T-Rex totally had me at "oh snap"

HR 3200 - the Health Care Enigma Act

Between vacations and planning for future vacations and cutting the grass, I haven't had time yet to read the entirety of the bill which casts the entire US health industry to the tender mercies of the byzantine Federal bureaucracy. I don't expect this will matter much, since its authors haven't read it either and we as a nation lately appear discomfitingly insouciant regarding the notion of bills becoming law without anyone having specific knowledge of their contents. I imagine this is mainly so as to provide maximum scope for smart democrat lawyers to later make the law say whatever they want it to via the magic of litigation, which I suppose is great work if you can get it.

But no matter: the Czar of Muscovy is reading the bill, and you can find his trenchant analyses of its ghastly contents here. I highly encourage the visit.

L'affaire de Gates

So much of the handwringing and bedwetting over the whole Henry Gates affair totally misses the point, to wit, that free taxpaying citizens should not be required to genuflect to law enforcement, no matter the race of any of those involved.

My Dad often, and wisely, advised "never argue with a man with a gun." While this is doubtless good advice, as a matter of public policy enforced on pain of arrest and detainment, it leaves much to be desired. Nevermind that no charges were ultimately filed in this particular case: merely detaining without intent to file charges is its own significant abuse of power.

I'll part ways with many law-and-order conservatives on this one, and point out this essay as neatly encapsulating what I think is the actual core issue here.

Ronald Reagan: Man from the Future

Ronald Reagan had seen the future, and recorded a warning to us from across the decades.

If the Russians see what's going on here, why don't we?

Pravda (remember them? the communist party newspaper that eventually went on to have a ridiculously overpriced cowhide bag named approximately after it) has correctly identified, in its lede sentence of a current editorial, what's going on with our current administration (I almost said "totalitarian regime").

It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

There's just enough weird pro-Russian anti-western propagandaist nonsense in the article to convince me that Karl Rove didn't somehow land a job as an intern for the newspaper, like the following bit:

True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

But it goes on from there, with a forthright directness of speaking which would be considered gauche in American society, to judge (despite the left's insistence that no one has the right to judge anyone about anything) our current trajectory and find in it a tragedy unfolding.

First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.

It doesn't seem the former communists harbor any doubts about the tipping point for our own descent into communism.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?

In 1984 anyone who supported a Pravda editorial over the US government would also have had to be wearing a Free Tibet t-shirt and a Mondale/Ferraro '84 pin. It's astonishing that a mere 25 years on, we've reached the depths that we have.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.

Yeah, I noticed that too, and yet it seems from all the non-existent outrage over this blatantly fascistic lurch toward statism that I and Pravda are the only ones who've noticed.

The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.

And they'd be right to laugh, to watch the world superpower suffer such obvious and self-inflicted and avoidable damage on itself.

BHO will prove to be our collective damnation.

An old argument with a new twist

In observing mankind I find that I sometimes begin to suspect correlations and draw conclusions based on observations I make. Although this sounds totally banal, there is a subset of our population (cough donkeys) who would argue that drawing conclusions about tendencies from one's own observations is being judgmental, which I suppose them to mean as a pejorative. There was a time that the ability to draw general conclusions from specific sets of observations (I think this is called inductive reasoning, no?) might have been considered a good thing, as this ability is one of the handful of traits which separates man from the lower animals. But I digress.

One of the trends I noticed in college was that there was a moderately positive correlation between being a democrat and being a cat person. (And preferring Coke to Pepsi is positively correlated with being a communist, or at least a democrat, which obviously is pretty much the same thing. I kid.) What made this fun was the fact that my roommate at the time was a stern rightwing NROTC candidate who totally inexplicably liked cats. He also disagreed with my catlovers = democrats theory. Naturally enough, we spent the next several days arguing the point with an appropriate level of vigor, and we at some point reduced to debating which party a cat or a dog would tend to vote for in the upcoming 1992 presidential election. This was done with rather astonishing earnestness.

My theory, the truth which seemed so self-evident that I was surprised to have to even explain it, was that not only are catlovers democrats but the animals themselves would vote for democrats given the chance to, and dogs the opposite. The argument runs thusly:

1. Cats really don't do anything for you. They play, occasionally, more for their own amusement than your own. They perform no essential or even useful function within the household. Just like the unemployed street youth of Ann Arbor.
2. Cats clearly don't love their owners and labor under the delusion that they're smarter than we are. Just like the democrat kids angry at their parents for instilling and requiring discipline. (For some reason cat people agree with this assessment and find it sort of Hugh Grant rogueishly charming or something.)
3. Cats don't follow instructions, just like a bunch of unwashed hippie protesters ignoring orders to disperse their foul gatherings.
4. Cats nonetheless expect, due to their own apparent sense of wholly undeserved entitlement, for their needs and wants to be provided for them despite having made not the least attempt to earn them. Just like a 1991 pre-welfare-reform era welfare mom.

Pretty damning stuff, yes? On the same points:

1. Although performed with uneven competence, a dog takes seriously its mission to protect the household (even against mailmen and children) and secure the perimiter. A dog is surprisingly vigilant in this even when sleeping, as anyone who's ever seen a startled dog woken up by an imperceptible noise two blocks away can attest. A dog wants to earn its keep.
2. A dog loves everyone who hasn't run afoul of them within the context of item 1. Dogs in particular were fans of Ronald Reagan for his tireless optimism and cheerfulness.
3. Dogs follow instructions reasonably well provided they don't require patience or an unnatural act like ignoring available snacks or something.
4. Dogs therefore earn their keep, are cheerful warriors, and Just Want To Help The Ball Club.

Clearly a republican animal. That anyone could argue otherwise boggles the mind.

So with all this by way of a back story, recently I uncovered the fact that probable communist Eric Zorn has written the worst possible thing imaginable about dogs, Your dog does not love you and other cold-nosed truths. This bit of defamation was in response to a woman jumping into near-freezing water to save her dog.

Let me just say, hats off to Miss Craigie, and I think I'd rather hang out with her than a crabby old sourpuss like Eric Zorn. And my dog obviously loves me, so phllbtphlpt.

Income tax funtime

Just for fun, and because posting has been a little light 'round here the past few weeks, I offer the following for your edification.