Ronald Reagan At 100
— DrewM

A selection of some of his greatest speeches.

First his seminal speech..."A Time For Choosing". A great speech from 1964 in support of Bary Goldwater. The depressing thing about it? Considering the speech is almost 50 years old and we are dealing with many of the same problems, we as a nation chose poorly.

Reagan's First Inaugural.

Favorite Quotes:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.

...

So, as we begin, let us take inventory. We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth.

...

It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope.

An excerpt from his Berlin Wall Speech.

Reagan makes teh funny. Yeah, he kicked the Soviets in the ass and laughed at them in the process.

I'll put up a few more but this is a good start.

Thanks to Nathan Wurtzel who did "A Regan Speech A Day" on Twitter for some of the suggestions. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 09:12 AM | Comments (254)
Post contains 421 words, total size 4 kb.

Charles Krauthammer: "If Godzilla Appeared On The National Mall, Al Gore Would Say It's Because of Global Warming"
— Ace

Because of, you know, "the spores."

Al Gore's explanation is a lie. The same lie was offered last year. It's basically "well of course it's snowy because all this extra warm air coming up from the equator is loading the air with moisture and so it snows."

Except it's not just snowy. It's also cold. Al Gore's hot-air-causes-precipitation explanation can be used to explain precipitation -- but heat cannot be so used to explain cold.

And it is cold. Colder than the global warmistas predicted, of course, but who cares, that's Old School Science where you make predictions which are then either proven true or false, which in turn either provides or removes confidence from your working model. The New Science is It just is; we have said so; now shut up.

Clown Nose On, Clown Nose Off: That's how Treacher described Jon Stewart's very selective stance as to whether he was "just a comedian" and it therefore didn't matter if he was saying nonsense or whether he was a sage outsider commentator on political affairs.

The global warmistas have a similar tactic. When asked to explain why their predictions keep failing, they will say "Well, the environment is a very complicated thing and of course we don't have a perfect model of it yet."

But when their core claims are challenged, they claim the exact opposite: They have a perfect model of everything, with all variables perfectly weighed in the equation (that's why they know, to a moral certainty, that the sun has no more than a trivial effect on changing climate), so shut up, we got this, all of this.

Well which is it? They seem to toggle between Perfect Confidence in Our Perfect Modeling and Of Course All Models are Incomplete and Inaccurate as often as, well, as often as the weather changes, don't they? If the weather does anything congruent with their model, toggle on Perfect Confidence mode; if the weather does anything incongruent with their model, toggle on High Number of Variables That Of Course No One Can Perfect Model.

These are incompatible, of course. If it is true (as it is true) that they really have a very poor, shaky, and incomplete model of the climate, then they cannot have such confidence in their (almost always in error) predictions.

They can't admit that, of course. Same as charlatans claiming they can bring the rain to a droughted land can admit Shit, Boss, I really don't know why it rains or why it doesn't. The Charlatan's position at royal court depends on him being able to convince the king he knows what's going on, despite never being able to actually demonstrate an accurate working knowledge of what's going on.

Posted by: Ace at 08:41 AM | Comments (181)
Post contains 490 words, total size 3 kb.

Obama Advisor Valerie Jarrett Mistakes 4-Star General For Waiter, Asks Him For a Glass of Wine
— Ace

The general rushes to not take offense, which is the required move, saying "It could have happened to anybody" -- he says all she saw was his striped pants which could be mistaken for a waiter's.

But this sure seems to reinforce a narrative, though one the Make Believe Media isn't fond of.

Posted by: Ace at 08:30 AM | Comments (69)
Post contains 85 words, total size 1 kb.

Early Super Bowl Thread
— Monty

Apparently there is some sort of major sporting event taking place today. You may discuss it here.

UPDATE: I understand that it is traditional to post a photo of a cheerleader when posting about a hand-egg football contest. As I am nothing if not a giver, here you go:

Posted by: Monty at 08:11 AM | Comments (163)
Post contains 57 words, total size 1 kb.

Sunday Book Thread
— Monty

I carry around in my head a list of "essential books" -- books that profoundly influenced me or changed the way I think about things. These are books that I push on friends, give away as gifts, and read over and over again.

