I was hoping that the President would approach for a few questions, but at the bottom of the stairs he hooked a quick right and headed for his waiting helicopter, Marine One. I knew I only had time for one question.
“Mr. President,” I shouted. “Cake or pie? It’s too loud to hear your answer out here, so if it’s cake, just give me a wave.”
And there you go. All good, decent, real Americans (and cute Japanese robot girls) prefer pie, except at birthday parties and weddings. (A good pineapple-upside-down cake properly done in an iron skillet is the outstanding exception.)
Cake is simply sugary bread with sugary cream squirted all over it that looks prettier than it tastes. It’s insubstantial, disnutritive, bland. Mix up the batter, pour it in the pan, bake, and stuff yourself till you’re sick. Add ice cream for further dental caries, or candles to remind the childish and senile of how old they are.
Pie, on the other hand, is complex, nuanced, balanced. Making and baking pie is inherently an expression of skill, yet pie requires no decoration other than an artfully woven or slashed top crust, and even that serves a crucial purpose. Ice cream, if present, balances the fruity tartness of the filling. Eating pie is an expression of mature discrimination regardless of the age of the eater, each bite a timeless act of graceful passion.
After this insightful probe, there can be no question of where the O stands. No pie for him!
Ladies and gentlemen, this is about managing the immutable reality of mechanical systems. People can bullshit each other — and even themselves — over concepts in all sorts of ways. When concepts are forged in steel, that becomes impossible. You don’t get to bullshit your way around a 5/8″ bolt. You just don’t. When you’re dealing with a flywheel pilot bearing, no mental substitutions — whether from sloppiness or outright psychosis — will suffice: that bearing is only what it is, and your mind had better be right about everything about it.
Robert Pirsig once wrote a very ridiculous book, but he wrote it about a very serious subject.
There is great philosophy in machines.
Accompanied by some heart-warming shop photos.
[Hey, Billy! I've done a couple of head rebuilds, and my question is, where are you getting the gasket sets for this beast?]
I was standing in front of a green hooded idling number of about half the age of Beck’s specimen, while the man I was there to do business with slowly hand pumped diesel into the fuel neck from a large tank out behind his corn crib. Over the rumble, he pointed to the name plate at the prominent place on the nose and asked, “Ever see one of those before?” The plate said, “Deutz”, and I allowed that I hadn’t. He said it was a three cylinder, air cooled.
…
[He] remarked, “I’d like to buy a new one of these, but they don’t make them anymore.”
I asked, “Did they go out of business?”
“No. They just can’t make them. The government says they have to be water cooled, now.”
And that opened up whole new areas of conversation.
I’ve whacked out about half of that; see the whole thing for the flavor.
I’ve done volunteer teaching of fifth grade science labs. They stopped doing that;it was too damn much trouble, too messy, too loud.
I don’t know how much science got through, but if I managed to get across the faintest glimmer that the universe does what it does, and not what you think it ought to do, I succeeded.
Anybody who thinks economics doesn’t follow that same principle is advocating ruin, death, and chaos.
Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady says in a release that committee analysts actually couldn’t fit everything in: “This portrays only about one-third of the complexity of the final bill. It’s actually worse than this.”
I have some quibbles about the graphic itself — primarily, I wish it were interactive, so you could choose which aspects of the tangle to concentrate on — but the reality they represent is horrific.
Things to looks at:
Red circles with dark orange interiors are “Rationing Potentials”.
Orange circles with light blue interiors are “Involvements with the health insurance market”.
Note that the Patient, lower right hand corner, is not directly connected to the Physician, lower left hand corner. I suspect, I hope, I pray, that this is a fault in the chart, not a true representation. If it is true, this means that I, cash in hand, cannot go to my doctor, pay him, and be examined and treated without getting some kind of government approval. [update]OK, close examination of the chart shows that the lines are actually labeled with the section number of the Obamacare act establishing that connection. Unless Obamacare breaks the existing patient-doctor connection, no wonder it does not appear on the chart.
