We Just Want to Lose!

I always wonder if there are any circumstances under which the Democrats would actually hope for success for America. No, probably not. In the unlikely event they ever wanted to take a shot at truth, the "We Just Want to Lose" motto could be a great slogan!

Power Line: Political Progress in Iraq

Political Progress in Iraq

The Democrats' party line is the "surge" in Iraq has failed despite the best efforts of our troops, because the surge has not been followed by the political progress called for in Congress's "benchmarks." Yesterday, one of the benchmarks was achieved as Iraq's Parliament voted to reinstate the ability of former Baathists to serve in government jobs.

Much more progress remains to be made. Still, perhaps one can look forward to the day when the Democrats, out of ammo, unveil a new slogan: "We just want to lose!"

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America's Bull Run

America's Bull Run - US News and World Report

America's Bull Run
Can we keep it going?
By James Pethokoukis
Posted January 4, 2008

What an amazing run. For a quarter century, from late 1982 through 2007, Americans enjoyed a financial and economic boom that was as powerful as it was unexpected. During that generational span, the economy more than doubled in size—rising from $5.2 trillion to $11.7 trillion, adjusted for inflation—as the stock market generated an incredible 2,300 percent total return. Downturns have been blessedly brief. Consider this: Since 1982, the economy has suffered two recessions, in 1990-91 and in 2001, for a total of 16 months. In the previous 25 years, the economy suffered six economic downturns for a painful total of 67 months.

It WAS "unexpected" to the MSM and most Americans, but of course both the economy and the demise of the USSR were EXPECTED to one "simple minded" Ronald Reagan. Maybe Reagan wasn't quite as "out of touch" as all those brilliant lefties in the MSM think.

Wouldn't it be amazing if just a few Americans tried to understand what was different from 1982 on, and WHY we had such an unprecedented run? In 1989 the Japanese Nikkei finished just shy of 39K, and today it sits at around 15k. In the late '80s LOTS of pundits, including Lee Iaccoca, talked of the "foolishness of the Reagan administration", and how the Japanese were buying our country and were going to "take us over". Wouldn't it seem worth understanding why the supposedly brilliant were very wrong and the supposedly foolish were very right?

So what do we do to keep doing what we have done for the last 25 years? Actually it is pretty simple:

1. Keep Competition High - No trade barriers, more deregulation.
   
2. Keep Inflation Low - When prices rise, raise interest faster.
3. Keep Taxes Low - The Reagan tax cuts ignited the growth in '82 and they and every tax cut since have MORE than paid for themselves with growth in the economy. Of course the government has always figured out how to spend even MORE than that growth, but that is hardly the fault of the growing economy for that. Try to harvest that growth with higher taxes, and every indication is that the growth will stop.

So US News covers this. How many of the sheep in the country even think that the economy is GOOD? Not many, all most can talk about is "change". There is no guarnentee inherent in "change" that it will make things better, in fact, unless those doing the changes are VERY clear about what it is that they are doing and WHY, the odds are that the change will be highly negative.

We are hurtling down the road in the economy that Reagan built, and we are likely to hand it over to folks that don't understand anything about what it takes to continue at anything like the current growth we have.

iPhone Article

How The iPhone Blew up The Cell Industry is a good article in Wired about the iPhone development and business change. Since I have one in my pocket, it may be more interesting to me. I remember a time when in order to buy the latest and greatest PC it was $5K or better of more expensive dollars.

No longer. Where the iPhone is built makes very little difference, the design, deals and profit end up with Apple and AT&T. Japan thought that manufacturing excellence was the way to a perpetually growing economyin the '70s and '80s. Their stock market peaked at 39K in the late 80's and it hovers around 15K now. If we would have listened to guys like Lee Iaccoca and most Democrats in the '80s, we could be sitting at 50% of our 89 market highs as well.

The need for continual innovation to provide growth ought to be plain. This article shows a concrete example. The "growth economy" of tomorrow is not going to be the same as the growth economy of today, and the way to predict that economy isn't by listening to government bureaucrats, MSM reporters, or even ivory tower professors. "The way" is the way of creative destruction, and it involves a lot of experiment, failure, and plain old luck. There better be millions of people taking part in that, not any supposedly super brilliant central planners. If they WERE super brilliant, they would realize they weren't as smart as millions of people.

