I just want to point out, as Liberal Fascism does well, that the right is generally better read and knows where it is coming from, than the left. In a comment on a post Rants mentions: Keynes, FDR, Bush, Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Rousseau, Hobbes, Jackson, Coolidge, and Reagan. One of the big arguments I have with my center-right brother petedied is Hamilton vs Jefferson. He dares me to say Hamilton wasn't an American Bismarck (purportedly a good thing) and I end up saying Jefferson wasn't only-kinda a Rousseau simp in his dotage. I always open and close with the Whiskey Rebellion which reinforces Hamilton-as-Bismarck but also proves the man was a giant dick.

Being a say-something on the right involves a shitload of history and reading. My bookshelf includes Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, and other quacks.

Being a say-something on the left might require a deep reading too but the do-somethings haven't got it and they run the show. But it mostly starts and ends with Rawls (who says nothing, btw). It is all action and emotion, all the time.

You may not like conservatives or what they have to say but they do have a pedigree. Given the fact that the nature of man hasn't changed much it is surprising that much of the [venerated] old stuff has held up while much of the well-wishing hopenchange stuff is empty. The book on my shelves with the oldest pub date is by St Thomas Aquinas. People haven't changed much in the last 800 years even when they squinted their eyes and hoped really, really, hard that they would.

So, uh, Get Off My Lawn.

The Powderhouse Pub is due to reopen in a week with a new kitchen and new everything; possibly to compete with the Tavern on the Hill instead of just being a townie bar (lots of townies at The Tavern, but still..). Next door the Urban Gourmet rehab is finally moving again, almost two years since it burned out in a suspicious "electrical" fire. Word is that it will again be a pizza/pasta house. That is good for Pescatore next door in the same way that The Breakfast Wars have been good for all the diners/coffee houses involved (the Boston Globe writeup didn't hurt).

NB, I snuck in there a link to the Pescatore website. I bought the domain for them more than a year ago (traded it for a case of beer) and they finally have something up. The site isn't very good - it was done by one of the daughter's classmates - but it could be worse. Or it could be better; they asked me if I would do it or recommend someone to do it and I flatly told them that to do it well would cost more than they would get out. They took my advice, so blame me for it's sparseness.

NBB I'm still pissed that my Chowhound thread introducing Pescatore was purged of all my comments. My comments weren't all praising but apparently I ran afoul of some guideline. Emails asking why my comments were purged went unanswered.

2. If you purchase a cat you will be expelled. If you post a picture of a cat it will be assumed you bought a cat.

For the Good of the Children

Laws are not consequence free, except maybe for the people who write them. Baby Jake won't die in a car wreck - because his parents follow the law - but he will spend more time on trains and that extra cost in money and time will mean he doesn't get to do other things. Heck, the law even hurts the environment: because a child seat must be in the back that means this two car family with a pickup truck and a sedan must use the truck for commuting and the sedan for baby stuff.

Laws aren't just bad, they are badly written. Baby Jake is big for his age* but the local baby seat laws mandate different seats by age and not size. What is best for baby is actually illegal by PA state law; his parents have no say. I can't even imagine what planning a cross-state trip must be like. Can parents really be expected to bring two or three car seats and change their configurations at borders? Making all these laws national instead of local would be an improvement but only of a kind; to replace local assininity with federal ones.

I repeat myself but: You can't raise other people's children so please stop trying. Good parents will be good parents and bad parents will be bad parents, despite the law. Worse, good parents are more likely to be bad parents if the law requires being a bad parent; bad parents will be bad parents regardless of the law.

* He's big for his age but his head is very proportional to his body. I like kids plenty but kids with big heads freak me out. And there's a lot of them.

NB, As I always say with anything child related: If I, and my three brothers, survived childhood then childhood can't be terribly dangerous. Bikes (no helmets!), firecrackers, knives (ask me about my scars!), guns, strangers. The only dead kids I knew in my first 21 years had severe and congenital defects.

The whole contrivance of live popular musical appreciation: Parking Lot, red party cups, drunk, go through admission, head straight for a piss, buy more beer, sound check check check, roadies disappear off stage, 5 more minutes of wait, lights go down, spliffs ignite, lights go on, mad cheering, songs songs spliffs songs songs spliffs songs, finale, cheering, roadies, encore, final finale, roadies, lights up, march of the lemmings back to the car, 2 hours of inchworming one car length at a time to leave. Woohoo the highway! Rinse Wash Repeat.

Well yes, and if you've read your Hayek/Mises you would know this is exactly why politicians are worse at running things than non-politicians. The politicians who win elections are, by definition, just the people best at winning elections. Yes, those pols have to have the appearance of someone who would make a good legislator/executive but they also have to have good campaign staff, be a good public speaker, and lead unnaturally clean lives [Obama's paper-trail free life, for instance].

Importantly there is no way around this limitation. Most Utopian plans begin "first, we get all the smartest people together..." They are variations on Technocracy, the silly idea that if only the right people were in charge and given unlimited power the world would be a better place. From that link:

What is the basis of Technocracy?

All forms of government have their roots in political ideology, philosophy, and opinion. By contrast, Technocracy has its roots purely in science.

Consider this a reminder to back up your stuff. I'm a geeky guy and I don't do it often enough, or in this case in the right places, but you should do it anyway. Good advice is good advice even if it isn't followed.

