Cities Make You Stupid

According to this article, scientists over the course of multiple independent studies have found that living in cities can make you dumb.

That explains why most major cities are nests of liberal vipers.

Now cities do help with innovations but not all inhabitants are innovators. Most are just dwellers.

So I'd say the net result is, liberal elite urbanites are NOT as smart as they think they are.

Defend this

One of the things I find so frustrating and repugnant about moral relativism that leftwing folks love so much is the tendency to defend bad behavior as "cultural".

Defend this.

Because I really can't find any moral relativism with burning a young woman alive for witchcraft. That's so 17th century.

Oh My!

114 to 1

Bye, bye Blago

And, of course, Jonah's take on this is delicious.

Impeachment begins Jan. 25th

Here's why.

Sarah Palin Post-election

This is an interesting video over at Big Hollywood about a documentary titled How Obama Got Elected. It features Sarah Palin and that's good enough for me.

Visit the website to read the accompanying article about the experience but first watch the video below. Sarah is worth it.

Bail Me Out

If the government of the United States of America can propose a stimulus package of over $300 billion dollars, then why can't we all just get a thousand dollars each?

Seriously? All this money is coming from taxpayers and I promise that if the government gave me a thousand dollars I would do my best to stimulate the economy.

I'd stimulate the economy good with a thousand dollars.

I Promise.

Verify

From NRO Corner:

Creating Facts on the Ground [Mark Krikorian]

The 100,000th business has signed up for E-Verify, the free program that enables employers to check electronically whether new hires are authorized to work. (It's the Bratton Corp. of Kansas City.) Back in May, DHS's policy director reported that at least one in 10 new hires nationwide was already being verified this way, and the number of participating firms has grown by 50 percent since then. And after a new rule kicks in a week from today, requiring federal contractors to also use the program, DHS estimates the proportion of all new hires who are verified will climb to perhaps 20 percent. The point is to make use of E-Verify a standard part of the hiring process, even without a statutory mandate, and thus close off more and more of the job market to illegal workers (most of whom work on the books). In the shorter term, this growth makes it essentially impossible for the Democrats to kill E-Verify (it needs to be re-authorized in March), as many of the open-borders crowd would like them to do.

Bumper Sticker

Does anyone know where I can get a bumper sticker that says:

"Don't blame me. I voted for Palin."

Or do I have to make it myself?

Found it. Right here.

Have Some Fun

Right here at this site, The People's Cube.

Subsidies are Bad

The article below is from factsaboutethanol.org.

Ethanol’s Federal Subsidy Grab, Leaves Little For Solar, Wind and Geothermal Energy
Posted by GasMan on January 8, 2009

WASHINGTON, January 8, 2009 – As Congress and the incoming Obama administration plan the nation’s next major investments in green energy, they need to take a hard, clear-eyed look at Department of Energy data documenting corn-based ethanol’s stranglehold on federal renewable energy tax credits and subsidies.
An Environmental Working Group (EWG) report released today uses data from a little noticed analysis buried in an April 2008 report from the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA). The information unearthed by EWG shows that solar, wind and other renewable energy sources have struggled to gain significant market share with modest federal support. Meanwhile, corn-based ethanol has accounted for fully three-quarters of the tax benefits and two-thirds of all federal subsidies allotted for renewable energy sources in 2007.

The corn-based ethanol industry received $3 billion in tax credits in 2007, more than four times the $690 million in credits available to companies trying to expand all other forms of renewable energy, including solar, wind and geothermal power.

“With America facing an exploding federal deficit and the crisis of climate change,” report author and EWG Midwest Vice President Craig Cox said, “it defies common sense to continue to lavish billions of tax dollars on corn-based ethanol, a fuel that has failed to fulfill its promises at every turn.”

“Corn-based ethanol production, spurred by federal subsidies and mandates, is polluting our nation’s water, eroding our soil and plowing up precious wildlife habitat — and worst of all is likely contributing to global warming,” Cox said. “As the polluting ethanol industry gets fat at taxpayer expense, proven clean technologies such as solar, wind and geothermal are fighting for support. America needs a truly renewable energy portfolio, and the evidence is mounting that corn-based ethanol will not get us where we need to go.”

Go here for the full report - http://www.ewg.org/node/27498

The Case for Ken

Amanda Carpenter over at townhall.com has presented serveral excellent reasons why Ken Blackwell should be RNC Chair.