Voting Irregularities in New Hampshire

This link on supposed Diebold voting irregularities. in New Hampshire showed up on a techie net clipping service this AM. I was noticing that the MSM seemed quite incurious about potential irregularities in NH, even though the "polls were very wrong" problem was much larger than the often reported case in '04 where the polls said that Kerry would win. The same thing happened in NH with both the polls right before the election and with the exit polls. Naturally though from an MSM POV it can't be "fraud", because by definition, there is no such thing as a "Bad Democrat" -- it takes a victory by a Republican to arouse suspicion.

While I don't tend to buy into this allegation either, it is interesting that a PRIMARY is especially ripe for voter fraud. Lots of Government employees run the polling places, and they are overwhelmingly Democrat. Easier to pull of fraud if you don't have someone that is likely to be suspicious of your actions looking over your shoulder.

Wireless Power

Click on the Blog link to go off to see a Blog from CES on wireless power. The idea would be that if your whole home (or some rooms) had wireless power, you would not have to remember to plug in your devices anymore, they would "just charge". If it was common enough in public places where you use your devices or commonly are (office, coffee shops, car, airport, etc) then you might be able to forget about charging all together!

The Best Available

Well, McCain has won New Hampshire for the Republicans, so I may have to change my mind on a guy that I never thought I would. He just got in a good line; "We are the makers of history, not it's victims" ... followed up with "we will never surrender, they will" He is right on the shape of the foe we face, that is something way more than I think any other candidate in the race has.

I disagree with him completely on campaign finance and I find him to sometimes be a primping prima donna, BUT, when one stares into the abyss of Obama and Hillary, even a thin reed looks pretty good.

McCain and Lieberman with a huge Democrat majority in both houses of Congress? Maybe there is a chance and the depth of defeat for America that would be assured with Hillary or Obama can be yet averted.

Hope. Something that is very hard for some of us to resist.

Remember Gary Hart and Vince Foster

Powerline has a good post on poor Hillary here.
It is pretty funny to see Slick talking about media bias in Obama's favor. Is he right? Sure, the MSM loves Obama big time and they haven't said a thing critical about him. Of course the front-running Dem is pretty much always the love of the MSM, it is just that it looks different to Slick when he isn't in that roll for a change.

I think folks need to remember Gary Hart. Does anyone really think that there is any limit to what the Clintons will do to gain power? Osama Obama has no doubt been fully probed by the Clinton machine and is due to have his insides displayed for all to see. Of course maybe he is clean, but what difference would that make? There weren't any smoking gun Bush National Guard memos either, but that didn't prevent CBS from making them up out of thin air. If it hadn't been for some Bloggers and talk radio, they would have gotten away with it too. Only the unimaginative or the naive think you actually have to do anything wrong to be "convicted" in the court of public opinion when you have the MSM and folks like the Clinton's out there.

Sex, drugs, theft, cheating of one sort or another, felony crime, etc-real or created, it really makes no difference. The MSM will be willing to let the Clinton's stick the knife in covertly, and Bloggers on the left have no interest in truth or standards, only gaining power. We still don't know exactly who ran the DWI op on Bush 3 days before the election in 2K, and of course THAT wasn't a "dirty trick" anyway because the target was a Republican. Nope, only Republican's do "dirty tricks"-or "Willie Horton" or "Swift Boating". Those Dems run a really clean show!

How many times has Bush been accused of taking military action for political gain? It is so common that it hardly bears repeating. How times have changed from the days when Slick did the obvious "wag the dog" attacks on the aspirin factory and camel butts when the "stain" surfaced and then the attack on Saddam that delayed the impeachment hearings. Naturally, we only got REAMS of ink about how "partisanship stops at the waters edge", and how it would be a cynically evil day for American politics if anyone thought that Slick had ANY thoughts of "wagging the dog". Sure, nobody should ever think ill of old Wandering Willie, but there is NO PROBLEM in claiming "lies, political calculation, blood for oil, etc" every other day against Bush. The slight difference is what it means for the sheep to think there is an "unbiased media". I wonder what it was that suddenly made politics NOT "stop at the waters edge", and for it NOT to be "horribly cynical" to make horrible accusations about a President as common as the weather? Well, last I checked, Bush is a Republican.