I can be emailed at jackdied at gmail. While jackdied.com addresses work the amount of spam is staggering at 1k+ per day and around 4 gigs per year. My spam filters suck so I only check that inbox when looking for something specific.

Her politics are small-L libertarian and her life is all lunch pail American. There are pictures of her hunting deer, shooting an M4 (on a visit with Alaskan troops in Kuwait), she says nuke-U-lar, and if I was a betting man I'd say she bowls too. Her husband is a union steelworker who has racked up some snow mobiling championships in his spare time. I would find her hard to dislike even if she had hard left politics. Unfortunately for Obama the lunch pail dems - who are not liberals - have a lot more to identify with in Palin than Obama or Biden (or McCain!).

Likability isn't everything, as Obama has found out. I admit that I twitched when I read that she has a baby (her fifth). I understand that her husband can take care of the child - my brother is a stay at home dad to my Godson - but that cringe reflex is a powerful thing especially when confronting "likable."

If nothing else this VP pick will be much more interesting for the media, comedians (she has an accent out of "Fargo"), and political junkies. Mitt Romney would have been a safe pick that didn't change the election narrative at all.

PS, if you don't know her politics: she is a gunny, favors small government, and she had that baby despite knowing that it would have Downs Syndrome - pro-life not just in theory but in practice.

By "not perfunctory" I mean you can fail and the only retakes happen next year. That would suck but I don't expect it to be a problem. Taking the pips out of a card at 50 yards isn't hard but I'm sure hunting requires a lot more than that.

The outcomes of our plan, though, are not to be feared. They will create countless green collar jobs, introduce greater economic stability, bring huge benefits to the real economy and establish prudent environmental policy.

Here is some of their brilliance:

Raise the resources to invest in change: The Green New Deal needs resourcing. As part of the financial reform described above, cheaper money is needed to invest in the environmental transformation of our energy, transport and building infrastructure.

In parallel, to prevent inflation, we want to see much tighter regulation of the wider financial environment.

Here is heading that is self-explanatory:

Rethinking Reality

Also, [WWII rationing] had unanticipated benefits for health and well-being, such as the growth of urban gardening.

[we can learn from] Cuba's astonishing avoidance of widespread starvation post-Cold War, when it lost access to affordable oil supplies and was placed in near total economic isolation.

This article could be a reprint of any conversation with a BA undergrad (or professor). The first step is always "get a bunch of smart people to figure out what to do" and the predicted end is always awesome.

My response is always the same: Get off my lawn.

Lots of promises. The world, in fact. Good luck with that.

I like when he called on past democratic presidents that showed the proper example for the party. FDR and Kennedy. He skipped the other meat heads like Buchanan who enabled the civil war to happen. Wikipedia says this "he held that secession was illegal but that going to war to stop it was also illegal. Taking his own advice, he did nothing"

Kennedy is another one that i just don't get. Bay of Pigs? Vietnam? He did get the first 20K or so troops into Vietnam. I may have gone with somebody that had a little more stones then Kennedy. Who, by the way, had the CIA instigate a coup that put that Baath party in charge of Iraq. The party of Sadaam Hussein.

Truman for instance? But he dropped the abomb.

Andrew Jackson the founder of the party? Trail of Tears

Good speech, but once again selective in what you want to hear. You hear Kennedy, you think poor bastard, you hear FDR you think savior of the Great Depression. You hear green is good, you say "yes!" But you forget that the reason food prices are the highest they have been in years is because ethanol has driven up the price of corn around the globe. A lot left unsaid that makes a big difference. However, that's politics and that's how it works.

How come people are so distrustful of the government but when a new face comes around and changes the rhetoric they don't think twice? If McCain yelled i'm going to change our economy by investing in a green new deal, as my brother puts it, people would yell the Reupblicans sold their soul to the devil. It's not going to work. And they'd be right. It's not going to work.

Mom: Let the meat rest for five minutes.
Q: Why?
Mom: Because Alton Brown says so, and so says everyone who's cooking you like: you father's mother, her mother, my mother's mother, and Mrs. Smith next door. [This "because it tastes good" lecture may have predated cable TV].

• You are most likely to live in a county that was evenly divided Bush/Kerry
• The chances that you live in a county that went +5% for Bush or Kerry are about even
• If you live in a county that went +15% for Bush or Kerry the odds are that they went for Bush
• If you live in a county that went +30% for Bush or Kerry the odds are that they went for Kerry

Neither party can lose much because they each have a fat middle. Karl Rove's strategy of "turnout, turnout, turnout" reflects that middle. Here is another approximation [both graphs I made after the 2004 election]

Note that the fat on the left goes more left and the fat segment on the right is tilted towards the middle. The area under the blue line (left bump and right bump) is total population and is almost exactly equal - just like the election. The raw data I got from USA Today in 2004 and can be found here.

That is all a long way of asking "how many Communist mentors are too many?" with regards to Barack Obama. The middle is thin for both Republicans and Democrats so Obama loses more by tracking right than McCain loses by tracking left and Barack has been trying to dance on that line. Unfortunately for him most living voters don't like Communists and he has a raft of them: Ayers and Trinity church are just the best reported pair. Obama wins fewer voters by tacking right than McCain does by tacking left.

NB, I can't stand either of them for different reasons, FWIW. Though I do find it easy to dislike the guy who has Communist friends more.