Happy Festivus You Bastards

In case you're unfamiliar with Festivus traditions here are the key ones:

• The Festivus Pole
• The Airing of Grievances
• Festivus dinner (filled with carbohydrates)
• The Feats of Strength

May your Festivus miracle come true and everyone else's be denied.

More Modern Christmas Songs

Now is the time every year when we take a moment to enjoy the Christmas songs that don't get played to death on the radio and commercials but ought to be.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:22 PM | Comments (572)
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Vince Mancini reviews Les Miserables to the tune of Smash Mouth's All Star.

HEY now, youÂ’re a French dude, kill some French dudes, sing, GAAAAY

HEY now, ValjeanÂ’s there now, lifeÂ’s unfair now, get, SLAAAAAIN

And ALL those PEOP-LE are DEEEE-heeeeee-yeeeeead, Jackman in the SEW-er, saved Eddie RedÂ…

Funny stuff.

I've seen the Broadway show twice and can't wait to see the movie.

What?

Don't judge me.

And no you most certainly can not see my man card. There's guns and killin' and explosions 'n' stuff, so this one skates by on a technicality.

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 04:34 PM | Comments (185)
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From the Telegraph, a list of gifts to avoid unless you want to find your Christmas less than snuggly and warm.

I have to say, I am in near total agreement with this list. The exception being, of course, if the womenfolk requested such an awful gift.

How did the Obama Chia Head not make the list?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:10 PM | Comments (21)
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DrewM explained his reasons for disliking the NRA's statement on the Newtown shooting in a post on Friday. And like the typical rationalist that most of us are, he took it apart for some pretty good reasons, one of which is that using federal dollars and creating one more top-heavy boondoggle to put armed guards in every school in the nation is not in our best interest. As he correctly points out, it is, thankfully, an exceedingly rare event, and would be a huge waste of resources to try to prevent in that way.

But.... more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:10 PM | Comments (318)
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Short answer:

I don't know. You are [fucked|screwed|pooched].

I Don't Know

Why bother reading further when the author seemingly doesn't know the exact figure?

One problem is that the number is a moving target. Can you guess which direction the number is going?

Taking a look

This has to be a relatively simple exercise in arithmetic. One could divide a 14 digit number by a 9 digit number by hand, but I'll do it with a calculator, thank you.

Stopping by at http://www.usdebtclock.org I get the current debt figure of $16,395,173,356,211.

Divide that by 314,982,978 people in the US and I get $52,050.98 per man, woman and child. Got a spare $52K, Bunky?

That figure, however, is wrong. It includes the all Americans, the majority of whom are non-taxpayers. It includes my retired parents and in-laws, who are contributing very little to the national treasury at this point of their lives. Let's run the numbers again.

Take the current national debt, now at $16,395,177,588,347, divide by a US workforce of 143,963,180 and we get $113,884.52 per taxpayer. You have a job, right? Sorry if you don't. At this point, I would still rather be pulling the wagon than riding it.

So we have this nice ballpark figure of $114K, but it still isn't correct. No matter how average a person may be, they are still (an) individual(s). Are you washing dishes 32 hours per week? Your share is going to be lower. Are you a fund manager or an investment banker? Your share will be higher. People with more income pay more income tax. But we knew that.

There is No "Share"

Do you have a mortgage? My wife and I have a mortgage. It involves a significant amount of debt, but it also involves a plan. We send a check every month and at a particular date in the future, we will owe no more. I know that date.

With the feds, there is no plan. You could ask around Washington, D.C. and find quite a few people who won't even ackowledge that something needs to be done. (Fire them. They make way more money than you, should know better, and some cause America problems). That is why in a few minutes between calculation, our debt went up by more than $2million.

Our debt is 105.6% of our GDP. If everything we earned for 1 year and 19 days went directly to paying off debt, we would be in the clear. In the meantime, you would be kicked out of your house for not paying property taxes, in legal trouble from not paying state of federal income taxes, and looking kind of thin from subsisting on moss soup and acorns. Clearly, this will not be fixed in a year. Or two, or five.