Can I prove that Billy C used the US military for political purposes? Of course not, but William of Occam long ago thought that simple explanations were best. Can anyone prove that Bush did Iraq, Afghanistan, 9/11 or whatever for "political purposes"? No, of course not, or successful impeachment proceedings would be under way. The Dems are in power in both houses and Republicans mostly still have some allegiance to truth. They (as would I) join completely in the impeachment of Bush if ANY of the miliatry actions were launched for political purposes. In fact, in my book, there is no greater crime possible than for a Commander In Chief to put soldiers sworn to defend their country in harms way for personal political gain.

I argue that the circumstances for Slick taking military action TWICE in the manner he did when he did CRY OUT for an investigation and understanding of why he took those actions at those specific points. How much arm chair psychology have we had to listen to about the relation between Bush and his Dad relative to Iraq, but how little have he had to listen to on children of alcoholics (Billy C) pushing limits beyond the pale to "prove that they can control it all". Clinton all but slapped us in the face with the OBVIOUS explanation for why he took the actions he took when he took them, but the sheep refused to note the obvious, and the Republicans refused to do the investigation those actions required. So, now we will never know, but the Clinton's are still on the loose. I maintain that we ought to be very strongly suspicious that the Clinton's have no moral limit on actions they will take to get what they want.

"No limit" means just what it says. During the Clinton years the right wing "Back Helicopter" conspiracy folks ran wild over Foster, Ron Brown, the secret service plane crashing outside Jackson Hole and a HOST of other theories where the Clintons' may have killed one or more people. Of course, the MSM was always as incurious about that as they are about who leaked the DWI stuff 3 days before the 2k election, why Joe Wilson (Plame) didn't have an NDA that prevented him from writing magazine articles, or the facts of the Juanita Brodderick rape charge against Willy C..

I think the secret service is well advised to step up security on Obama, and while they do it they ought to remember that Hill-Billy have some understanding of their operational profile.

McGovern for Impeachment

Here is an important piece of news - George McGovern thinks that Bush and Chaney ought to be impeached. One thing about the old lefties, their anger just gets deeper as they get older and once a sore loser I guess always a sore loser. Bush Sr may not have much in taste in trying to be friendly with Slick Willie, but at least he doesn't waste his days running around as a sore loser. One would hope that there was a statute of limitations on acting like 5 year old, but I guess that for old lefties that is way too much to ask. Look at Jimmuh Carter.

I suppose when the MSM is happy to give your rantings billing and treat you sympathetically, it makes you feel like what you have to say is sensible. It is pretty clear that from the POV of the left that democracy is just plain bogus. Congress gets a chance to vote on the war in fall of '02, there is an off year election and the Republicans pick up seats, 80%+ of the people support going into Iraq in '03. What is it that would make going to war "legal"? What did they "lie" to the American people about?

The left seems to have a lot of trouble with "what everyone thought in advance wasn't proven" (as in all intelligence services from every country, the UN, the US Congress, the MSM, etc was SURE that Saddam had WMD, but we didn't find them) and "a lie". For a LIE, one has to KNOW the truth (as in, "I didn't have sex with that woman" -- where unless you have sex with so many women at the office that you just forgot, it is assumed that you DO know, so you can lie, one has to know the truth to lie).

It is pretty much impossible to "lie about the future". It is the PAST that mortal non-omniscient humans can lie about. Effectively that means that it is McGovern and all those that claim that "Bush Lied" who are ACTUALLY lying. Since what they are talking about is in the past, they know the truth but continue to lie about it because they like the sound of "Bush lied". For the left, the idea that they would even care about their OWN truthfulness is absurd, since once one cares nothing for consistency, the idea of "truth" is nonsense in all cases. They know that people with values DO care however, so their constant claims of "Bush lied" have some effect there.

For the evil Bush, their standard of truth is that that he is supposed to predict the future correctly or he is "lying". For Slick Willie, I'm not sure the MSM would find it possible to establish that he was lying under any circumstance. Which is quite a statement, because if his lips are moving, it is certain he is lying.