One more charting quibble: I’d like to be able to click on one entity and see all the other entities it connects to, and how.
My title asks if you trust the Post Office. This chart shows that you have to trust several non-health-care related agencies, including the IRS, which has a history of being openly hostile to citizens. Other agencies include Justice, Homeland Security, Labor, and Treasury.
It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.
In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?
Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.
More evidence that putting the educated elite in charge of our lives is a bad idea.
My sense is that academics and bureaucrats must be as susceptible to this as anyone else, perhaps even moreso, because they are, effectively, trained to think that they are right, and they are totally isolated from real world consequences if they are wrong. Instead, their assumption that the stupid ignorant mundanes just didn’t take their advice strongly enough, and so they must be forced.
Individuals may well fall victim to the problem, but if they act on false assumptions, they will fail, and they will not be able to force their failure on those around them.
I now propose Moore’s Arrow:
All sources of bias arising from education are arguments for reducing government power.
The only bulwark against this seems to be Popper’s discipline of falsifiability. This demonstrably works, however slowly and unreliably.
there is very little feedback from the free market to the State. The State conjures deficit money from thin air, and believes itself capable of sustaining unlimited losses in the service of a “just cause.” Ideology is pursued in defiance of cost and benefit analysis. Politicians rarely suffer personal consequences for disastrous economic decisions. In fact, they have a good chance of manipulating such disasters into golden opportunities to acquire more power for themselves.
The State is exceptionally poor at analyzing the true value of anything. The lens of ideology is filled with clouds of hatred, occasionally sundered by blinding flashes of righteousness. The actual value of health care and medical insurance was almost completely invisible to the architects of ObamaCare.
…
The great lesson of socialism will be repeated one more time, as it has played out around the world, without exception: governments redistribute poverty, not wealth. Some people will find ways to make money in the dreary twilight of an economy where the light of knowledge through value has been blotted out. You probably won’t be one of them.
And this:
The masterminds behind ObamaCare will quietly relish the collapse of the private health insurance industry, which was one of their primary objectives all along.
It’s crucial to understand that this is their objective because they believe the marketplace is inherently evil. They think they’re doing the right thing, that they are making the world a better place.
They believe that wealth is money, gold, wampum. Beads and trinkets.
Doc has it right: what has real value is information. “Information wants to be free,” yes, but socialists believe that the government can own all the information, and hand it out in equal little chunks out to everybody. They don’t understand that different people in different situations place different value on a given piece of information.
Multi-part video documenting charges of voter intimidation and outright voter fraud during the Democratic Primary by the “Chicago-style” Obama machine versus Hillary Clinton supporters.
This was put together by Democrats; it’s not a Republican or Tea Party hit job.
It makes me wonder three things:
First, what’s going to happen this November? I may sign up as a poll watcher.
Second, what did they threaten Hillary with to get her to accept the Secretary of State position?
Third, where was the press during all this? Heh, heh, just joking, of course; we all know where the press was: on its knees before its Lord’s zipper.
Anyway, posting first of five parts; follow links at youtube for the rest.
President Obama on controlling the debt: “Somehow people say, why are you doing that, I’m not sure that’s good politics. I’m doing it because I said I was going to do it and I think it’s the right thing to do. People should learn that lesson about me because next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country….
He’s talking about controlling the debt, and I should be thrilled with that, but this quote just scares the pants off me.
I’m reading that bit about politics and “right thing to do” as “I don’t care what you morons think, I know what’s best for you and I’m going to give it to you good and hard.”
I’m reading “should learn that lesson about me” as “the gloves are coming off”. I hate that phrase in his mouth. [update: Moreover, he's talking down to us: "You children, you."]
And most of all I’m reading “hard choices” as “no choice at, you’ll do what I say”.
As for “I said I was going to do it”, yes. I believe that. Thing is, I think he’s talking about stuff he and his mentors were talking about back before anybody knew he was, not what he said in the 2008 Presidential Campaign.
