Hitchens on Mamet

Christopher Hitchens' review of David Mamet's The Secret Knowledge on the Dismantling of American Culture had this to say:

This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason.

That's funny because the same could be said of Hitchen's own book of atheist evangelism God is Not Great.

From Ace of Spades.

Constitutional Responses

According to the New York Times, Clarence Thomas is breaking with judicial ethics guidelines by supporting Federal historical conservation efforts related to the Gullah/Geechee peoples of the coastal south. Thomas is himself a member of that group. Althouse and Instapundit mention that the proper response to a Supreme Court Judge with inappropriate behavior is impeachment not passive aggressive editorials.

To put it bluntly, Democrats don't want to use the I word. Not when Obama is violating the War Powers Act in Libya. Obama's defense is that it's not a war. The Libyan's military is so inferior to our own that they are no threat to us. Try not to thing about that one too hard or you might wake up your pregnant wife in the next room yelling things like "Then why are we there in the first place!" at your computer monitor. You know, like I did.

Instead they're putting a bipartisan group together to sue Obama in federal court. Really? Look if he's breaking federal law and you think it's important, impeach him. If you don't want to impeach him, then pass a bill that revokes the funding appropriation for activities in Libya. Then dare him to cross that line. If you don't have the votes for that then make political hay. Just don't think that the last one is really doing much of anything.

Some Light Blogging

So I haven't written anything here in a few months. There are many reasons for this. My wife is expecting our first child in two months. All of the meaningful parts of Blogger's backend is blocked at work. I can't even comment on Blogger blogs. I've also changed teams at work so that I'm actually working with military systems I like, which greatly restrains what I can actually post on without causing myself problems. But attempts to restrict gun rights in a misguided attempt to reduce domestic terrorism over at SayUncles roused me from semi-retirement.

I've already covered why restricting an enumerated right using the no-fly list is a bad idea on this blog. My uncle-in-law basically doesn't fly anywhere anymore because his name is common and therefore guaranteed to be on the list.

But more importantly, the whole logic is flawed. Terrorists everywhere basically start with guns. They did in Iraq. They did in Afghanistan. In Iraq they quickly moved to explosives. Things appear to be going the same way in the 'Stan. Why? Because when they start shooting at our soldiers, they expose themselves to US Troops. Then our soldiers kill them. The US military is rather good at it.

The way to get the terrorists to stop shooting people is to make it possible to easily shoot them back. Which means letting their future targets, Johnny and Jane American, both keep and bear arms. It's a strategy that is even written in our earliest founding documents. Perhaps help them get training in how to use these arms and how to recognize these threats. Is this the plan the left is proposing? Of course not. We must restrict constitutionally enumerated freedoms and have nothing to show for it. Thanks lefties.

RNC Politics

Rumor has it that Michael Steel is finally stepping down as RNC chair. Huzzah! Now Norm Coleman says he wants the job.

Hey I have an idea. How about we pick an RNC chair who actually has a history of winning elections. Steele was a joke in his native Maryland, mostly because Black Republicans are blatantly Uncle Tommed in the state. Coleman lost to Al Franken in a close race. Isn't there a decent Republican governor facing term limits somewhere?

Obama on Mythbusters

The President is appearing on tomorrow's Mythbusters to commission Adam and Jamie to look into the myth of Archimedes mirror. For those not in the know, it's a device which was supposedly used to focus the power of the sun to set attacking Roman ships afire during the Siege of Syracuse.

The Mythbusters have addressed this one at least twice in the past. So it's been done multiple times before, they've had minor success, but never found it really workable, and now that Obama shows up the results are supposed to be different? A fine metaphor for modern liberalism indeed.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike, but IMAO has clips.

Wisdom for the Ages

Clayton Cramer's post of excerpts from Andrew Jackson's fairwell address contain some amazing stuff. Among the topics he discusses are taxes, duties, the expanding role of federal government, and corrupt politicians or businessmen profit from these.

Bashing Meghan McCain

While I don't doubt that her book is completely daft, some of Leon Wolf's scathing review is also startlingly ill-researched. For instance:

I defy Meghan McCain to identify a conservative candidate who acted or behaved in this way towards the party after a primary loss.