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar

Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes, by Thomas Cathcart and & Daniel Klein.

One of the joys of having grown children is that sometimes they can purchase you gifts that are really fun, such is the case with this witty, very funny and actually quite educational little book on exploration of philosophy through jokes. The essence of the book is that many jokes have as their basis a philosophical problem being exposed in a whimsical way-as non-philosophers, we are just usually unaware of the potential deeper thought behind what makes it funny.

There are way too many to pick from here, but I'll just do a couple of examples to give a flavor. Anyone that enjoys jokes will like the book, one that has any interest at all in thought will love it.

"An irishman walks into a bar and orders 3 pints and proceeds to drink them down by taking a sip from each one in turn until they are gone. He then orders 3 more, and the bartender says, "You know, they would be less likely to go flat if you bought them one at a time".

The man says, "Yeah, I know that but I have two brothers, one in the States and one in Australia. When we went our separate ways, we promised we would drink this way in memory of the days we drank together. Each of these is for one of my brothers and and the third is for me."

The bartender is touched and the guy becomes a regular at the bar and always orders the same way.

One day he comes in and only orders two pints. The other regulars notice and silence falls over the bar. When he comes to the bar for his 2nd round, the bartender offers his condolences.

The Irishman responds, "Oh, no, everyone's fine. I just joined the Mormon Church, and I had to quit drinking."

The following joke shows the difficulty of reasoning from a false premise:

"An old cowboy is sitting at a bar and a young lady comes in and sits down beside him. She asks him "Are you a real cowboy"?

He replies, "Well, Ive spent my whole life on the ranch herding cattle, mending fences and branding calves, so I guess I am."

She says, "Well, I'm a lesbian. I spend my whole day thinking about women. As soon as I get up in the morning I think about women. When I shower or watch TV, everything seems to make me think about women."

A little later, a couple comes in and sits down next to the old cowboy and asks him, "Are you a real cowboy"?

He replies, "I always thought I was, but I just found out I'm a lesbian".

Ok, so this isn't a very good "summary", but I have to do one more since readers of this Blog know that I like to poke fun at empiricists.

"A man is worried that his wife is losing his hearing so he consults a doctor. The doctor suggest that he try a simple at home test on her: Stand behind her and ask her a question, first from 20 feet away, then from ten feet, and finally right behind her.

So the man goes home and sees his wife cooking facing the stove. From the door he asks, "What's for dinner tonight?", no answer.

Ten feet behind her he asks, "What's for dinner tonight?" Still no answer.
Finally, right behind her he says, "What's for dinner tonight?"

His wife turns around and says, "For the third time-chicken!"

I love this one  -- replace the man by "human perception" and one sees the limits of empiricism.

Extremely fun book and one that must be read to be appreciated.

Bearing Arms

The Constitution pretty clearly states that we have the right to bear arms, but at least here in MN there is already a lot of paperwork that includes a lot of information to the government involved. I wonder why the MSM and the left finds  the government listening to a cell call to a known terrorist number to be "a chilling infringement of constitutional rights", where the government gathering all kinds of data on a law abiding citizen exercising a specific constitutional right to be just fine? In fact, I strongly suspect that when the Democrats move to restrict that right even more in '09 or so, the MSM and the left won't find that "chilling" either. We decided that it was time to arm while the arming was good. 

Anyway, we now have a Beretta Tomcat .32 cal and a Springfield XD 9mm in the family arsenal. We picked up the 9mm today, and since it was warm we went out to the range and did some shooting. I was really surprised at all the handguns being shot out there today. This was the last of this model that they had at the local gun-shop, and when talking over at Cabella's as we were getting the Beretta, they said that they had broke all records for handgun sales in '07. 

The 9mm Springfield is a gun that puts an instant smile on your face. At 25', the first clip easily and comfortably all ended up in the plate, and it just got better from there on in. It is an extremely sweet little weapon with a 14 shot clip as one of the clips included. The gun is reasonably compact and light, but enough size and heft to make the 9mm recoil extremely manageable. I'm thankful that a buddy of mine let me shoot his .40 cal Springfield so that I was familiar with the piece, and a conversation with an ex-Marine Gunnery Instructor that works at the shop part time convinced me that 9mm was just fine for any potential defensive use that I might ever have for it. It is a gun that inspires instant confidence that rounds can be placed where you want them to go, it has a lot of capacity, 9mm ammo is relatively cheap and easy to get and the Springfield double safety system is hard to argue with. A great gun.

