Quotulatiousness

June 23, 2010

Monty’s summer job recommendations

Filed under: Economics, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me a link to Monty’s “Wednesday Financial Briefing”, which includes some job advice for students:

If you’re a high-schooler looking for a summer job, your best bet looks to be sex slavery, murder-for-hire, selling your blood, or Occult Apprentice to a Master of the Dark Arts. (Teens who have already sold their souls for liquor, sex, or illegal drugs need not apply to the Dark Arts Guild. Teens will be required to promise their souls in exchange for a Guild Card.)

Monty also thinks that Barack Obama will have a noteworthy spot in the histories:

I always thought that Jimmy Carter would remain the gold standard for modern Presidential incompetence and futility. But Barack Obama, the comback kid, has already usurped Jimmah’s spot a mere two years into his term. What wonders still await us as the remainder of Bammer’s term plays out? And Bammer is a young man; he has a great shot at being the worst former President as well, a title also held by the lamentable Mr. Carter.

June 22, 2010

QotD: He bestrides the G8 like a Colossus

Filed under: Cancon, France, Germany, Italy, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

. . . things are pretty bad in the mother country when a self-described “Whig” calls Stephen Harper “a magnificent fiscal conservative.” It’s like calling Gordon Brown “a brilliant and charismatic leader,” or Jean Chretien “a visionary and articulate statesman.” In politics, at least practical politics, all truth is relative.

Compared to most G8 leaders Stephen Harper does look like a genius. This is, as you’ve guessed, damning by the faintest of praise. Barack Obama is an avowed socialist, who described his one real job in the private sector as working “behind enemy lines.” Japan has been governed by a series of interchangeable non-entities for the better part of the last decade. In most of Europe, and certainly the English speaking world, Silvio Berlusconi would be awaiting sentencing. Angela Merkel rivals Helmut Schmidt in the visionary department. Sarko is a living embodiment of every mistake the French have made since Diem Bien Phu: A domestic policy summed up by the quintessentially French term “dirigiste,” and a foreign policy consisting of German guilty tripping and sophomore anti-Americanism. If Stephen Harper looks taller than others, it is because he is standing on the shoulders of midgets.

Publius, “Well, at least someone likes him…”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2010-06-21

June 18, 2010

A “new chapter in U.S. history”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Ron Hart congratulates President Obama for delivering on his promised change:

We are so in debt to China that President Obama had to visit their president in his first year in office. It was an important meeting between the most powerful communist leader in the world and the president of China.

Obama is so popular in China that a nightclub named after him opened in Beijing. In keeping with the Obama theme, the club opened with $10 trillion in debt. It will, hopefully, close in just four years with $15 trillion in debt and no apologies to its “hope-based” investors.

[. . .]

To sum up our situation just short of two years into this Obamanation of an administration: Our debt is much higher, an unwanted ObamaCare bill that will cost us at least $2 trillion more than predicted was rammed through Congress, more troops are in Afghanistan, unemployment is much higher even after a union handout “stimulus” bill, and the biggest tax increase in American history is coming in 2011. So yes, Mr. President, technically I guess you can say you have brought about “change.”

As for your assertion, Mr. Obama, that you are going to usher in a “new chapter in U.S. history,” it looks like you will make good on that too. Unfortunately, it will be Chapter 11.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord.

May 12, 2010

When politics takes on religious attributes

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:48

Frequent commenter Lickmuffin sent this link, discussing some interesting notions from the 2008 US presidential campaign:

Cast your mind back to January 2009, when Barack Obama became the president of the United States amid much rejoicing. The hosannas — covering the inauguration was “the honor of our lifetimes,” said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews — by then seemed unsurprising. Over the course of a long campaign, hyperbolic rhetoric had become commonplace, so much so that online wags had started calling Obama “the One” — a reference to the spate of recent science-fiction movies, especially The Matrix, that used that term to designate a messiah.

It all seems so long ago now, as one contemplates President Obama’s plummeting approval ratings and a suddenly resurgent Republican Party. Yet it’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.