Peg Luksik in the PA governor's race in 1994. Both Ridge and Single were total centrists and after losing to Ridge in the primary, she ran as a Constitution Party candidate. For that matter current Tea Party darling Christine O'Donnell ran a write-in campaign in 2006 after coming third in the Senate primary to both Jan Ting and Mike Protack. And these were just two I could think of off the top of my head, they can't be the only ones.

Insofar as I can even tell what that sentence means, I am pretty sure it indicates that Meghan McCain does not know what white noise is, or that it has nothing to do with oversaturation.

McCain's statement is that "these days, the name Ronald Reagan – as well as his legacy – has become oversaturated, just white noise." Yes her metaphor is a bit mixed here. But her point is that devotion to Reagan is pure political rhetoric and formality. It's is everywhere and in everything, therefore it is devoid of meaning. Even liberal Democrats do it. Meghan even does it in an example Wolf cites a few paragraphs later.

But if Wolfs excerpts are accurate, I can't dispute that Meghan McCain isn't especially smart, has a weak understanding of politics, and an even weaker understanding of proper sentence construction.

Delaware Primaries

I've been receiving multiple robocalls per day from the O'Donnell and Castle campaigns for the last week. We're really sick of them and they are not convincing anyone in my family to vote for a particular candidate. I'm already voting for Castle. O'Donnell doesn't have anything to recommend her other than conservatism. Conservatism won't win her the general election. On the other hand my politically neutral wife is pissed off enough that she probably won't vote in the primary. If the Republicans keep it up, she might vote Democrat to spite them.

It has me wondering if the Delaware Republicans even know how to campaign properly. Two years ago, my long-incumbent state representative Vince Lofink lost the election to Democrat Earl Jaques. This is largely because Jaques and his wife did their legwork. They went door to door. He hit every HOA meeting in the district. People knew who he was and voted for him. Two years later and Earl has already knocked on my door and will almost certainly be at my HOA meeting. The Republican candidate? Still haven't met him. I expect Jaques to win re-election quite handily unless things change after the primaries.

Campaigning requires real legwork. Robocalls are fake legwork. This is why people are annoyed.

Miss Universe

The wife and I caught the end of the Miss Universe Pageant this year. Unfortunately we missed the swimsuit competition. Somehow I also missed the retiring Miss Universe, who hails from Venezuela, subtly snub Dictator Hugo Chavez as she gave up her crown. Good for her. And if you don't understand why, read more.

Ghastly Truths

From a really old on of IMAO's random thoughts:

Why do liberals need federal money for abortion? Can’t they just start a “Stop the Babies!” charity? “Right now there are babies waiting to be born and ruin people’s lives. We can stop that. With your help.” See, you can voluntarily spend you money on others. It’s called charity. I’m not sure who came up with it.

That would be a really funny idea if I hadn't heard of someone who actually did it. They didn't start a charity of course, they held a "Get Maggie an Abortion" party instead. People brought their kids.

No-Fly 2nd Amendment Abridgement

Fifteen months ago I addressed a Rahm Emanuel clip from before the 2008 election that suggested using the no-fly terrorist watch list as a basis for denying gun ownership to a large number of individuals.  The issues with this proposal are:

• Gun ownership is a constitutionally enumerated and protected right which ought not be abridged without due process.  The no-fly list ain't due process.
• The no-fly list is a joke.  It is a list of names and lacks truly unique identifiers.  This means that the false positive rate is ridiculous (just ask my wife's uncle).  It can also be easily foiled by such simple linguistic tricks as alternate name spellings.
• Buying a gun from a dealer requires a background check.  Anyone on the no-fly list ought to be flagged for further review anyway.

Spearheaded by NYC Mayor Bloomberg, the left has picked up on this concept again after the Times Square non-bombing and is running with it. If you'd like to read more, here are some links in order of occurrence:

• The NYT gets behind Bloomberg's proposal with an Op-Ed.
• SayUncle notices that apply this standard of review to speech would never be acceptable to the Times. Also notes that the Times bomber was removed from the watch list.
• Pajamas Media wades in on the side of the Angels.
• The NSSF responds to NYT editorial.  Also here.
• Bill Clinton gets behind Bloomberg.
• The Atlanta Journal Constitution calls compares opposition watch-list proposal to witch burners.  Well hey at least I'm not a Nazi yet. The inlaws would probably find that embarrassing.
• Bloomberg and Clinton videos.

