is just a bluff. Like the bin Laden attack, we’ll have to wait for a wag-the-dog domestic prompt to get us to move.
5. Related to the above. So, prior to being elected President, Mr Obama was firmly against Presidential unilateral military action, now he’s for it (indeed done it). Stupid or evil (that is, was he so dumb he didn’t anticipate reasons for doing so, or was he lying when he said he was against it?) Liberals keep telling how smart they are, which alas, leaves the “evil” alternative.
6. I think this belief noted (that racism is the motive) is common on the left. It remains interesting (ironic?) that that assumption is itself  the essence of bigotry.
7. Guns and legal control. Back when I was in school, a very good cartoon was on a door in our dorm … “People don’t kill people, Toasters kill people.” with the image of a guy falling down dead with toast impaling his back and another holding a toaster like a mortar.
8. “Noble cause corruption” isn’t noble but it is indeed corruption.
9. Chemicals to leave for the professionals.
10. Academic potential.
11. Who done it?
12. A short way from surrealism is hyper-realism, both I will admit to liking.
13. A mistake I’ve made.

Good morning.

1. Foreign policy excuses.
2. Coming to the dance, and darn it all, but someone else has the same dress.
3. And then … have a cup.
4. Oddly enough, I have an LED bulb in my bathroom because it is brighter than the incandescent (the fixture limits because of heat to 60 watts, I put a liquid cooled LED 75+ watt equivalent which draws under 20 watts … and voila … more light than ever).
5. Them folx are serious about their drinking (and avoiding taxes).
6. Wow.
7. Syria and gas … and who dun it … so cui bono? Al Qaeda or an equivalent?
8. Sweets and athletes.
9. Anti-Semitism as proof of the devil.
10. Rape and vigilantism.
11. One explanation …
12. Luxury and academe.

Mr Taranto highlighted a Yglesias post in which Mr Yglesias opines against educational meritocracy. Mr Yglesias is wrong in assuming that “white people” would have problems with Asians getting more places in higher education based on their higher grades and test scores. I offer myself as one white person who sees nothing at all wrong and a lot right with more people with better grades and test scores regardless of the color of their skin getting into the better schools. Furthermore he concludes:

But rather than dedicating the most resources to the “best” students and then fighting over who’s the best, we should be allocating resources to the people who are mostly likely to benefit from additional instructional resources.

I wholeheartedly agree. We should allocate more of our educational resources to those who are most likely to benefit from additional instructional resources. Who are those people most likely to benefit? We call them the gifted students (at least those gifted students who are also willing to work hard).

Same-sex marriage got a gentle nudge from the Supreme Court in the recent ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act. But, as much as it seems that it’ll be a state-by-state issue, a court ruling in late July suggests that same-sex marriage anywhere may mean same-sex marriage everywhere. A federal judge in Ohio ordered state officials to recognize the marriage of two men who were married in Maryland, for the purposes of listing on the death certificate of one that he was married to the other.

Yeah, it’s just a blank on a form being filled in, but if it stands, it would be a legal precedent that could easily be built upon. So here’s the question for same-sex marriage proponents. Do you really believe this should be decided by each state, or should it be handed down from the federal government? If the former, you should be against this judge’s action. If the latter, you should be letting us all know. My guess is that if people knew that proponents are looking to force this on all states, there would be quite the backlash. And so, in the meantime, it’s not spoken of much in polite company. After all, if you think the federal government shouldn’t define marriage via DOMA, then it shouldn’t define marriage, period.

And the people of Ohio would get to choose how to deal with this situation themselves.

I’ve written before about how Detroit had become the victim of big-spending, blue-state politics. The idea that government must do everything for everyone has been shown to be bankrupting. So many liberals will say, when conservatives want to cut this or that government program, that those conservatives don’t care, or even hate, those people who are served by that program. That is to say, if the government doesn’t do it, no one will, certainly not the private sector.

A private, for-profit business, the Threat Management Center, or TMC, has sprouted up in Detroit to pick up where the incompetent city government has left off. Dale Brown started TMC in 1995, initially to aid law enforcement. But after getting no interest from the cops, Brown just kept doing what he did best; helping prevent crime, rather than taking notes long after the bad guys got away. He’s paid, not by collecting fines like the city does, but by his customers. And if he doesn’t do the job, he doesn’t get paid and goes out of business, unlike a government that, with no competition, doesn’t care if they perform well or not. And thanks to TMC’s efficiency and profitability, they are also able to provide free or incredibly low-cost services to the poor as well.

Here’s an article about TMC, and another private enterprise; the Detroit Bus Company. The headline is, “This is What Budget Cuts Have Done to Detroit … And It’s Freaking Awesome”. It proves that private enterprise can handle essential services far better than the government can. Not that die-hard liberals will ever admit to it, in spite of the evidence. I really suggest you stop by the show notes and give it a read.

The profit motive works. For all of us.

The IRS will be one of the agencies collecting data for ObamaCare. Odd, then, that the National Treasury Employees Union, whose members include most of those IRS workers, is encouraging them to write their Congressman and protest being put into those very exchanges that ObamaCare proponents consider so wonderful.

Congressman David Camp has introduced legislation to force all federal employees out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and into the exchanges. Camp actually thinks that ObamaCare should be repealed, but if what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, why should government employees be exempt from this big government program? After all, the whole point is to get more people to participate so that (so the theory goes) insurance costs will be lower for those who need subsidies, right? The fewer the participants, the higher the cost for everyone, right?

And unions were the biggest backers of this plan. So, you have to wonder why this union is trying to get out of this. Oh, and DC legislators and their staff; they’ll be exempt, too. Subsidizing for thee, but not for me, so the saying goes. Or ought to.

G’day

1. Now there’s an amusing analogy.
2. The scandalanche.
3. Christianity.
4. And the same as above, just very early.
5. Stimulus not stimming.
6. OK, then, but even if statistically sound, it won’t change anyone’s positions today.
7. Where you go when you don’t have a sound argument.
8. Or one of these.
9. If one was racist, oddly enough … I’d think that the Democrat’s pet race/economic policies would be exactly what I’d support, e.g., aff action, pc speech suppression, and so on.
10. Ages of famous men in a remarkable time.

Busy busy.

1. A book is noted.
2. Public works art is often regrettable.  Or should that be normally?
3. “Marriage” !?? … child abuse by any other name is … still.
4. Doing the damning with faint praise to the max.
5. Education and Poverty.
6. Consequences of raising minimum productivity bounds.
7. 5 years of blogging … gets results.
8. Ah, memories of high school reading habits.
9. Well, to be honest a lot of the knowledge brought West reportedly from Islam came from sacking Constantinople.
10. Feeding the wrong wolf.

So … do you like puns?