The Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. - Mark Twain

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Newsweek has an entertaining infographic ranking the top 100 countries in the world by education, health, quality of life, economic dynamism and political environment.  The US comes in at #11, Finland is #1.

What hurts the US ranking is health—which is ordered entirely by life span—and education.  But both ranking are a little bit silly.  The education ranking is based on literacy rate and average years of schooling.  We get hit because our literacy rate is 99% rather than 100%.  I actually think that ranking is, if anything, generous, given the poor performance of American students on international testing.  However, I would note that, if you have/use the opportunities available in this country, you can get an amazing education.  The American university system is far larger and more open than any in the world.

As for health being ranked on lifespan ... well, I’ve blogged on that before.  The infamous WHO rankings have us #1 in healthcare responsiveness.  Our lower lifespan compared to countries like Japan (ranked #1) has less to do with an evil healthcare system and more to do with an obesity rate that is ten times higher.

As for the countries ranked higher than us, they show a bit of the peculiarity in the rankings.  Finland is #1, but mostly because there’s no metric for “living in an ice cold place next door to a famously psychotic superpower”.  I can understand Switzerland’s #2 ranking; it’d be my top choice if I could live anywhere in the world besides the US.  Australia ranks #4—higher than us on education and health, lower on economic dynamism (the high political environment ranking was before they had a hung parliament).  And that’s without any bonus for the barramundi and chips.  That jibes with my limited time spent in Australia (now about four months over the last ten years).  This quality of life is high here but the overall wealth is a bit lower than what we experience in the US (and less concentrated).  My mother-in-law probably described Australia’s economy best—it’s about seven years behind the US.  So Australia 2010 is like the US 2003.  The trade-off is the greater security of a welfare state, a tradef-off the Aussies seems to be fine with.

Ranking at the ass end of economic dynamism and 71 overall is Sean Penn’s tropical paradise of Venezuela.  That doesn’t count for the quadrupling of the homicide rate in the last decade—a trend Chavez is trying to censor.  Michael Moore’s beloved Cuba ranks #50.  But in both cases, Newsweek is accepting, at face value, figures on education and health coming out of communist countries.  As we have shown extensively at Moorewatch, those numbers should be taken with enough salt to preserve a beached whale.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Now here is a good topic for the weekend.

John Hawkins polled the right wing blogs to get a list of the Worst Americans of all time.  Here is his list:

23) Saul Alinsky (7)
23) Bill Clinton (7)
23) Hillary Clinton (7)
19) Michael Moore (7)
19) George Soros (8)
19) Alger Hiss (8)
19) Al Sharpton (8)
13) Al Gore (9)
13) Noam Chomsky (9)
13) Richard Nixon (9)
13) Jane Fonda (9)
13) Harry Reid (9)
13) Nancy Pelosi (9)
11) John Wilkes Booth (10)
11) Margaret Sanger (10)
9) Aldrich Ames (11)
9) Timothy McVeigh (11)
7) Ted Kennedy (14)
7) Lyndon Johnson (14)
5) Benedict Arnold (17)
5) Woodrow Wilson (17)
4) The Rosenbergs (19)
3) Franklin Delano Roosevelt (21)
2) Barack Obama (23)
1) Jimmy Carter (25)

I’m sorry.  I have to agree with Bainbridge, riffing off Gallagher.

Personally, I find the collated list pretty much of a joke. It reflects the partisan passions of the moment, not anything resembling a serious verdict of history.

I’m not fond of Obama, Carter or FDR but putting them on the list ahead of several traitors (the Rosenbergs, Hiss, Ames, Arnold), scumbags (Moore, Chomsky) and assassins (Booth) is bizarre.  Obama is turing out to be a crap President, but I’d be proud to call him an American as opposed to Alger Hiss.  This really looks more like a list of annoying people than “worst” people.