One of these books is Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, now recently updated to the 4th edition. Along with Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, it forms the bedrock upon which most of my economics knowledge is built. I remember how amazed I was when I first read it: Sowell had produced a primer on economics that was somehow concise and accurate without resorting to jargon and dense pseudo-mathematical formulae.

One of Sowell's strengths as a writer is that he has a wonderful simplicity of style. He has a good ear for the plainsong of American speech, but he doesn't dumb down his prose or make lame attempts at being "folksy". He also has a great ability with metaphor, analogism, and simile, which stands him in good stead in books like Basic Economics. Sowell is a great teacher, in other words: he doesn't just tell you things; he shows you, and in such a way that you find yourself nodding in agreement as Sowell wraps up a Q.E.D.

Basic Economics is also written to a general audience, which means it's suitable for high-school-age people onwards. It's not only a good read for adults, but if you home-school (or have the ability to jawbone your kid into reading a book on his or her own time), I highly recommend this book. Innumeracy and ignorance of economic principles is one of the main reasons we're in the fiscal mess we're in right now -- there are many people in government and industry right now who could have benefited from reading Sowell's book.

[UPDATED: Another great economics primer for young people is Peter Schiff's How An Economy Grows and Why It Crashes. It's a little cartoon-book that explains what the econ teachers sometimes call a "Crusoe economy" -- i.e., a small, self-contained, simplistic economic system that nevertheless illustrates the basic precepts of economic principles. Schiff's book is a light-hearted, simple, and fun read. And you don't get to use "fun" in the context of an economics book very often!]

On the ficitonal side of things, I re-read James Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker. This is a longtime favorite of mine, a story of sentient robots on the Saturnian moon Titan. It's a classic sci-fi story of first contact, religion versus science, and what it means to be "alive". (As a side-benefit, the first chapter is about the best explanation of evolution by natural selection that I've ever read.) It's a great book, stuffed with interesting characters and situations.

There is a sequel to Code of the Lifemaker called The Immortality Option, but I'm not as fond of it as I am of the first book.

Posted by: Monty at 05:19 AM | Comments (180)
Post contains 413 words, total size 3 kb.

A sober Sunday morning poem [Fritzworth]
— Open Blogger

Reading this article by the wise and insightful Victor Davis Hanson over dinner last night left me somewhat depressed, as most honest assessments of our current situation do. It's not just that the national economic situation is so bad -- it's that the mindset that led us here, as VDH points out, still pervades most of government and much of society.

And that leads us to Rudyard Kipling. Kipling is often portrayed as an unabashed imperialist, even though "Recessional" -- a poem written for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee -- is as sober a slap in the face to the Queen and the British Empire as you could hope to find. But that's not the poem for this morning. The Kipling poem for this morning is "The Gods of the Copybook Headings", written in 1919. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:06 AM | Comments (102)
Post contains 840 words, total size 5 kb.

Overnight Thread-Devil Dog Edition [CDR M]
— Open Blogger

Evenin' morons! It's another fine Saturday and it is my honor to entertain you morons so go get a cold one and stand the hell by for some typical ONT links, videos and, well, just some silliness and mind blowing information.

Now last Saturday we had a nice graphical math equation. Tonight we'll do a little geometry but I imagine it will frustrate you more than make you laugh as the last one did. I know it did for me for a little while before the CFL came on. Don't worry, I've been told the President still hasn't figured this one out.

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:30 PM | Comments (612)
Post contains 773 words, total size 10 kb.

DOOMED. No more shop classes? WE'RE DOOMED. (Open Thread) [ArthurK]
— Open Blogger

You can't tell me this is a slow news day.

Anyway, here's a thread to chew on.

And a lazy link about kids not learning to do things anymore...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:14 PM | Comments (325)
Post contains 47 words, total size 1 kb.

Obama Tries His Hand at Motivating Businesses
— Geoff

Somebody take this President's hands off the wheel immediately. Please. He should never be allowed in a moving vehicle again. Hand the man his Slurpee and put him on his bicycle.