The Beretta .32 takes a little more getting used to. Ours has a Crimson Trace laser grip that is a nice addition to a weapon that may be used for self defense. Since the gun is smaller and lighter it is harder to shoot accurately, but after putting 100 rounds through it, my wife was able to shoot a couple of very nice groups at 25' as you can see from the picture. The potential to carry it in a purse or pocket much is of course the advantage to the small size and light weight.

I've only shot handguns a couple of times in the past and was surprised by how much fun these were (especially the 9mm). Since MN is a Concealed Carry state, we planning to avail ourselves of that right before the chance is passed forever. I still remember how crime was increasing rapidly in the 60's and 70's. I would hope that we would not return to those days (or worse), but one of the things that the left likes to do is remove the freedoms of law abiding citizens while reducing penalties for criminals and those kinds of policies often have predictable and unfortunate results. No doubt they will try to remove the rights of existing permit holders as well, but there is some chance that they might compromise at some "grandfather clause" for at least awhile.

In any case, it was a fun day and I'll have something else to do with my "spare time" as the weather warms this spring.

16 Year Itch

Great little Michael Barone analysis from the WSJ. I think the part in red is especially important. The median voter today doesn't know what bad times are, so is unafraid of them. Those of us who saw the '70s didn't even see how bad things could be after 8 years of FDR in the late '30s. WWIII might look like a "good idea" after 8+ years of Obama or Hillary, but for those for whom "bad times" are the "recessions" of 90-91 and 2000-2001, the definition of "bad" is certainly nothing to even consider. May as well "just take a chance".

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

My thought is that, over a period of 16 years, there is enough turnover in the electorate to stimulate an itch that produces a willingness to take a chance on something new.

Over time, the median-age voter in American elections has been about 45 years old. This means that the median-age voter in 1976 was born around 1931--old enough to have experienced post-World War II prosperity and foreign policy success, and then to have been disgusted by Vietnam and Watergate.

The median-age voter in 1992 was born around 1947 (the same year as Dan Quayle and Hillary Clinton, one year after Messrs. Clinton and Bush, one year before Mr. Gore). These voters came of age in the culture wars of the 1960s. They experienced stagflation and gas lines of the 1970s, and the prosperity and foreign policy successes of the 1980s. Mr. Clinton persuaded these voters to take a chance on change by promising not to radically alter policy. They rebuked him when he tried to break that promise, then for 14 years remained closely divided along culture lines as if the '60s never ended.

The median-age voter in 2008 was born around 1963, so he or she missed out on the culture wars of the '60s, and on the economic disasters and foreign policy reverses of the 1970s. These voters have experienced low-inflation economic growth something like 95% of their adult lives--something true of no other generation in history. They are weary of the cultural polarization of our politics, relatively unconcerned about the downside risks of big government programs, and largely unaware of America's historic foreign policy successes. They are ready, it seems, to take a chance on an outside-the-system candidate.

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The Laws of Simplicity

The subject book by John Maeda is a little book about a subject that is very important at the start of the 21st century. More about the subject can be found at www.LawsOfSimplicity.com.

The ten laws are:

1. Reduce - The simplest way to simplify
   
2. Organize - Makes more appear as less
   
3. Time - Saving time feels simpler
4. Learn - Knowledge simplifies all things
5. Differences - Simplicity and Complexity need each other (Wave function)
6. Context - What is peripheral is important
7. Emotion - More is better
8. Trust - You must trust the simplification
9. Failure - As in learning that it can't all be simpler
10. The One - Subtract the Obvious, add the Meaningful.
    

There are also three actions to be used to achieve these laws:

SHE: Shrink, Hide, Embody
BRAIN: Basics, Repeat, Avoid, Inspire, Never
SLIP: Sort, Label, Prioritize

The example of the Apple iPod is used very frequently throughout the book, and as a fairly recent convert to the "Apple Kool-aide", I agree that it is an excellent object lesson in the miracle of simplicity in the modern world. I need to get a Blog out on the Apple Experience here very soon, and when I do, I hope to link it.