I have to think on this and will post an update later tonight (Aussie time), but Bainbridge’s list is much closer to the one I’d put up, sans the confederate figures like Jeff Davis (Bainbridge regards the rebellion of the South as treason; I do not.) But I’m not even sure—and I say this as a Moorewatch blogger—that Michael Moore would be on my list.  And certainly the top of my list would be guys like Aldrich Ames, Aaron Burr, Nathan Bedford Forrest (for founding the KKK and murdering black soldiers, not rebelling) and the Rosenbergs.

Anyway, post nominations in the comments.

Friday, July 02, 2010

And he has done so by torpedoing the election prospective of something around 75 House demcorats and a big enough number of Senators that now have to return to their republican leaning and heavily anti-illegal immigration districts, and defend his plan for amnesty. And he is doing this when poll after poll shows the majority of Americans against amnesty of any kind and supporting Arizona’s attempt to do what the feds won’t. This umpteenth attempt by Obama to ride roughshod over the will of the people, to keep a campaign promise, shows that basically Obama has decided that his current drop in popularity is easier to reverse for the 2012, than the coming slaughter at the polls that the democrat party faces in the coming November elections.

So, Obama’s focus is now on repairing the damage that people actually getting a first hand look at what “Hope & Change” really meant, leading to a plunge in his popularity. He is banking on help from what democrats consider to be natural born democrat constituents, which as usual involves those that are bad for everybody but democrat politicians. Anyway, the collectivists and their policies are destroying the economy - spare me the “it’s Bush’s fault cop-out, because it has gotten real old, and even the dumbest of the dumb out there knows that’s a weak excuse even if the apparatchiks keep spouting it – and it is pissing off the American people. This kind of genius only makes things worse. Trillions have been flushed down the toilet because of the Keynesian “big government deficit spending tax dollars can fix any economic downturn” collectivist economic model, and things are still getting worse. Much worse. Despite government subsidies to artificially stimulate sales – that tax break for home buyers - the numbers continue to suck. Heck, we even have a DOJ that selectively applies the laws in the new “Hope & Change” America. Even more interesting are all the games being played so the demcorats controlling Congress can avoid showing they are setting new deficit spending records. And we have not even had them screw us tax payers hard yet! Don’t worry though, soon we will all be getting the same level of care the Cuban people get at a hundred times the cost. All is well!

Can’t wait for November though. It’s going to be a blood bath. Maybe we can get most of the damage done by these people reversed. Let’s hope the republicans that do go to Congress buck the establishment and do what is right for the country. The one good thing is that it took a measly 2 years for the whole “progressive” revolution to strangle itself and piss off Americans.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Hmm.  It turns out that Daily Kos’s polling company may have been making shit up:

There’s a great deal of evidence suggesting that the polls commissioned from Research 2000 by Daily Kos were either inappropriately cleaned up, or outright fabricated.  To summarize crudely, there doesn’t seem to be any random statistical noise in the data; there are no outliers, and there’s an extremely odd tendency for the male and female crosstabs to both end in either an odd, or an even number; since these numbers vary pretty randomly, there’s no reason that they should consistently be both odd or both even

To his credit, Kos was the one who made this known.  To his discredit, however, this was discovered long after the poll that proved that Republicans were a bunch of insane lunatics who want gay teachers out of schools, contraception out of stores and foreign-born Obama out of the Oval Office.  And not to blow my own horn, but I called it:

I hate to impugn the source.  I don’t think Kos is cooking the number or anything.  But given his attitude toward the GOP, I think the poll results are being greeted with a lot less skepticism than they warrant.  If a similar poll had come out in 2002 on Democrat beliefs, I would have called bullshit (and often did) and so would any reputable source.  But a poll indicating lunacy in the GOP is greeted with utter acceptance.

And here I pointed out that DKos’s results were wildly at variance with Gallup’s on the gays in the military question:

That’s 32 points of difference between DKos and Gallup or 16 times their supposed polling uncertainty.  This poll, my friends, is what you will find if you look up “horseshit” in the dictionary; assuming your library hasn’t pulled them from the shelves because they also define oral sex.