Among the mighty Ken's ideas are:

If elected RNC Chairman Blackwell’s mission would be to change the culture of the RNC, which he thinks has become too dependent on Washington connections cultivated with the soon-to-be nonexistent Bush Administration. To help make the break, he’s pitched RNC members on a new revenue sharing program that would kick-back ten percent of net fundraising proceeds to state parties.

...

Blackwell is also a strong advocate for opening up the RNC’s “voter vault” database to members, which helps satisfy the outside pressure for all RNC candidates to become more tech-friendly without riling older RNC members who are turned off by complex tech talk.

He also wants to keep the Republican party Conservative. And more. Mr. Blackwell has laid out all his ideas in a 38-page, Conservative Resurgance Plan. I've read this plan and it is really inspired. I didn't think I could be more impressed with Mr. Blackwell but I am.

Quite frankly that is truly what the GOP needs badly right now, a man with a (really good) plan.

The New York Times and the Information Theory of the Leisure Class

Kenneth Anderson has put a long essay up on his website - Law of War and Just War Theory Blog- which is a must read for anyone interested in facts vs. opinion.

As a blogger, his point about "confirmation bias" is well taken and always worth protecting yourself against it. But the meat of his essay is the holding up of the New York Times' failure to distinguish between facts and opinions. This action is tantamount to a betrayal of everything we rely on newspapers for. A sample of this magnificent essay follows....

As a business model – not politics – I’m skeptical this can work on a daily basis. There are reasons why magazines appear weekly or monthly, not daily. As politics – well, the Times’s relentless cramdown of skewed, confirmation bias opinions-as-facts this election cycle represents one of two things. The cramdown might so annoy that segment of its readership that still cares about facts on the traditional basis of them being, well, true that it recalculates price in relation to facticity and drops the paper subscription, crippling the business model even further. In that case, I sincerely hope that the Times’s and its employees think the political self-satisfaction was worth it. Or, alternatively, the cramdown might handsomely pay off in cementing the emotional bond ever more closely with the core subscribing, offline readership and allow it to raise the price, directly and indirectly, to a smaller, wealthier, more devoted leisure class audience. But is there really room for a daily New Yorker?

The King vs. Facism

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has a tremendous piece up at TCSDaily laying out a surprisingly persuasive arguement that Elvis Presley saved the world from fascism.

At first I thought he was joking but having read his perspective, I now believe he has a rather strong position.

This is a good bit but read the whole thing! I especially like the insult, "you look like a congressman."

If what you want is to dress up funny and bond with a lot of other people in front of a great light show, well, you don't need the Nazis to do it anymore - even in Berlin. Since Elvis, the bonding-and-catharsis element of mass media has expanded to outdo anything that any politician can deliver. We describe an especially popular politician today as looking "like a rock star," rather than the other way around, after all. (Could there be a worse insult than describing a rock musician as looking "like a Congressman?" I can't think of one.) And if you're a working-class guy with lousy prospects, well, you can learn to play guitar, or to make music on your computer, and then you, too have a chance at being the guy under the lights - and without having to invade Russia.

Wrong!

From AP, this article is all about Obama warning of bad things coming.

"Obama made broader arguments, too, saying that the private sector, typically the answer, cannot do what is needed now.

"At this particular moment, only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe," he said."

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

First of all, in government there are no "short-term boosts", we are still burdened with Depression-era laws, regulations, taxes, and government programs that are wrecking lives and businesses.

Secondly, if you want to lift us out of this recession, bring our corporate tax rates down and in line with other countries like Ireland. Then encourage manufactorer to bring their factories back to the USA with incentives. Also, end subsidies. These things will encourage growth and investment, jobs and better lives.

Democrats/progressives use the suffering of the Great Depression to make a massive power grab and move the United States down the road to socialism. Be wary of this happening again because liberals don't pay attention to history, they just repeat it.

The Top Ten Myths of American Medical Care

Thomas Sowell urges everyone to read this book (The Top Ten Myths of American Medical Care) immediately.

His review of the book and the state of American healthcare is something I whole heartedly agree with.

Fortunately, Sally C. Pipes is one of the few who has explored the reality of government-controlled medical treatment in Canada and other countries. Among the things she discovered is that new life-saving medications that go immediately into the market in the United States take a much longer time to become available to Canadian patients — if they ever get approved by the bureaucrats.