Offshore Drilling!

Obama seems ready to allow drilling off of new portions of the US coastline. This is a good thing. Of course the specifics of the proposal seem to indicate that it will be saddled with extensive environmental roadblocks and require local state approvals. Which means that at this point it is all talk.

A Divider Not A Uniter

I spent most of today running around doing errands. I spent a fair bit of it waiting for various things and people. This allowed me to sit and observe or as we say in my household "people watch."

For instance while in Walmart I watched two African-American men arguing quite loudly about the relative merits of Obamacare. One was for it, citing the need for easier access to medical care for the poor. The other was against it because he knew that as responsible adults they were going to have to pay for it. And in his opinion he was already paying enough taxes for lazy good-for-nothings without picking up the tab for their medical care as well.

Once again I learned not to assume. And once again I am amazing with how divisive some policies can be even within demographic groups that are amazingly one-sided in their political support.

Not Fitting the Narrative

Let it not be said that bloggers can't do this too. Mainstream Baptist is heavily invested in the principle Separation of Church and State and lead a post with the title "Supreme Court Affirms 10 Commandments Decision" this week. The problem? They didn't.

The Supreme Court denied cert. That's legalese for refusing to hear the case. The Supreme Court does this to the vast majority of cases that petition them for appeals because they just don't have the time to hear everything. Denying cert allows the lower court ruling to stand, but does not imply that the Supreme Court agrees or "affirms" it.

Funny how I posted as much in his comments, but that one never came through his review process...

History Threatens to Repeat Itself

Why didn't we get HillaryCare in 1994? According to Robert Reich, it was because Fed Chairman Greenspan let the administration know that he wouldn't go along with it. Fast forward 16 years and Bush appointee Ben Bernanke is saying the same thing to the Obama administration.

Unexpectedly!

So at what point do we fire the people in charge of predicting job loses and gains?

Climategate!

From the Timesonline via Instapundit:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The issue is not a long-term temperature increase over the last 150 years. 150 years ago was the end of the Little Ice Age, so no one really disputes that temperatures have increased since then. The real issue that has been deliberately obfuscated is (1) how warm the Medieval Warm Period was and (2) whether the divergence of temperature behavior from historical trends over the last 50 years is the result of how the historical data has been subjected to a moving average while recent data has not.

Groan

Six months after putting General McChrystal in charge, the news this morning was that President Obama has finally made a decision about Afghanistan. No idea what that decision was as the White House will not divulge its actual content for another week. Is the man such a lightweight that merely having meetings and deciding something is national news?

What's next? This just in, after intense discussions with the highly trained White House chef corps, the President has opted for Cheddar instead of Swiss on his turkey club. The effects of this change on the Presidential Gastronomy should be known early next week.

Sometimes Complaints Show More about the Complainer

From this article criticizing the M4:

"My weapon was overheating," McKaig said, according to Cubbison's report. "I had shot about 12 magazines by this point already and it had only been about a half hour or so into the fight. I couldn't charge my weapon and put another round in because it was too hot, so I got mad and threw my weapon down."

360 rounds in 30 minutes through your rifle and your gun became unreliable? Wow I would have never guessed that if you overheat a machine, it becomes unreliable or breaks. Ditto the other soldier who ran 600 rounds through his M249. If you want to avoid overheating, you can change out the barrels on machine guns for a reason.

More telling for me is the opener of the piece:

In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips' M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn't work either.

If someone is trying multiple types of weapons and none of them work, that isn't a criticism of the weapon. If none of the guns work, the only systematic element they all have in common is the soldiers tasked with maintaining them. And there is no magic rifle design that won't fail without proper maintenance.

This isn't to say that everything is hunky dory with US small arms. The SAW in particular is not a very good gun, something the newer lightweight versions of the weapon only make worse. But the M4 is, by all accounts, a decent weapon.

Young Adult Employment Stinks

Instapundit points out that the worst job market right now is the 18 to 24 year-old non-students.

My question: does this have anything to do with the skyrocketing price of unskilled labor thanks to recent minimum wage hikes? Congress enacted a minimum wage increase that took it from $5.15 to $7.25 over the last 3 years. Meanwhile the job market has gone in the toilet. Who gets paid the minimum wage? Kids living with their parents. What a surprise 52% of them are out of work.