May 1, 2010

Press corps afraid to criticize White House for fear of “retaliation”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:10

Ah, the brave and intrepid journalists in the White House beat — are afraid to actually criticize the President for fear of losing access:

Just think about that for a minute. National political reporters are furious over various White House practices involving transparency and information control, but are unwilling to say so for attribution due to fear of “retaliation,” instead insisting on hiding behind a wall of anonymity (which Politico, needless to say, happily provides). Isn’t that a rather serious problem: that the White House press corps is afraid to criticize the President and the White House for fear of losing access and suffering other forms of retribution? What does that say about their “journalism”? It’s the flip side of those White House reporters who need the good graces of Obama aides for their behind-the-scenes books and thus desperately do their bidding: what kind of reporter covering the White House would possibly admit that they’re afraid to say anything with their names attached that might anger the President and his aides? How could you possibly be a minimally credible White House reporter if you have that fear? Doesn’t that unwillingness rather obviously render their reporting worthless?

April 30, 2010

QotD: A notable unintended consequence

Filed under: Economics, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Hardly a day seems to go by nowadays without somebody with approximately the same kind of political attitude as me scratching his head, publicly, in writing, about President Obama’s bafflingly sensible space policy, which sticks out like a healthy thumb in an otherwise horribly mutilated hand of policies.

Critics are disturbed by the large and unprecedented role Mr. Obama sees for the private sector in space exploration. For a president who is often accused of being a socialist, he has more faith in the ingenuity of the private sector than his detractors do.

Brian Micklethwait, “On the unintended consequences of President Obama”, Samizdata, 2010-04-28

April 26, 2010

P.J. O’Rourke definitely wasn’t an “A” student

Filed under: Education, Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

At least, based on his apparent contempt for “A” students:

America has made the mistake of letting the A student run things. It was A students who briefly took over the business world during the period of derivatives, credit swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. We’re still reeling from the effects. This is why good businessmen have always adhered to the maxim: “A students work for B students.” Or, as a businessman friend of mine put it, “B students work for C students — A students teach.”

It was a bunch of A students at the Defense Department who planned the syllabus for the Iraq war, and to hell with what happened to the Iraqi Class of ’03 after they’d graduated from Shock and Awe.

The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15 we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.

Now there’s health care reform — just the kind of thing that would earn an A on a term paper from that twerp of a grad student who teaches Econ 101.

Why are A students so hateful? I’m sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting that they’re smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement? They are. You can look it up (if you have a fancy education the way our betters do and know what the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is). “Smart” has its root in the Old English word for being a pain. The adjective has eight other principal definitions ranging from “brisk” to “fashionable” to “neat.” Only two definitions indicate cleverness — smart as in “clever in talk” and smart as in “clever in looking after one’s own interests.” Don’t get smart with me.

Whole piece here.

April 23, 2010

Senator McCain’s latest assault on “due process”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Whenever I think badly of President Obama (which is a pretty regular event), I have to remind myself that his main opponent in the 2008 US presidential campaign would have been even worse on civil liberties:

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) has introduced a bill that would allow the President to imprison an unlimited number of American citizens (as well as foreigners) indefinitely without trial. Known as The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, or S. 3081, the bill authorizes the President to deny a detainee a trial by jury simply by designating that person an “enemy belligerent.”

Even better, should someone manage to be released, the notion of “return to the battlefield” apparently includes exercising your freedom of speech:

[T]he U.S. military has officially classified many former Guantanamo detainees, such as England’s Tipton Three, as having “returned to the battlefield” for merely granting an interview for the movie The Road to Guantanamo. Another five innocent Uighur (Ethnic Turkish Muslims from China) detainees had been listed as having “returned to the battlefield” after their release because their lawyer had written an op-ed protesting their prolonged detention without trial after they had been mistakenly picked up by a greedy bounty hunter. Writing an opinion or speaking an opinion against the party in power in Washington can — and already has — made some people “enemy belligerents.”

So, thank goodness Senator McCain didn’t become president, even if it means putting up with Barack Obama for at least four years . . .

April 15, 2010

A very disturbing notion

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

The Cato Institute’s Richard W. Rahn speculates about some very disturbing notions:

Politicians in developed countries have found that their citizens often get upset when inflation reaches high levels and then tend to vote out the culprits. You may recall that the less-than-astute Jimmy Carter lost his re-election campaign, in part, because inflation at one point reached 14 percent and the prime interest rate hit 21 percent.