...

As with so many government programs, “the poor” are used as a political justification for imposing government-controlled medical care on everyone. But The Top Ten Myths of American Medical Care shows what a fraud that is. First of all, the average uninsured American has above-average income — and people living in poverty are already eligible for Medicaid.

There are of course some serious problems with Medicaid, as there is with government medical treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals and with Medicare. But such things only highlight the dangers of having the government take over the rest of the medical sector, given its dangerous failures where it is already involved in medical matters.

The lure of something for nothing may be seductive when you are in good health. But it can become a bitter irony when you are waiting for months for surgery to relieve your pain or when your life hangs in the balance while some bureaucrat decides whether you can get the best medication or something older and cheaper.


The Top Ten Myths About American Medical Care can literally be a life-saver. What it reveals is unlikely to be told by the mainstream media or by other enthusiasts for the magic phrase “universal health care.”

Capitalism is not the problem

As this opinion piece by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal asserts, Capitalism did not cause this housing crisis.

Mythmaking is in full swing as the Bush administration prepares to leave town. Among the more prominent is the assertion that the housing meltdown resulted from unbridled capitalism under a president opposed to all regulation.

Like most myths, this is entertaining but fictional. In reality, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were among the principal culprits of the housing crisis, and Mr. Bush wanted to rein them in before things got out of hand.

Rather than a failure of capitalism, the housing meltdown shows what's likely to happen when government grants special privileges to favored private entities that facilitate bad actors and lousy practices.

Fannie and Freddie are "government-sponsored enterprises" (GSEs), chartered by Congress. As such, they had an implicit promise of taxpayer backing and could borrow money at rates well below competitors.

I agree with him.

Oops

Let's just hope other news media are as discrete or Pat Fitzgerald's case could be in jeorpordy if it is not already.

Blago must be howling with laughter right now.

The World Is Not Enough

Sarkozy, Merkel and Blair are calling for a "New Capitalism" one that includes "The State".

Given how central control-and-command economies have consistently failed. Given how the EU is falling apart. Given how government interferance has consistenly messed things up. Why, on earth would we want a new global order.

It's always the same solution with these leftwing socialist/commies.

No Thank You Europe. Capitalism doesn't need to change - you do.

Beware the Bear

I am old enough to just remember The Cold War.

Looks like my kids might get a new one. This article talks about gas pipelines, but if Russia is pulling stunts like this then Europe needs to suddenly become a lot more appreciative of the United States.

Obama - NO NEW DEALS

This post from National Review's The Corner was so good and dovetails so nicely with the book I'm reading ("The Forgotten Man - excellent) that I am posting it in full.

On Depression-Era Policies that “led to recovery”, Jim Powell

In his most recent column, Harold Meyerson writes about the process now underway to determine “which of the paths that Depression-era America embarked upon actually led toward recovery.” He criticized Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a misguided policy to be sure (along with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and the 1932 tax hike).

But Hoover left office in 1933. Since Mr. Obama has promised a “New New Deal,” one might expect Mr. Meyerson to point out something that Hoover’s successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, did that “led to recovery.” He doesn’t.

Truth be told, that’s probably because Meyerson doesn’t have much to choose from. Unemployment averaged 17 percent during the New Deal period; the only thing FDR did that banished high unemployment was conscripting 12 million men for World War II. In my book FDR’s Folly, I suggested a number of reasons this happened: The New Deal tripled taxes, which meant consumers had less money to spend and employers had less money for hiring; a number of New Deal laws made it more expensive for employers to hire people, which also meant less hiring; New Deal soak-the-rich taxes discouraged investment, and it’s almost impossible to create private-sector jobs without investment.

Other policies hurt Americans in other ways. Several New Deal laws banned discounting, when desperate people needed bargains; the New Deal authorized the destruction of food when people were hungry; the New Deal established hundreds of cartels and monopolies; the New Deal centralized the power of the Federal Reserve, and the Fed’s first major policy decision was a blunder that brought on a crisis within a crisis (the depression of 1938); the New Deal broke up the strongest banks and did nothing about laws that prevented thousands of banks from diversifying their depositor bases and their loan portfolios (Canada didn’t have these laws, and it went through the Great Depression without a bank failure).