I was right.  Now I wonder how quickly the same people who trumpeted this poll will admit it may have been crap.  So far, nothing from the usual left wing sites.

Monday, May 24, 2010

I have been busier than a one legged man at an ass-kicking contest the last month or so, and have not posed much, but today I have finally gotten some slow time and decided it was time to get back at it. And I think the appropriate place to start is with the current economic crisis gripping the world, and closer at home, this whole government healthcare takeover thingy, better know as Obamacare. Since everyone but the usual bureaucrats seem to understand the budgetary problems facing the great Western socialist paradises on the verge of economic collapse are caused because the parasites “working” in government have had a great run for the last few decades buying themselves both power and bennies with other people’s money, and are discussing the fact that we can’t keep spending at the rate we are, it should be obvious that this massive government expansion would remain unpopular and continue to get more unpopular as people realize the economic impacts associated with it. In fact, the numbers for those of us wanting it repealed, have climbed to 63%, and they are just going to keep going up as even the CBO now has to admit. I am sure the democrats are quite surprised that it now looks like Obamacare will not save us anything but actually cost more. And that is with a shameful slight of hand/scam used by those promoting this most massive government expansion since the first day of the Roosevelt socialist takeover, that allows the government to collect taxes for 10 years, but then only offer services for the last 5 or 6 years in a 10 year cycle. As I have pointed out repeatedly, it should be blatantly obvious that there is no arguing that even if the program doesn’t end up as I suspect it will deep in the red in the first decade, come the next 10 year cycle, the program is going to be short a trillion or more from the start.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Just after one year of “Hope and Change” it looks like people are wising up that they got sold the same bill of loser collectivist goods of the Carter years, and pining for those bad days they told us we had when republicans were in charge. As reality clashes with fantasy and things like this, this, this, this, this, this, and this keep happening, the democrats continue to pretend that what people want is bigger government, a complete takeover of healthcare - 1/5th of the economy - by that big government, and a massive migration from jobs in the private sector to a fraction of the number of jobs lost there in the public sector. And that doesn’t tackle the complete collapse of the AGW scam which wanted to expand the government take over globally and other such stupid ideas. At least Clinton was smart enough to be saved by a republican takeover of congress in 2004. I doubt Obama, a true believer, will be able to make the same connections. After all, he was told he was the messiah and could walk on water.

As I said before, a few years of the democrats in power would be enough to make many see the light. I just didn’t think it could take but one year for that to happen. I could not believe that the democrats were really this inept and stupid, but they are hard at work proving me both right and wrong. Democrats are good at manipulating the news, with help of the complicit MSM, to attack their opponents when they are in power. Unfortunately now that they are in power, even with massive help covering up for them by the MSM, they can’t hide how inept they are. Reality has a way of destroying most collectivist fantasies, and what is happening isn’t anything new. The fun thing is that I get to bring out my latest find, a poster on some highway in the Mid West that tells the story better than anything else:

Give it time. The numbers are getting bigger and bigger, and all but the most hard core leftists are agreeing that for all his faults, and he had them believe me, Bush was heads and shoulders a better president than the current community organizer in chief….

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

I updated my previous post, but thought I’d demonstrate, once again, why that Daily Kos poll on Republican attitudes is shit.  Here are the full results of the poll.  Here’s a question:

QUESTION: Should openly gay men and women be allowed to serve in the military?  26% yes, 55% no, 19% not sure.

Here is Gallup’s result on the same question:

Do you favor or oppose allowing only openly gay men and lesbian women to serve in the military?

Republicans: 58% Favor

That’s 32 points of difference between DKos and Gallup or 16 times their supposed polling uncertainty.  This poll, my friends, is what you will find if you look up “horseshit” in the dictionary; assuming your library hasn’t pulled them from the shelves because they also define oral sex.

Update: That should have said “openly”, not “only”.  I was typing too fast.

Monday, February 01, 2010

The blogosphere is aglow with the latest polling from ... Daily Kos.

A new Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll, conducted among 2,000 self-identified Republican respondents nationwide, gives an interesting peek into the psyche of the minority party’s base.

