As if the elk and coyotes weren't enough, we have cougars wandering around town - and I'm not talking about middle-aged women looking for boy-toys. We have a bunch of coyotes living a block away, which isn't really a bad thing, because they tend to take care of the cats that our Lefty neighbors had running around. Our next-door neighbor actually figured it out after losing four cats - now he has one, and it's kept indoors. Even hard-core Lefties can learn!
Conservatives are jack-booted thugs, marching in lock-step with the evil Koch brothers to the tune of their authoritarian pied piper. Leftists, by contrast, are free-thinkers, always there for the little guy. Ummm...not so much.
Conservatives, many people will tell you, like authority. They like the idea of someone telling them what to do, lest society break down into chaos. Liberals, on the other hand, are a bit more skeptical of authority and quick to challenge it. But a new paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that this common belief is wrong — that liberals and conservatives have the same views on authority, but differ only when it comes to what kinds of authority they respect.
Basically, it seems that we're wired in very similar fashion, but it depends on where we fall along the ideological spectrum. In broad terms, conservatives tend to aggregate along well-established social norms, while Leftists tend to go for the laughs generated by mocking and denigration. Conservatives, for example, may be drawn toward people like Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin, while leftists prefer the likes of Jon Stewart and Tina Fey.
Really, the USA can Save The Planet™ all by itself, if we only continue to fast-track job destruction and economic ruin. The lives are simply collateral damage. That's all, nothing more. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.
One of the leading leftwing environmentalists last week described the hundreds of thousands of Americans who may lose their jobs due to the Obama administration’s new anti-carbon regulations as “collateral damage” in the fight against global warming.
He said that the pain and suffering to the estimated 200,000 families put out of work is an “evolutionary step in technology and the economy” and a move toward “economic progress.”
Well, he's not a Republican, so it must be all-okay. And you have to break a few hundred thousand eggs to make an omelette. As long as he's not one of the eggs, it's cool. Hey, Chairman Mao advised his countrymen to use the bodies of starved workers as fertilizer. This is no different.
Few things are as enjoyable as the sound of unionistas crying into their cornflakes, and there's a lot of that going on today: the usual suspects are whining that in ruling that public employee unions can't continue to collect "dues" from home health-care providers who don't want to be in a union, SCOTUS has somehow "taken peoples' rights and given them to the corporations". That's just silly; they seem unfamiliar with the term "public employee unions" - which are, at last check, governmental - not corporate.
"The Koch brothers are partying today", according to one unionista. Sure, everybody knows that the evil Koch brothers are dominant forces in government-provided home health-care for the disabled.
But hey, the meme doesn't have to make sense.
And as members in good standing of the Congregation of Perpetual Outrage, they're also hopping mad about the Obamacare ruling, claiming that it "denies women their right to access healthcare". It may be quite a stretch to say that an employer who doesn't want to pay for birth control or abortion is somehow denying women access, but as the slavering Left routinely demonstrates, they're nothing if not limber.
Somehow, forcing people to join a union translates to "freedom" in what passes for their little minds, and telling people that they don't have to join becomes "taking away their rights", while not forcing an employer to pay for abortions denies women access to "health care". It's as though they're completely incapable of grasping the facts: if a home-care provider wants to join a union, he or she is free to do so - but they're also free to decline to join.
And the Sandra Flukes who choose to work at Hobby Lobby are free to purchase their own birth control pills (which are very inexpensive), and they're free to buy their own abortions. They just can't force the employer to pay. Heck, they're even free to find a job elsewhere; nobody's requiring them to work for any particular employer. If they're really assiduous, they can even start a business of their own!
At least, language in a bill currently in play at the US Senate would allow that interpretation.
The cybersecurity bill making its way through the Senate right now is so broad that it could allow ISPs to classify Netflix as a "cyber threat," which would allow them to throttle the streaming service's delivery to customers.
That's because high-bandwidth users inevitably make less bandwidth available for other users. To the brain-trust in the Senate, that equates to a "cybersecurity threat".
"A 'threat,' according to the bill, is anything that makes information unavailable or less available. So, high-bandwidth uses of some types of information make other types of information that go along the same pipe less available," Greg Nojeim, a lawyer with the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. "A company could, as a cybersecurity countermeasure, slow down Netflix in order to make other data going across its pipes more available to users."
It seems rather unlikely that this sort of thing is going to gather any steam, given that there are many less restrictive approaches to any perceived bandwidth problem. For one thing, we still have a glut of dark fiber in most metropolitan areas of the USA. It's already in the ground, and it's going to be more cost-effective for the existing monopolies to tag into it and boost bandwidth than it'll be to risk irking their customers. As an example, in Portland, Comcast is the dominant ISP; holding a more or less de-facto monopoly in large portions of the Metro area.