An insightful European banker suggested to me over breakfast a couple of weeks ago that the European political class would use selective expropriation, rather than inflation, to avoid paying back all of the debt. The way this would be done would be that the political leaders would announce they would only pay back those bonds with full interest that were held by labor unions and other “politically correct” interest groups but not the bonds held by “greedy bankers” and rich people. Maturities would be extended and promised interest rates lowered – effectively reducing the value of the bonds.

My initial reaction was that, yes, such a selective expropriation might work in Europe, but not in the United States. As I thought more about it, however, looked at what was happening and heard President Obama’s rhetoric attacking “greedy” bankers and insurance companies, I began to think that not only was my European friend right about Europe, but his scenario was equally valid here.

The Obama administration has already indicated that it’s quite comfortable with protecting unions at the expense of other contracting parties (in the Government Motors case, at the very least), so it’s not much of a stretch to see this as a possibility in larger matters.

April 14, 2010

Poll shows Obama would beat Ron Paul . . . by 1%

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:18

Rasmussen Reports has an amusing poll of voting intentions for 2012 if Barack Obama faced Ron Paul:

Election 2012: Barack Obama 42%, Ron Paul 41%

Pit maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul against President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up, and the race is — virtually dead even.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

Ask the Political Class, though, and it’s a blowout. While 58% of Mainstream voters favor Paul, 95% of the Political Class vote for Obama.

But Republican voters also have decidedly mixed feelings about Paul, who has been an outspoken critic of the party establishment.

Obama earns 79% support from Democrats, but Paul gets just 66% of GOP votes. Voters not affiliated with either major party give Paul a 47% to 28% edge over the president.

Paul, a anti-big government libertarian who engenders unusually strong feelings among his supporters, was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But he continues to have a solid following, especially in the growing Tea Party movement.

Frank J. on saving Guam

Filed under: Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Frank J. takes a moment to cast an admiring glance towards one of the best and brightest politicians in the world today:

Could Guam capsize? This is not a question a lot of people would think to ask. People just go about their little lives, eating Cheetos, watching Jersey Shore, and never once stopping to think what would happen if a U.S. territory flipped over in the water.

Guam is home to an estimated 178,000 people, and if they and all their homes were thrown into the ocean, it would be one of the greatest disasters in history. There would be loss of life, destruction of property, and permanent damage to the ocean’s ecology. This is a potentially huge problem, but most people are too busy with their new iPads to give it even simple consideration.

[. . .]

The average citizen probably wouldn’t have even studied the issue, other than maybe looking Guam up on Wikipedia, seeing its president has the odd name of “Barack Obama,” and dismissing it as an enemy Muslim nation. But Representative Hank Johnson, who we can only assume is the smartest person out of the more than 600,000 people in his district in Georgia, was focused enough to have concerns about Guam capsizing and has potentially saved thousands of lives. They might name a street after him.

You can almost hear the “Real Men of Genius” theme music playing, can’t you?

April 13, 2010

Caption contest

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:25


Wonder what’s really being communicated here . . .

March 23, 2010

QotD: The future of Obamacare

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:14

There will be court challenges to Obamacare but I doubt if they will be entirely successful. I further find it unlikely that the GOP, if they achieve majority status again, will be able to repeal it. Perhaps a combination of the two but that may be the most unlikely scenario at all.

Prediction? In five years, the Republican party will be embracing Obamacare and will be running on a platform that boasts they are the best party to manage it efficiently.

Rick Moran, “NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE REFORM DONE”, Right Wing Nuthouse, 2010-03-22

March 14, 2010

Far from supporting Britain, US Navy on manouvre with Argentines

Filed under: Americas, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Gordon Brown may have hoped to get some tacit sign of support from the United States in the diplomatic kerfuffle over the Falkland Islands, but if you look closely here, you’ll see which side President Obama prefers:

Courtesy of Strategy Page, that’s the USS Bunker Hill (note the deliberate anti-British choice of name for the ship) and the Argentinian frigate ARA Gomez Roca together for operations recently.

March 4, 2010

Don’t plan on riding those new high speed trains any time soon

Filed under: Economics, Railways, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:03

I’m a train fan, always have been. I’d love to see new rail lines developed, but only where they make economic sense. Most of the proposed HSR lines don’t even come close, and as they point out in the video, they don’t deliver on the other claimed benefits either. I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

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