Kos has not yet released the full numbers, but here’s some early info on the poll that he has posted on his Twitter account:

• 39% of Republicans want President Obama to be impeached.

• 63% think Obama is a socialist.

• Only 42% believe Obama was born in the United States.

• 21% think ACORN stole the 2008 election—that is, that Obama didn’t actually win it, and isn’t legitimately the president, with 55% saying they are “not sure.”

• 53% think Sarah Palin is more qualified than Obama to be president.

• 23% want to secede from the United States.

• 73% think gay people should not be allowed to teach in public schools. This position puts the GOP base well to the right of none other than Ronald Reagan, who helped defeat the Briggs Initiative, a 1978 referendum in California that would have forbidden gays or people who advocated gay rights from teaching in public schools.

• 31% want contraception to be outlawed.

I’m sorry.  I call complete bullshit on this.

First, self-identified Republicans only constitute about 20% of the populace (versus 40% who identify as conservative).  That’s an awful small group to define and you can define it narrowly enough to get only the most extreme fringe.

Second, as we’ve mentioned a million times, question matter.  The article mentions the Public Policy Polling that indicated that half of the GOP thought ACORN has stolen the election. Numbers that wildly discrepant tell me you’ve got a question problem.  A change in phrasing might shift the number dramatically.  Take the ACORN question—many conservatives think it’s likely ACORN stole some votes; very few think they stole ten million of them.

Third, what people tell a pollster about extreme views and what they actually believe are different things.  Hell, if a pollster called me up questions like these, I’d probably answer yes just to fuck with them.  And there’s a certain push-polling aspects to these leading questions.

Fourth, I thought all the crazy people were supposed to be the tea parties, which are not associated with the GOP.  Does that we mean we have two groups of crazy people running around?

I hate to impugn the source.  I don’t think Kos is cooking the number or anything.  But given his attitude toward the GOP, I think the poll results are being greeted with a lot less skepticism than they warrant.  If a similar poll had come out in 2002 on Democrat beliefs, I would have called bullshit (and often did) and so would any reputable source.  But a poll indicating lunacy in the GOP is greeted with utter acceptance.

Update: Full poll results here.  I still say this is garbage because the result are so at variance with any other polling.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

The GOP should demand that the MSM give Obama hour long, weekly, or better yet, bi-weekly air time, so he can talk to the people some more. I know the left loves to call conservatives idiots, cowboys, and red necks, and to pretend that their side is replete with intellectuals, but I think the American people are much smarter than they give em credit and more and more of them are starting to see that Obama is nothing but an incompetent collectivist boob. The usual losers in the MSM did an awesome job snowing people and covering for Obama before the election. The best counter for their continued efforts to protect this guy is to actually let this guy talk. He makes Bush, even in his most weakest moments, look like Plato or Socrates compared to him.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 29% of the nation’s voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -11. That’s the first time his ratings have reached double digits in negative territory (see trends).

These updates are based upon nightly telephone interviews and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. Today is the first update based entirely upon interviews conducted after the President’s prime time televised press conference. The number who Strongly Approve of the President has remained unchanged since the press conference but the number who Strongly Disapprove has gone up by five percentage points (from 35% on Wednesday morning to 40% today).

The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates also available on Twitter. The President received generally poor grades for his response to a question about a Cambridge police incident involving a black Harvard professor. However, the results show a huge divide between black Americans and white Americans on all questions.

Overall, 49% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. Fifty percent (50%) disapprove. It is important to remember that the Rasmussen Reports job approval ratings are based upon a sample of likely voters.

Basically it looks like the well orchestrated and carefully crafted person for Obama - the one where he is an intellectual giant and uniter, of Ronald Reagan like caliber, and beyond the racist and collectivist policies that have always dragged this country down – goes up in flames when he actually gets to talk. Many of those house-fraus that voted for Obama, to prove how chick they were for electing a black man, are now realizing that this guy is just another Jackson or Sharpton, with a large contingent of fanatical media people covering up for him.

