To the ISPCS. Probably no posting until tonight.
[Late evening update]
Well, I made it, and made it to a great reception sponsored by Spaceport Sweden, with Absolut, whole salmon, herring, shrimp, cheese, and other healthy food. No Swedish bikini parachute team, but most of the spaceport people were women.
Off to bed now, for a busy symposium tomorrow.
Why is he playing favorites in Texas?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we’d have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe “stimulus” wouldn’t be such a dirty word.
To quote the president in another context, you’d think they would be thanking him, but I’ll bet those ingrate Texan hicks won’t even vote for him in 2012.
[Tagged as “Satire” because I’ve never created a “Sarcasm” category. Maybe I should.]
Al?
The crazy 2004 and 2005 seasons were supposed to be the new normal. Pretend scientists like Al Gore said global warming was here, and we had better listen to him because he had all the answers. People pay Al Gore $200,000 to speak, but that doesn’t mean he knows anything.
I hope this is another bubble. We’d be better off paying him that much not to speak.
A plaintive letter from a law-school student. Unfortunately, universities are as immune to lawsuits for fraud as politicians are.
I find it amusing that the morons who drafted up the health-care deform couldn’t find room, in over 2000 pages, for a severability clause.
For those interested in Big Televen pigskin talk, I’m publishing a chat with the inimitable Iowahawk. I am [You] (though not in the Christine O’Donnell sense].
…and the unpersuaded yahoos:
…maybe that is what defines an elite: the lip-curled reproach to anything that has come before this privileged and smug generation—tradition, faith, heroic self-denial—and the illusion that their disdain is somehow a broader and more enlightened “love.”
For the most part, the “yahoo” non-elites do not begrudge the gentry their private jets, their private clubs, and their private schools. They do, however, begrudge them the superior dismissal of their values, and the constant attempts to control how others get to live their lives.
The ineducable masses begrudge the hectoring about their taste for “gas guzzlers,” from people who ride in limos. They dislike being dismissed as “provincial” or “parochial” by people who only associate with others of the same neighborhood and mindset. They are weary of being portrayed as less compassionate, less well-meaning, gosh darn it just lesser people because they believe in giving an equal-opportunity hand-up, rather than an impossible-to-sustain equal-hand-out.
The elites don’t want to be called “elite.” But they reinforce the perception with every tax-shelter they pursue, every privilege they grasp, every tax bill they can’t be bothered to pay until they’re forced to, and when they pretend that middle-class wages are undertaxed, greedy, ignoble, selfish, and unfair.
I wouldn’t mind quite so much if they were really, you know, elite, instead of someone who managed to get a piece of paper from Harvard or Yale.
OK, so the president is out campaigning, and part of his stump speech is a claim (with absolutely no evidence) that the US Chamber of Commerce is breaking the law. So can someone explain to me why our fearless Attorney General Holder hasn’t opened up an investigation?
…and Islam:
During a March 2009 interview with the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, Wilders had earlier rejected the notion he “hates Muslims,” while providing a frank characterization of the totalitarian nature of Islam:
I have nothing against the people. I don’t hate Muslims. But Islam is a totalitarian ideology. It rules every aspect of life — economics, family law, whatever. It has religious symbols, it has a God, it has a book — but it’s not a religion. It can be compared with totalitarian ideologies like Communism or fascism. There is no country where Islam is dominant where you have a real democracy, a real separation between church and state. Islam is totally contrary to our values.
By making this latter claim, Wilders shattered a corrosive modern taboo, enforced rigidly and without forgiveness by cultural relativist politicians and government bureaucrats as well as influential “savants” in media, academia, and religion.
But Wilders’ assessment not only comports with scholarly observations made (primarily) before the advent of the postmodern Western scourge of cultural relativism, it is supported by contemporary hard polling data from 2006 -2007, and a more recent follow-up reported February 25, 2009. At present, overwhelming Muslim majorities — i.e., better than two-thirds (see the weighted average calculated here) of a well-conducted survey of the world’s most significant and populous Arab and non-Arab Muslim countries — want these immoderate outcomes: “strict application” of Shari’a, Islamic law, and a global caliphate.
We keep our head in the sand (or in the case of Joy Behar and Whoopie, up our fundament) at our peril.
In the banking profession and the government. We already knew that both administrations were lawless when it came to immigration and voting-rights enforcement. Why should this be any different?