The copy of this book that I read was borrowed from the company library, but my own copy is on order to be marked up, further understood and probably re-blogged.

Maybe I'm an Edwards Guy?

John Edwards Vows To End All Bad Things By 2011

Who could possibly be against ending all bad things? Only some nasty negative Republican!

Blocking Bush

Senate holds 12-second session to block Bush

This has been reported on CNN pretty much every day over the holiday season. AGAIN, if this was actually how actions by BOTH SIDES would be reported, I'd have no problem with it with the exception of the use of "Bush" vs "The President".

To report this correctly, one either says "Senate DEMOCRATS block Bush" or "Senate blocks PRESIDENT". The use of "Senate" takes the taint of "partisanship" out of it, and since Bush has low opinion numbers, the MSM can see that it will generally be seen as a "good action". The idea of the news ought to be to tell us what is happening, NOT to tell us what to think about it.

It is rather amazing how "partisanship" seems to have become a thing of the past in '07 as far as the MSM is concerned, with the only exception being a Senate filibuster. One would think that blocking recess appointments could be seen as unusual, and at least my search of the web leads me to believe it may be HISTORIC! I couldn't find any other examples of it being done! One might draw the conclusion that we have reached new high water mark for partisanship and that "historic levels of partisanship" would be newsworthy? Oops, I guess it can't be that, because Democrats are doing it!

Stumbling on Happiness

One of the foolish pop psychological books that I tend to enjoy for no particularly rational reason. Human nature is a slippery item, yet for some reason Mooses seem to be fascinated with it!

"Human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed." Note though that "control" isn't as simple as one might expect-how one achieves "control" may be by having a high position, making a lot of money or even being an invalid. Of course none of us ACTUALLY have control but, but humans are generally pretty good at being able to stay in an illusion that they like.

Unfortunately, it turns out that this idea that we ought to "steer our own boat" isn't correct for a lot of different reasons. One of the reasons is that we tend to recall and rely on unusual instances. "Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire (or might admire) doesn't always pay clear dividends".

Another reason is that we have a huge tendency to misconstrue how we will feel about regret of action vs regret of inaction. "Studies show that about 9 out of 10 people expect to feel more regret when they foolishly switch stocks than when they foolishly fail to switch stocks, because most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. But studies also show that 9 out of 10 people are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret the things they did."

"Because we do not realize that our psychological immune systems can rationalize an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice, we hedge oru best when we should blunder forward." A piece of wisdom that has been apt for thousands of years, but one which is hard to truely learn.

One of the more memorable parts of the book was a discussion of Siamese twins. Society and the rest of us are of course "absolutely certain" that Siamese twins CAN'T be happy, so it is worth even huge risks to separate them. However (and rather disconcertingly), Siamese Twins that reached maturity universally think the their condition is BETTER and they don't want to be separated! To which we respond "they don't really understand what it means to be happy".

The book has a sort of chilling little paragraph: "If they haven't had our experiences, then we haven't had theirs either, and it is entirely possible that WE are the ones with the "squished language"-that when we say we are overjoyed, we have no idea what they are talking about since we have never experienced the companionate love, the blissful union, the unadulterated agape that Lori and Reba (the example twins) have." The "squished language" is a reference to "happiness being relative"-the idea that if you experience more happiness, you get a new "happiness set point".

Ah yes, a perspective that doesn't fit into what our "collective consciousness" thinks. IS there any human "collective understanding"? There is a "bee collective", but as a Moose I'd like to point out that humans are not a herd (or hive) creature. Maybe "individual" (or possibly Siamese Twin, or agape heterosexual pair) is "as good as it gets" as defined by either God, or 100's of millions of years of evolution. Who would know? Certainly not a scientist since "happiness" is an irreducible experience of INDIVIDUAL consciousness-so not even a lefty collectivist can decree what happiness is! It may be politically incorrect, or possibly even RELIGIOUS!

I enjoyed the book. I'm not sure that we really have the capacity to operate on meta-knowledge about our human makeup, but it is fun to acquire anyway.