A few more pressers like this, and Obama will be left with nothing but the fanatical collectivist lemmings following him. I say give him as much TV time as he wants. If he rigs the audiences as he is want to, hammer him on that. More likely, even with a rigged audience and planted questions, my bet is that he will continue to pull stunts like the last one, and as he is exposed for all to see – unmasked as a collectivist ideologue with zero real life experience, and hell bent on destroying this great nation – will lose support fast.

Oh yeah. For the usual libs: it’s BOOSH’ fault. There. Now you don’t even have to coment.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Posting from yours truly will be a bit sporadic for the next two weeks thanks to some computer issues. On the menu today, immigration, and how it relates to the swine flu.

I’ve blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration. We’ve heard for years from reckless open-borders ideologues who continue to insist there’s nothing to worry about. And we’ve heard for years that calling any attention to the dangers of allowing untold numbers of people to pass across our borders and through our other ports of entry without proper medical screening — as required of every legal visitor/immigrant to this country — is RAAAACIST.

9/11 didn’t convince the open-borders zealots to put down their race cards and confront reality.

Maybe the threat of their sons or daughters contracting a deadly virus spread from south of the border to their Manhattan prep schools will.

We’ve had our first death from the swine flu already. A seperate post about that whole can of worms would be very much justified. I am more interested in the immigration angle. Being a more libertarian site than many others in the conservative blogosphere, I am curious as to where our readership falls on the immigration issue generally. Does a potential pandemic change anyone’s minds as Malkin seems to hope?

For me, there are really three key questions at the heart of the debate overall.

1. What do you think about current legal immigration levels?
2. How should we treat the illegals here now?
3. How do we secure our borders? Do we even need to? Do we need a physical wall?

What’s your take?

Here’s mine:

1. Way too low. I think we should be taking in a lot more immigrants and the restrictions and red-tape barring legal immigration should be greatly relaxed. For its size the U.S. is way underpopulated.
2. I don’t think we should deport them. I think we need to find a way to offer them a legitimate status without necessarily a path to citizenship. Keeping them as a perpetual serfdom in fear the INS isn’t practical or moral.
3. We should be doing more to secure the borders, but fixing our legal immigration would do a lot to solve the problem in itself. I don’t think a physical wall is really necessary but more agents, check points, and better electronic surveillance wouldn’t hurt. If anything the swine flu suggests the risks of doing nothing.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

...That social conservatives are biologically predisposed to respond to scare tactics more than the rest of us.

A story today in the The Los Angeles Times on a study about biology and politics starts with: “Die-hard liberals and conservatives aren’t made; they’re born. It’s literally in their DNA.
....

The study, released yesterday, tested the physiological responses of 46 participants to various threatening images, like bloody faces. It found that people who self-identified as “in favor of socially protective policies” responded much more strongly to the stimuli than people who held more liberal views on such issues as welfare, abortion, immigration, gay rights and school prayer.

The researchers concluded that people of different ideological persuasions have divergent physiological reactions, and that people with socially conservative views tend to be more shocked by potentially threatening stimuli.

“Some people have said that we’re calling conservatives ‘frightened’ or something along those lines,” Oxley said. “And we’re not. All we’re suggesting is that there’s a physiological difference between people who hold one set of political beliefs and people who hold another set of political beliefs.”

I tend to be skeptical of such “DNA surveys,” but they have a point-people who are more ideologically driven than the rest of the population will tend to get more agitated about what they perceive as threats and will generally overreact in their solutions on how to deal with said threats. Fear has become a prime motivator in presidential politics in this country. Sane people on both sides have learned to reject fear and the simplistic solutions it tends to create. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be a healthy level of concern about society’s problems. But scare tactics have ruled for far too long now, and people on both sides have become quite effective in using them. Fortunately, there is not a requirement that the rest of us have to vote accordingly.