The biggest irony is that although the New Deal was supposed to help the middle class and the poor, it was mainly the middle class and the poor who paid for it. The biggest source of revenue — bigger than the federal personal income tax and the federal corporate income tax — was the federal excise tax on beer, wine, cigarettes, chewing gum, soda, and other things bought disproportionately by middle-class and poor people. Moreover, New Deal spending was skewed away from the poorest people who lived in the South, and instead targeted toward political “swing” states where average incomes were more than 60 percent higher — even FDR pursued his interests as an incumbent.

Perhaps the most obvious lesson to be learned from the New Deal: Don’t try anything like that again.

The Fallacy of Collectivism

Liberals and Progressives believe in collectivism - the idea that humans can collect together and work for some higher good for the sake of the higher good, usually via the State.

This flies in the face of all human history and reality.

All human life and behavior is collective. Families are collective. Tribes are collective. Civilization is collective. Humans naturally work together to achieve specific ends. Raise Children. Hunt food. Distribute food and defend the group.

Without human collective behavior, we would have no civilization, no religion, no community whatsoever.

Only an individual, completely isolated, is not part of a collective.

So why do progressives and liberals fight against families and businesses and religion? Because, progressive and liberals believe that the "State" over any other group organization.

But is that wise or realistic?

No.

Because the "State" always supports individuals over a true collective.

What do I mean?

Well, "religion", "family", "big business", are things Leftwing progressive/liberals don't like because they do not have control over these groupings without government intervention. So they try to use government policies like welfare and education to promote their ideologies.

But this tends to pervert or destroy these institutions and as a general rule, humans don't like that. This is why folks in true democracies tend not to allow progressive/liberals to attack these institutions. Only in far leftwing ideologies like socialism, fascism, and communism do these ideologies gain any control over religion, family and business.

And here is where the real fallacy happens. Since all human activity tends to naturally be collective, the refusal to acknowledge family, religious, and corporate collectivism, is the refusal to acknowledge basic human activity.

Why?

Because family, religion, and businesses are groups of humans working towards common goals. Groups of humans for mutual benefit. To raise children, to control society, to provide necessary services, these are all collective human behaviors. Big business is still a collection of people who believe they are working to create goods or services that people want. A corporation is NOT a faceless entity, it is a collection of human beings working towards what they believe is a common good.

If you are an entrepreneur, you start alone but your goal is to convince others that your idea is of value to consumers. Once you start collecting other to believe in your ideas, you expand your own ideology. Or rather you develop your business.

So think about it. No human endeavour is without some kind of collectivism. But it is a mutually beneficial collectivism. But left-wing liberal/progressives believe in a State/Government Collectivism where only the Elites benefit because as history has repeatedly shown, Leftwing ideology always creates elites who benefit on the backs of workers.

So it goes back to the "State" and my standing invitation to prove me wrong by describing any socialist, fascist, or communist state that does not rely on elites for governance.

What I mean is that in a true democracy, leaders lead because people believe in their ideas. A successful business succeeds because people believe their products add value to their lives. A family works because they have a common goal. A religion inspires because it offers hope.

In short, human collectivism has a historical record of success. State collectivism is a development of elite intellectualism of the past century with a history of failure. And as I have repeatedly stated, a history of failure does not predict a future of success.

And that is the fallacy of collectivism.

I'll Believe It When I Earmark It

Obama promises to end earmarks. Then how will politicians get re-elected?

Democrats are also promising transparency. Hasn't that always worked against them in the past?

I'll believe it when I see it.

Never Say Never Ever

Harry Reid said Coleman will "Never ever serve".

As I am hoping Coleman wins, I also hope that Reid eats and chokes on his words. They were a foolish thing to say before Franken is even certified.

She's Also A Chick

Along with all the other excellent points this article makes about Sen. Feinstein's reaction to the Panetta pick, I'd like to point out that Obama doesn't really have a terrific record with women-of-power.

He's been disrespectful and crude to Clinton and Palin respectively and most recently but his history with the ladies goes back quite far - that Alice Palmer incident.

You'd think a man who'd basically been raised by women would be a little better at this.

Lefty Infiltration

The Weekly Standard has published a report about Team Sarah's website being infiltrated by horrid leftwingers who pretended to be pro-Sarah only to post hate-filled vile on the Team Sarah website.

Classy, pathetic, and something conservatives should learn from.

Freedom of Speech is worth fighting for but so is civility and honesty.

Protect and moderate your websites.