WizardPC’s comment to this post at Knoxnews:
I just did a quick google search for stories on the April 2008 jobs report, and it was called “bleak” because we only gained 18,000 jobs that month and unemployment was at 5%.
The April 2009 jobs report is “better than expected” at only 539,000 jobs lost and unemployment at 8.9%.
From recipient of the 2009 Irving Kristol award Charles Murray’s acceptance speech, challenging conservatives:
The European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birth rates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that. So let me rephrase the question. If we could avoid Europe’s demographic problems, do we want the United States to be like Europe?
Tonight I will argue for the answer “no,” but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem.
…
Critics of the European model are about to get a lot of new firepower. Not only is the European model inimical to human flourishing, twenty-first-century science is going to explain why. We who think that the Founders were right about the relationship of government to human happiness will have an opening over the course of the next few decades to make our case.
The reason is a tidal change in our scientific understanding of what makes human beings tick. It will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson anticipated what is to come in a book entitled Consilience. As the twenty-first century progresses, he argued, the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of biology; specifically, the findings of the neuroscientists and the geneticists.
What are they finding?
Emphasis mine. Read the whole thing. You’ll be glad you did.
that the wife and I just got back from seeing Star Trek in all it’s giant-screen IMAX glory, at 8:20 in the ayem?
GREAT movie, btw — and I say that as a longtime Trekker. They did a wonderful job reinventing and reinvigorating the series. Go see it.
Want proof that Socialism’s only solution to problems is to equalize the suffering amongst the populace?
Look across the Atlantic
EU alls for shorter work week to create jobs
I’m not even going to quote the story linked there because you are smart enough to know what they are going to try and do: Cut the available work hours of the employed, without a responding increase in wages, so that the unemployed can work those left over part-time hours and earn a very small wage.
How long until the part-time employees demand more hours until everyone is working half of a 36 hour workweek? The more senior employees won’t be able to pay their bills due to the cut in their hours and the less senior employees can’t afford to pay their bills because they’re not working enough hours.
Government mandated pay raises for everyone!
Sounds like a very EU “next step” to me.
Despite multiple requests to stop, via comments and email, lest they have to buy/read another Randian tome, we continue with The Comprachicos
For several generations, the destruction of reason was carried on under the cover and in the name of reason, which was the Kant-Hegel-James-Dewey method. When every girder of rationality had been undercut, a new philosophy made explicit what had been implicit, and took over the job of providing a rationalization of the students’ psycho-epistemological state: Existentialism.
Existentialism elevates chronic anxiety into the realm of metaphysics. Fear, misery, nausea – it declares – are no an individual’s fault, they are inherent in human nature, they are an intrinsic, predestined part of the “human conditionâ€. Action is the sole alleviation possible to man. What action? Any action. You do not know how to act? Don’t be chicken; courage consists in acting without knowledge. You do not know what goals to choose? There are no standards of choice. Virtue consists in choosing a goal by whim and sticking to it, “committing yourselfâ€, to the grim death. It sounds unreasonable? Reason is man’s enemy – your guts, muscles and blood know best.
For generations, the destruction of freedom (i.e., of capitalism) was carried on under the cover and in the name of freedom. The genteel intellectual conformists, mass-produced in colleges, proclaimed every collectivist tenet, premise and slogan, while professing their abhorrence of dictatorship. When every girder of capitalism had been undercut, when it had been transformed into a crumbling mixed economy – a state of civil war among pressure groups fighting politely for the legalized privilege of using physical force – the road was cleared for a philosopher who scrapped politeness and the legality, making explicit what had been implicit: Herbert Marcuse, the avowed enemy of reason and freedom, the advocate of dictatorship, of mystic “insightâ€, of retrogression to savagery, of universal enslavement, of rule by brute force.
The student activists are the comprachicos’ most successful products: they went obediently along every step of the way, never challenging the basic premises inculcated in the Progressive nursery schools. They act in packs, with the will of the pack as their only guide. The scramble for power among their pack leaders and among different packs does not make them question their premises: they are incapable of questioning anything. So they cling to the belief that mankind can be united into one happy, harmoniously unanimous pack – by force. Brute, physical force is, to them, a natural form of action. Philosophically, it is clear that when men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements. The activists are the living demonstration of this principle.
The activists’ claim that they have no way of “attracting attention†to their demands and of getting what they want except by force – by violent demonstrations, obstruction and destruction – is pure throwback to the Progressive nursery school, where a tantrum was the only thing required to achieve their wishes. Their hysterical screaming still carries a touch of pouting astonishment at a world that does not respond to an absolute such as “I want it!†The three year old whim worshipper becomes the twenty year old thug.
Ayn Rand – The Comprachicos
Of the last paragraph: You and I knew that this was true, but that Rand can put it into words so plain is possibly art.
Just buy the book and read for yourself. I’ve only posted quotes from Part 5 of the essay because, while the first four sections are rather quotable, to get the context, they’d all be longer than today’s.
It is official: Washington State has the highest fuel prices in the lower 48 with an average price of $2.392 per gallon of regular unleaded.
Two things caused this to happen:
1: Second highest per gallon tax rate at $0.559 per.
2: Our junior Senator, Maria Cantwell, makes life very unfriendly here for oil companies and has pushed legislation that drastically cut the number of oil tankers allowed in the Puget Sound, as well as harassed refinery owners to the point that they just up and leave. Low local supply means importation of fuel and/or shortages.
Welcome to your micro-scale version of Barack Obama’s America.
This is a much better pic of the statuette than the one I posted before. Thank you again, Derek!
And he seems to be multiplying. For much more of Derek, see here:
Just trying to help out Sheriff Joe
I had just gotten to work the other night and was walking out to do a truck mileage inspection. As I walked down the hallway to the back of the building I was able to hear the music being played by my fellow late-nite employee, Scott. It was the flute inrto to the Beastie Boys’ “Sure Shot”, but until I got into the room he was in I thought I was hearing a different song.
This was the following conversation:
Me: Oh, the Beastie Boys. I thought you were listening to MC 900 Foot Jesus.
Scott: MC 900 Foot Jesus? I wonder what he’s up to these days?
Me: 900 feet, motherfucker! Mwahahaha!
Ends up, Mr. Griffin is holding down a DJ gig at Lee Harvey’s, a club in the Cedars section of his hometown of Dallas, TX
Here is the track I though I was hearing instead of the B-Boys
And here is the one that had him banned from airplay for a while because of idiots thinking that it would “encourage arson”. Similar to how my keyboard encourages bad grammar.
Enjoy!