P.S. I just got back. The wedding was held Saturday and went off with out a hitch. It was a nice ceremony that was held in a tent in my brother’s back yard with most of our extended family there. We had barbecued beef, chicken and sausages, and the weather actually cooperated-it waited until we were inside the tent and then it started pouring down the rain, but that didn’t really matter.

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

America’s irrational paranoia over marijuana strikes again.

The federal government plans to escalate its eradication of marijuana plantations in the backwoods of national forests this year, beginning in California with the deployment of larger strike teams and the controversial launching of miniature, remote-controlled spy planes to outfox growers, a top Bush administration official said Thursday.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey said an increasing number of pot growers financed by Mexican drug cartels are taking cover in the forest, particularly in the southern Sierra Nevada.

“We believe there are as many of them working marijuana gardens on national forests in California as there are Forest Service employees in the state – upwards of 5,000,” said Rey, who oversees the agency.

According to Rey, the administration decided to disclose the planned surge in forest surveillance after The Bee and Associated Press persisted in questioning U.S. Forest Service officials about a $100,000 purchase of two battery-powered “unmanned aerial vehicles.”

“We wanted to (clarify) what they are being used for, and what they aren’t being used for,” Rey said. “Random hunters aren’t being spied on by their government.”

Whew, that’s a relief!  Because, as we all know, our government never illegally spies on anyone, do they?

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit group representing whistle-blowers in government, called attention to the robo-planes earlier this week as Forest Service Chief Abigail Kimbell appeared before two U.S. Senate committees to justify the agency’s annual budget request.

“A cash-starved Forest Service is buying glitzy hardware with zero justification,” the group’s director, Jeff Ruch, said in a press release, adding that “the use of spy technology in the domestic U.S. should not be undertaken lightly.”

No, Jeff!  What shouldn’t be taken lightly is the threat that marijuana places on all our children!  Think about the children, Jeff!  Do it for the children!  Why won’t anyone think of the children?

The SkySeer runs quietly and its tiny video camera can resolve whether a person is armed with a handgun from 250 feet in the air – high enough for the 4-foot-long craft to become invisible from the ground, according to its inventor, Sam De La Torres.

“You can really sneak up on people,” said De La Torres, who works at Octatron, a Los Angeles County firm that specializes in military surveillance gear.

Well, it’s good to know that you can’t even escape Big Brother by going out into a fucking national park.  There’s no such thing as privacy any more.  Man can’t simply throw on a backpack and get back to nature any more without the nanny state videotaping everything he does.

And if you don’t think for a second that this technology won’t be abused you’re astonishingly naive.  We’ll soon start hearing stories of arrests that aren’t even related to marijuana, and these will then be used to justify the program.  And let us not forget, folks, that this is the federal government doing this.  In California marijuana is legal for medical use, and tolerated just about everywhere.  But we can’t go letting a state determine its own drug policies, can we?  We have to think about the chiiiiiiiiiildren!

Sunday, October 07, 2007

I participated in the latest Right Wing News Poll, Right-Of-Center Bloggers Select Their Least Favorite People On The Right (2007 Edition).

Since RWN’s readership is primarily of the Bushbot variety, their choice of Ron Paul as the least favorite person on the right is not surprising.  An actual conservative spouting actual conservatism is not what the Republican Party is about today.  It’s about God, guns, and keeping Amurka safe from terrists.  Ron Paul has some surprising levels of support, thus the Bushbots are terrified that the other candidates will be forced to tack more towards the Libertarian side and away from the fundamentalist wackos.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Care to see how your morals stack up against liberals and conservatives?  Via Reason comes this link to a morals test at YourMorals.org.  Here’s how I scored.

Harm:  2.8
Fairness:  3.4
Loyalty:  1.9
Authority:  3.0 (Higher than I would have thought)
Purity:  0.8 (Half of the average liberal)

Fascinating little test.  Take it yourself, see where you rank.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

A question for you religious types:  which to you is a bigger sin, lusting after another man, or using methamphetamine?

Update: Allow me to rephrase the question.  Which would disappoint you more, to find out that your child had tried meth, or that he was gay and had had sex with a man?