The recent news of Al Qaeda suffering from the Bubonic plague actually might be a result of them experimenting with biological weapons.
Archive for January, 2009
Along the lines of my earlier post about how much we’re letting our government (and ourselves) get exploited comes this news:
America now has more jobs in government than in manufacturing.
After all, you have to ask which conflict can be used to portray either Jews or the right wing in a bad light.
Bush pardoned just two people, border guards who had an especially harsh sentance for shooting an illegal immigrant invoved in quite a bit of crime. How many did Clinton pardon? And how many people have come under investigation close to Obama before he’s even sworn in?
There seems to be a difference in the expectation of honorable behavior between the two parties…
Obama’s appointment for Treasury secretary doesn’t meet the qualifications to be an employee of the IRS. Of course, the bar for government positions seems to be incredibly low these days: all you need is a D by your name, and all scandals are forgiven and forgotten!
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the biggest stimulus our economy could receive would be to reduce the corporate tax rate to zero. Another huge one would be reducing capital gains. And a couple of days ago they reported that cleaning up and simplifying our tax code would be essentially a free stimulus, not costing the government any reduction in taxes, while freeing up money for taxpayers.
All of this just screams for the FairTax, as these are its key points! And it gets even better: replace the expensive to enforce (and poorly enforced) income tax with a sales tax (where you only have to track each company, not each taxpayer), which also stops offshoring, puts illegal aliens, criminals, tourists and rich people who have stopped paying into the system back into it. And the best part is that since embedded taxes have already raised the price of goods by ~30%, the price of goods would remain roughly the same.
Barack Obama’s inauguration costs are huge…previous administrations have been criticized as being out of touch with the economic situation for spending fractions of what he’ll be spending, but it doesn’t matter, we can party because Barack is going to be president, right?
The truth is, they’re not out of touch. No one in the government wasting all of this money is out of touch. They’re just exploiting the system, spending our money, because they’ve realized they can constantly swipe more of it. Which is why, in these troubled economic times, there is one industry that is booming, and they lead the country in the richest counties, despite not producing anything.
It seems so obvious that this is exactly backwards from how any society should work…and yet, somehow at least half the country misses this. I wonder how far things will have to get, how much failure we’ll see the system go through before the electorate actually pays enough attention to fix these problems. If my current state of Massachusetts is any indicator (or California or New York) things can still get quite a bit worse…
It turns out Archimedes discovered some of the basic principles of calculus that had to wait until Newton and Leibnitz to be rediscovered.
Imagine where Humanity would be right now if the library of Alexandria hadn’t been burned, and Aristotle’s theories of Astronomy hadn’t seduced people for a thousand years plus…
Al Qaeda is suffering from the bubonic plague. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch…
Limbaugh doesn’t want Obama to succeed, given that his stated policies during his entire campaign were policies that were exactly wrong. Given his abrupt switches in policy the past couple weeks, I don’t know if we can still say that about Obama, but I think it doesn’t matter: Limbaugh is still making the classic mistake of thinking the President has much to do with domestic policy. He doesn’t, congress does, and right now you will not find worse leaders than that bunch.
Antisemitism has gone more mainstream than perhaps any time since the 1930s…when even the left in America approved of Hitler and Mussolini, at least before they found out about the death camps. The hatred for Jews never really went away (and in fact always remained higher than islamophobia ever got) but the attacks and outrage is getting much more public than any time I can remember – take a look at some of the recent news items for yourself. I could dig up a ton more – Those that I linked are all only a day or two old.
Just the latest news items to back up Jonah Goldberg’s book.
Ted Kaczynski vs. Al Gore. Not so different in rhetoric.
I found the quiz via some questions posed to Obama’s science advisor, namely, what parts of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto do you agree or disagree with?
Ultracapacitors have been on the fringe of energy storage technologies for a little while, offering huge capacity relative to current battery technology, with the amazing ability to charge all at once, as opposed to slowly over time. Next Big Future is reporting that a startup in Austin has managed to scrounge 500k to work on ultracapacitors based on graphene, just as methods are being developed to mass produce graphene sheets.
The ‘stimulus’ bill contains legislation mandating net neutrality, even though everyone has slightly different definitions, and the government has an unenforcable definition. Sounds like government in action, hooray Democrats!
Bloodthirsty Liberal has a link to Bill Frist’s point that Bush’s actions in Africa have saved at least 10 million lives in Africa. I would point out that not only did he liberate the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he saved countless lives there as well, since civilian casualties have been far lower than the sheer number of people Saddam and the Taliban were executing, not to mention torturing.
And, like Lincoln, he persevered in a fight for freedom he believed in, despite the Copperheads at home who would run away (in this case from casualties that over the course of the entire war represent a minute fraction of the casualties any battle of any of our previous major wars had).
A friend of mine sent me this email. I agree with the idea, although I don’t think we need to stop pushing the FairTax. Let’s do both: View full article »
Notice that Obama is changing his stance and doing a lot of the most controversial (for the left) things that Bush was doing? Staying in Iraq, Guantanamo, Osama bin Laden, interrogation, Iran…all of his previous rhetoric doesn’t seem to match his actions. Oh, and his advisors are clearly bringing a lot of change to Washington as well.
Now, let’s listen to the left over the next few years, and see how much they protest when Obama does what they were complaining about Bush doing the whole time.
I’ll point out that my big complaint about Obama isn’t his foreign policy (since we’ve won in Iraq) but that he’s going to greenlight everything Congress does, and spending and taxes are both going to go through the roof. Also because he’s a slimy Chicago politician, in the worst of ways.
Glenn Reynolds is linking to the 20 most gerrymandered congressional districts. Pretty disgusting, and yes, they’re mostly Dems. It’s always a shame to see regardless of the party though.
