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Everyone was quiet: If you’ve got nothing to say, now is a good time to not say it – the incomparable Michael Yon, reporting on British military operations in Afghanistan from very much up the sharp end. If you do not regularly read his site, you really should as it is filled with gripping stuff. Please consider dropping your mouse on this link to contribute to keeping Michael Yon in action. August 11th, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 August 10th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Whatever the marketplace, if talented people are given resources they’re going to keep driving us to having better, simpler, cheaper solutions to problems. And, by the way, if they come up with a better solution but it can’t be cheaper – which, in the beginning, most things aren’t – nobody says you have to buy it. If you think this new drug is too expensive, it’s not a good deal, we have a crisis, buy the old one. It’s a generic now. It’s cheap. You can’t look at the problem and say, “I want them to do more, better, faster miracles – and not invest in research, not invest in development, and have those miracles delivered to me free.” It’s unrealistic. And people know that about most things. They do. Nobody expects that just because they’ve made computers better they’re going to give them to you free.” – Dean Kamen, warning about how US medicine will be demaged by socialistic “reforms” by Mr Obama. Mind you, I get the distinct impression that health care could turn out to be one of the biggest problems for The Chicago Community Organiser, who seems to be losing a lot of his post-election goodwill. And not before time. August 9th, 2009 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I’m nobody’s conservative, but I’m pretty sure if I was telling conservatives how to think I wouldn’t admonish them for failing to champion limited government within two sentences of praising FDR’s pragmatism. It’s like, I dunno, lecturing the Labour Party about demonstrating their pro-union bonafides while praising Margaret Thatcher’s centrism. Sounds a bit off.” Matt Welch on the hapless Andrew Sullivan. August 5th, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“As for politicians’ personal conduct, I doubt it is much worse, relative to other professions, than it has always been, and it is not — or should not be — the main cause for concern. Personally, I would much rather MPs had numerous extramarital affairs, their hands in the till, or lucrative second jobs exploiting inside knowledge, than that they cavalierly abolish yet another civil liberty that took hundreds of years to establish. As far as I am concerned, politicians are welcome to be not only greedy, but also dull, unapproachable, ugly, pompous, clubby, elitist or socially inept, just as long as they do not consider it their job to reform society by making up a few more laws and rushing them through parliament as quickly as possible. Sadly, the people who agree with me appear to be a very small minority.” Fabian Tassano. His blog is required reading, in my view. August 3rd, 2009 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Paul Krugman, in one of his more inflamatory statements, claimed that congressmen who voted against cap and trade were guilty of “planetary treason.” The bill contains substantial support for biofuels, including a five year moratorium on letting the EPA decide whether, on net, producing ethanol actually reduces carbon dioxide. Converting food crops into fuel drives up the price of food. Driving up the world price of food results in more people in poor countries dying. Krugman is, no doubt, opposed to world hunger in theory. But he has come out passionately in favor of it in practice. Treason or murder, take your choice.” July 28th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“This coup took place to protect your liberty. Some of you may find this strange, as you currently have less liberty, owing to my regime being a vicious theocratic hell. Well, to use a phrase of a friend of mine, try thinking outside the box. It is well known that to have a large degree of liberty, it is necessary to surrender a small amount to allow for police, security services and the like. We have taken this concept a step forward: since you have surrendered all your liberty, you now have even more liberty to do exactly what I say or die like the filfthy heretic scum you are. Feel free to agree with me on this point.” – The Grand Hyrax, newly established God-King-Prophet-Emperor of Urn, the fourth planet of the sun Didcot. From the book God Emperor of Didcot by Toby Frost. July 26th, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
In every language, the first word after “Mama!” that every kid learns to say is “Mine!” A system that doesn’t allow ownership, that doesn’t allow you to say “Mine!” when you grow up, has – to put it mildly – a fatal design flaw. – Frank Zappa July 25th, 2009 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Groupthink was a major factor in the buildup of risk in the financial system in the decade preceding the recent crisis. Top bank executives and regulators ignored dissenting voices from both ends of the political spectrum which were questioning the excesses that were building up in the system. What was once a comfortable consensus about the strength of our regulatory structure has now been replaced by an equally comfortable and equally flawed consensus about how to fix it.” Arnold Kling, libertarian-leaning economist, giving a long report on the problems with how the US administration has sought to deal with the crisis, and why he thinks those moves will make future problems more, not less likely. My fear is that for now, such warnings will continue to go unheeded not just in the US administration of The Community Organiser, but in the UK and parts of Europe, as well. July 22nd, 2009 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Okay, since we are in Lunar mode today, here’s another quotation: “No event in contemporary culture was as thrilling, here on earth, as three moments of the mission’s climax: the moment when, superimposed over the image of a garishly colored imitation-model standing motionless on the television screen, there flashed the words: “Lunar module has landed” – the moment when the faint, gray shape of the actual model came shivering from the moon to the screen – and the moment when the shining white blob which was Neil Armstrong took his immortal first step. At this last, I felt one instant of unhappy fear, wondering what he would say, because he had it in his power to destroy the meaning and the glory of that moment, as the astronauts of Apollo 8 had done in their time. He did not. He made no reference to God; he did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of the opposite; he spoke of man”. (page 186). Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason. For all that I broadly share the sentiment expressed here, I don’t think that any of the astronauts, even if they were religious, would have thought of their faith as somehow undercutting the sheer, grandeur of rational thought that got them up there in the first place. For them, I think, belief in a Supreme Being might even have been strengthened by wondering about how the universe came about in the first place, although cosmology comes in many forms. But still, Rand was right to make the point: in a culture that sometimes denigrates science and reason, the Moon landings were a potent reminder of just how far Man has travelled through the use of both. July 20th, 2009 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
The recent embracement of the so-called Reform Treaty, which is in all important aspects identical with the old Constitutional Treaty, is a defeat for all true European democrats and should be interpreted as such. The down-playing of its true essence is intellectually unacceptable and morally inexcusable. Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming. The recent awarding of Nobel Prize to the main apostle of this hypothesis was the last straw because by this these ideas were elevated to the pedestal of “holy and sacred” uncriticisable truths. July 19th, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It is often wrongly assumed that the free market is always on the side of life’s heavy hitters. But sport gives plenty of examples that it is the market which corrects received wisdom in favour of untrumpeted stars. The internet has done something similar in publishing.” What Sport Tells Us About Life, by Ed Smith. Pages 88-89. Brian Micklethwait had thoughts about this short and excellent book a few months ago. A good book to read as the Ashes cricket series continues with the second Test at Lord’s starting later today. Bliss. July 16th, 2009 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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