Yet, there are still options: CenturyLink fiber optic around this neighborhood, FIOS in others, and if you get really ticked off, you can go with a larger DirecTV dish with three tranceivers for satellite internet. Granted, sat's not that great, but it's far better than it used to be in terms of speed and reliability. Moreover, it's almost a given that other options will be available in the not-too-distant future: does anybody actually believe that Netflix and other streaming services aren't going to cut deals for inclusion into the cable/satellite markets?
There's a lot of hand-wring going on over the latest bill, but it's unnecessary.
In Katy, Texas, a guy who's been raising pigs on the family farm for years was kind of surprised when Muslims bought the land next to the farm and announced their plans to build a mosque and community center on the site. He was amazed, however, when they told him to move or get rid of the pigs.
This kind of stuff really needs to stop. The farmer's taken a good first step, but these Muzzies need to be reminded that if they don't like our country, we'll gladly let them leave. These jerks knew they were buying land next to a pig farm, but somehow the farm's "offensive". Screw them.
Portland police closed streets in downtown, yesterday, because a guy climbed into a tree. It's unclear as to how many automatic weapons and Kevlar vests were deployed to deal with the threatening situation.
While President Lincoln was busy saving the Union and freeing the slaves, five former presidents tried to stop him.
As America slid toward disunion and war, the 1860 election pushed the former presidents off the sidelines. Franklin Pierce, who left the White House in 1857, tried to recruit his former secretary of war, Jefferson Davis, to run for president. John Tyler, who’d been out of office for 15 years, wanted the job for himself and authorized his friends to put his name forward if the opportunity arose. (It did not.)
When the Democratic Party collapsed into Northern and Southern factions during the campaign, Pierce, Tyler and James Buchanan supported John C. Breckinridge, the nominee of the Southern Democrats; Martin Van Buren supported Stephen Douglas, chosen by the party’s Northern wing. Tyler and Van Buren proposed that Democratic electors band together to deny Lincoln the presidency by voting for whichever of his opponents had the most support.
Despite their political differences, the former presidents all saw the role of president as conciliator in chief, whose main objective was to keep the union together, generally by making concessions to the South. They regarded the election of Abraham Lincoln, with his firm commitment to end the expansion of slavery, as menacing the presidency and the union itself.
The five were all about maintaining the Union at any cost, even if that meant accommodating the southern slave states. They advocated extending the Missouri Compromise to the Pacific Coast and, in diametric opposition to Lincoln's goals, expanding slavery in the western territories.
The Missouri Compromise was implicitly repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, submitted to Congress by Stephen A. Douglas in January 1854. The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission of slave states by allowing white male settlers in those territories to determine through "popular sovereignty" whether they would allow slavery within each territory. Thus, the Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively undermined the prohibition on slavery in territory north of 36°30′ latitude which had been established by the Missouri Compromise. This change was viewed by Free Soilers and many abolitionist Northerners as an aggressive, expansionist maneuver by the slave-owning South, and led to the creation of the Republican Party.
Despite what the Left would have you believe, Democratics have always been about slavery. The Lincoln-Douglas debates (one of which took place at Old Main on the campus of my old alma mater, Knox College) were really all about the direction our country would take. Douglas, as noted above, was clearly a Democrat slavery expansionist; Lincoln argued against it.
When our Civil War occurred, it should be noted that the ever politically-correct Britain planned to fight with the slave-holding south.
With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln broadened the Union’s objective from reunion to the destruction of slavery. He then lost the support of Fillmore and Buchanan, whose sole condition for peace had been status quo antebellum. Lincoln believed that while America should return to what it had been geographically, it could never return to being “half slave and half free.”
The Democrat response, of course, involved the establishment of the Ku Klux Klan and the enactment of Jim Crow laws. Democratics have historically been all about slavery, and that remains their goal to this day. But they have evolved: it's not about the color of your skin any longer; they now want everyone to serve them.
The USA regularly dumps over a billion dollars' worth of perfectly edible fish each year.
In its report, Oceana estimated the value of certain kinds of fish using the volume discard and the market price of a specific species. In the Southeast U.S. in 2010, fisheries tossed out $45 million in sea trout, $27 million in red snapper, $4.2 million in king mackerel, and $3.4 million in bluefin tuna. Every year, fisheries in the New England and the Mid-Atlantic region chuck more than $20 million in sea scallops, $13.5 million in flounder, and $7 million in monkfish. In Alaska, fishermen throw out Pacific halibut, cod, and snow and red king crabs when they don't have to meet catch quotas for those species. In California, Oregon, and Washington, fisheries regularly toss spiny lobster, rockfish, and sea bass.
It's not only wasteful, it accelerates the decline in fish populations. We don't actually have an over-fishing problem; what we have is an overthrowing problem. And it stems primarily from an over-regulation problem.
As has so often been demonstrated, government doesn't solve the problem; government isthe problem.
