Sunday, November 27, 2011

Steyn: More More More

When it comes to spending and stimulus and entitlements and agencies and regulations and bureaucrats, “More more more / How do you like it?” remains the way to bet.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Lileks on the Kindle Fire

Odds Are, You Probably Don't Exist

Excellent chart.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land.
~Jon Stewart


Samoan rugby manager fined 100 pigs for losing.

Most commercial turkeys are conceived via artificial insemination. (insert turkey baster comment here)

The Science of Sarcasm.

Baconlube.

What Drives Death Valley’s Roving Rocks?

Heh

Thanksgiving as a kid vs. Thanksgiving as an adult.

86 year old man deep fries own leg

Or, as he calls it, his drumstick.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Ogden Nash - The Common Cold

Go hang yourself, you old M.D.!
You shall not sneer at me.
Pick up your hat and stethoscope,
Go wash your mouth with laundry soap;
I contemplate a joy exquisite
I'm not paying you for your visit.
I did not call you to be told
My malady is a common cold.

By pounding brow and swollen lip;
By fever's hot and scaly grip;
By those two red redundant eyes
That weep like woeful April skies;
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff;
By handkerchief after handkerchief;
This cold you wave away as naught
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught!

Give ear, you scientific fossil!
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal;
The Cold of which researchers dream,
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme.
This honored system humbly holds
The Super-cold to end all colds;
The Cold Crusading for Democracy;
The Führer of the Streptococcracy.

Bacilli swarm within my portals
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals,
But bred by scientists wise and hoary
In some Olympic laboratory;
Bacteria as large as mice,
With feet of fire and heads of ice
Who never interrupt for slumber
Their stamping elephantine rumba.

A common cold, gadzooks, forsooth!
Ah, yes. And Lincoln was jostled by Booth;
Don Juan was a budding gallant,
And Shakespeare's plays show signs of talent;
The Arctic winter is fairly coolish,
And your diagnosis is fairly foolish.
Oh what a derision history holds
For the man who belittled the Cold of Colds!

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Friday, November 18, 2011

Must read: Hedge Broker Shuts Down Firm With Chilling Letter About the Market

Going Galt post MF Global:  A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Headline of the day

Brave Grandma Arrests Robber With His Penis.

Bonus - ad with Ben Bernake's picture next to article makes it look as if he's the subject of the article.

142 years ago today, the Suez Canal opened

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
~Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) ("The Ballad of East and West," stanza 1)

In order to succeed, one must have, like Lesseps, a devil's determination and ardor to succeed that doesn't know fatigue or obstacles. By the grace of God, it is Lesseps who will marry the two seas.
~Maxime du Camp (1822-1894) (Souvenirs littéraires, p. 103)

If M. de Lesseps had not been a man of the stuff and stamp of which all great inventors are made, if he had not toiled on to the attainment of his end in spite of every hindrance, the Suez Canal would now exist only on paper. . . The opening of the new water highway between the East and West will mark an era in the annals of humanity. . .
~The Daily Telegraph, London, 26 August 1869

The Suez Canal was the greatest feat of organization and engineering of its day, and it served, for a brief moment, as a symbol of all that was right in the world. It was created by dreams and by meticulous organization, by brilliant engineers and by workers looking for their next meal. And then, once the fireworks had faded, the canal began to fade as well. Traveling through Suez today, it is tempting to despair. Barbed wire, overpopulation, rusting ships, and dwindling business stand as rebukes to the vision of de Lesseps.
~Zachary Karabell (b. ????)  (Parting of the Desert - the Creation of the Suez Canal (2003)*, Epilogue)

(Today is the 142nd anniversary of the opening in 1869 of the Suez Canal between the Mediterranean and Red Seas, which offers the shortest maritime route between Europe and the lands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The subject of speculation for millennia, the 100-mile long canal was finally realized due to the vision and perseverance of French entrepreneur and engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805-1894), who convinced the French and Egyptian governments that such a canal was feasible, arranged ample financing, and supervised its construction over ten years, despite enormous engineering challenges. In 1875, Great Britain gained majority ownership of the canal to assure easy passage to India and seven years later essentially seized control of Egypt to protect it. Subsequently, de Lesseps attempted to repeat his success by building a similar canal across the Isthmus of Panama but ended in bankruptcy in 1888. Coincidentally, this Saturday will be the 206th anniversary of the birth of de Lesseps, who is said to have claimed that he had always had "the privilege of being believed without having to prove what one affirms.")

* N.B. A concise and readable history of the conception and building of the Suez Canal.

(The above is taken from Ed's quotation of the day)

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Canada to Obama: you delay the pipeline, we'll sell the oil to Asia

GatewayPundit has links and comments: The Keystone Pipeline project was expected to create up to 1,000,000 high-paying US jobs in the oil manufacturing and associated industries. The project itself would create 20,000 construction jobs.  Obama refused to sign the Keystone agreement last week. Today Canadian Prime Minister Harper told Obama that he would look to Asia to sell its oil.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Sports Media Asks Molestation Victims What This Means For Joe Paterno's Legacy

The Onion.


Describing the downfall of Paterno as "clearly the most devastating thing to come out of the sex scandal," outlets from ESPN to USA Today asked Sandusky's victims if, while being forced to engage in oral and anal sex with a man 40 to 50 years their senior, their primary fear was for Paterno's reputation.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Libertarianism versus Statism

Jacob Horneberger explains what libertarians believe:

We believe that people should be free to engage in any occupation or profession without any government-issued license, permit, or other form of official permission. Let consumers, not the government, decide who engages in different lines of work.

We believe that people should be free to enter into mutually beneficial transactions with anyone else in the world, without interference by the government. That includes such things as hiring a housekeeper from Mexico and selling food to a Cuban.

We believe that people should be free to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth and, equally important, to decide for themselves what to do with it — spend, save, invest, or donate it. Thus, we hold that people should be free to plan for their own retirement (or not), to donate to their church or other causes (or not), and to help out their elderly or ailing parents (or not).


via Newsalert

Tuesday, November 1, 2011