Here is President Barack Obama's thinking on creating a healthy business environment:

“If we make America the best place to do business, businesses should make their mark in America,” the president said. “They should set up shop here, and hire our workers, and pay decent wages, and invest in the future of this nation. That’s their obligation.”

Got that? If he improves the business environment, then businesses must change their operations to settle their debt with him. I hate to give him ideas, but this is like saying: "I've upgraded the interstates, so now you have to drive on them, and pay for the upgrades."

Mr. President, first, the US should always have been the best place to do business. You are not giving them a treat - you are finally living up to your obligations. Second, business must do what is right for business. If the business environment you create helps them, then they have a higher likelihood of prospering and growing. But there's no such thing as an "obligation" that requires them to make decisions independent of the business pressures and opportunities they face. They won't operate under such an obligation because they can't - that path leads straight to insolvency.

Third, you can't demand gratitude or a sense of obligation from people when you used their own money to create these benefits. I know, I know, you've heard those words before, and they've never made any sense to you. Spending more is always your solution, because it uses that inexhaustible supply of magic money, limited only by the greed and insensitivity of GOP fatcats.

___________________________

But things are always worse than they at first appear with this administration. Look at what he wants to do to help business out:

The national economy, he said, depends on the government making upgrades in education and technology, as well as promoting — and in some cases, helping to advance — groundbreaking business proposals.

“Supporting businesses with this kind of 21st century infrastructure and cutting-edge innovation is our responsibility,” the president said. “Our government has an obligation to make sure that America is the best place on earth to do business — that we have the best schools, the best incentives to innovate and the best infrastructure.”

So. We have this economic system called capitalism, see. It has some faults, but it's built entirely around incentivizing people to work hard and innovate. It's been the most wildly successful motivator for innovation in the world's history, and has been copied by countries worldwide.

Mr. President, we don't have an incentive problem. We have regulation problems. We have tax problems. We have rising energy and commodity prices. We have an increasingly unfavorable global business environment. We have legislative uncertainties hanging over businesses' heads like the Sword of Damocles.

But we want to make money. We want to do business. We want to innovate so that we can make more money and do more business. We don't need more incentives - incentive is built into the American system and psyche.

And we particularly don't need a ridiculous self-defeating scheme whereby the government encourages innovation via incentives funded by taxation, which stifles innovation.

Posted by: Geoff at 08:36 AM | Comments (582)
Post contains 569 words, total size 4 kb.

Mubarak Quits as Head of Ruling Party
— rdbrewer

Continues as president.

State TV reports that President Hosni Mubarak has resigned as head of Egypt's ruling party.

However, Mubarak still continues as the nation's president.

His son, Gamal Mubarak, and the National Democratic Party's secretary-general, Safwat el-Sharif, have also resigned from the party, in a new gesture to protesters carrying out a 12-day-old wave of anti-government demonstrations.

State TV said the ruling party's six-member Steering Committee of the General Secretariat stepped down and was replaced. The council was the party's highest decision-making body, and el-Sharif and other outgoing members were some of the most powerful (and to many Egyptians, unpopular) political figures in the regime.

El-Sharif was replaced by Hossam Badrawi, member of the liberal wing of the party who had been sidelined within the NDP ranks in recent years because of his sharp criticisms of some policies.

This comes as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking today at an international security conference in Munich, signaled that U.S. support has swung behind a transition headed by the recently-named vice president, Omar Suleiman.

Update: Has Mubarak resigned? There seems to be some confusion. While the AP and Reuters say yes, Al Jazeera says no.

But an Al Jazeera reporter, Alan Fisher, reports on Twitter that the station has been unable to get official confirmation (even though the anchor has been announcing the resignation for the last hour), and the Al Jazeera scroll now only speaks of Gamal Mubarak's resignation, not his father's. It seems that the source of the information may not be state television at all, but Al Arabiya, a private pan-Arab television station.

@AlanFisher, the al Jazeera correspondent, reports: "TV station breaking the news now backpedaling."

Thanks to DrewM.

Posted by: rdbrewer at 08:06 AM | Comments (77)
Post contains 296 words, total size 2 kb.