Listen to things he lists as examples of things he said he would do and did. Stuff he doesn’t like, doesn’t care about, like the oil spill or Afghanistan, he plays golf. Things he does care about, like health care and financial reform, or firing a disapproving general, he bulls through ruthlessly.
Mexican gangs with lookout posts IN ARIZONA??? Mexican snipers?? What in Hell is the matter with you? Are you so intent on “fundamentally transforming” this country that you will allow this? An ARMED incursion across our southern border and death threats to law enforcement and YOU ALLOW THIS???
If so, then you are a traitor in the purest sense of the word and should be treated as such. You are in direct violation of the Constitution by denying the citizens of Arizona the right to “be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects” as outlined in the Fourth Amendment, in addition to your failure to respect Article IV Sec.4 of the Constitution regarding the “guarantee to EVERY (individual) state a republican form of government and shall protect each of them (including Arizona) against INVASION”.
AND your failure “To provide for the calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and REPEL INVASIONS” (Article 1 Sec. 8 of the Constitution)
You are also in violation of Article III Sec. 3 of the Constitution in that, by allowing these outposts to exist you are indirectly giving “Aid and Comfort” to an invading force, the enemy. You have, at the very least, allowed a potential state of war to exist on our own sovereign soil and have done nothing to defend or support those in the line of fire. Abandonment and persecution of the people you were sworn to protect makes “Traitor” seems appropriate.
I must add, you are not only a traitor but a seditionist as well. That you are IN FACT, guilty of “overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority as tending toward insurrection against the established order” We The People being the legal authority and states rights being the “established order”.
“Subversion of a constitution” and “incitement of discontent (or resistance) to lawful authority” which you have done by demonizing the people of and filing suit against, the state of Arizona. You have, in fact, created a “commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws” (of the state of Arizona) all of which are part of the very definition of sedition. You have, in essence, declared war on one of our own states by these actions and you WILL be held accountable.
And you leg-tingling “Journo-lists” who acted as this thug’s mouthpiece during and after the election?
Right up against the wall with him. You’re not the independent, free press protected by the Constitution; you’re his shills, and if he starts bailing out your worthless puppy trainers, you’ll be his paid shills, his co-conspirators.
Anybody out there willing to admit they voted for him? Still proud of it? Here’s your rough-hewn rail, have a nice ride out of town.
Feeling a bit duped?
Too. Fucking. Bad. You deserve everything that’s about to come down around your poor little ignorant innocent socialist peacenik ears. We’ll do our best to keep it from killing you, but remember: we don’t feel sorry for you, we blame you. We’ll let you in if you promise to work, but expect a lot of rough words and angry glares while you dig the latrines.
Below the fold, a slightly modified transcript. I’ve corrected a couple of minor typos, some of which may have been intentional reproductions of the original archaic language.
I also tried to smooth over a particularly infelicitous phrase; editing
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally and ‘Change’ the Forms of our Government.
to read
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and endeavoring fundamentally to ‘Change’ the Forms of our Government.
I am not a great typist, so I’m sure other errors of my own have crept in; my apologies, and I’ll fix them as I find them.
As to the intent: things aren’t quite this bad yet, and much of this damage has been done by prior administrations. It cannot remotely all be laid at Obama’s feet; although he committed most of the particulars herein, he is merely closing the door on a tyrannical jail that has been slowly building around us since the Depression.
Most of all, though, it is not for us to secede or even rebel this time — It’s our country, and we mean to take it back. Rather, we should seek only to throw Obama and his fellow usurpers out, and prune our laws and our taxes back into something which can arguably be said to not stretch the Constitution, flawed as it is, to tatters and vapours. And that will, my people, indeed require us to pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honors.
[Un-earned] Self-esteem and the high regard of [tyrants around] the world at large be damned.
[Update: Thanks to DougM at Knowledge is Power for A) Also posting the comic, which needs wide exposure and B) Putting a link to this post up front, after I commented there.]
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