My mortgage? It is more than 105% of my household income, but it's a fixed obligation and we have an amortization date. No such luck with the feds. Unless it is dealt with, the problem will get kicked down the road until the road gets washed into the sea.

"Average"

Are you average? I'm not. I'm an individual, as are you. If you make lots of money, you will pay lots of taxes. If you are young, you will be paying taxes for many years. Great, isn't it? You are paying interest on a debt that has little to do with you. You are paying Social Security for your grandparent's generation. You are being convinced that it's no big deal.

Have you ever had a credit card problem? That is what we are working up to on a national scale. That leads to a whole lot of 'doing without.' Ask Greece about that.

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 09:51 AM | Comments (132)
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"OK, Mr. President, I'm ready to have a national conversation on guns. You go first."

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to this week's locked, loaded, and primed Sunday Morning Book Thread.

Blah, blah, blah

In the wake of the Newtown murders, acting President Obama has announced that he wants to have a "national conversation on guns." I don't know about you, but I really love these "national conversations". Of course, we all know that when a liberal says he wants to have a "conversation", it means he wants those who disagree with him (i.e. us) to shut up and listen to a lecture by him consisting of roughly equal parts of contempt, ridicule, insults, and threats.

This is what the left thinks is a "conversation."

But I'm serious when I say I welcome a national conversation on guns - for the simple reason that this is a debate that conservatives win pretty much every time. This seems to be the one area of American life that the progressive left has not been able to impose its worldview on. I'm not sure why this is; perhaps it's because gun owners are so numerous or so well-organized (the left bitterly complains about the NRA and the "gun lobby"), or maybe it's because the tradition of private gun ownership in America is so deep and pervasive that any attempt to transform it into a more European model (i.e. hardly any private gun ownership) simply has no chance of success. But whatever the reason, every time this subject comes up, the result is the same: we win, they lose. More or less.

All of the left's counterarguments are weak tea, mostly appeals based on emotion and empty rhetoric. And then there's this book here, which claimed to be a scientific study on the origins of American "gun culture." This book was greeted with loud hosannas and shouts of joy and praise from the liberal left, who were in a state of near-religious ecstasy because they thought that finally, FINALLY they had some solid evidence they could use against those mouth-breathing, troglodyte gun owners and that pesky 2nd Amendment. This rapturous joy soon evaporated, however, when subsequent investigations revealed that the author basically made shit up wholecloth to support his bogus thesis. His scholarship was so transparently dishonest that they revoked his Bancroft Book Award prize and he also lost his job at the university where he was teaching. Given that the book is completely fraudulent, I'm surprised it's even still in print.

But everybody knows it's crap. And the left has still got nothing.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:59 AM | Comments (202)
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It's almost Christmas too!

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:38 AM | Comments (180)
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Thoughts On the NRA's Statement

For as long as I can remember, the NRA's slogan has been, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people". Casting blame towards Hollywood and video games doesn't really fit in here, and I think it was very shortsighted, as was calling for a federal program to put security guards in schools.

If schools want security guards, they can hire them now. Federalizing this and making it mandatory, which appears to be the NRA's position, really is a solution in search of a problem.

As I said earlier this week, and as author Larry Correia pointed out in his excellent and now 10x-linked-at-the-HQ blog post, the policy change we need is simple: put an end to schools as "gun-free zones" ... either through hiring security guards or allowing concealed carry ... and this problem fixes itself.

Beware Of Laws Made In Haste

I had this piece in the queue before the shootings in Newtown, but is seems even more relevant now.

New York Democratic Rep. Steve Israel is calling for legislation to renew the federal ban on plastic guns, according to his official congressional website.

“Recent reports have pointed to the new possibility of building guns at home using a 3-D printer,” Israel’s website states. “Right now, plastic guns are illegal under the Undetectable Firearms Act, but this law is set to expire next year.”

Umm, yeah. As the article points out, these "plastic guns" don't exist and have some serious technical hurdles to overcome with ammunition to be completely undetectable. So let's ban them!

They said the same thing when the ZOMFG!!11! PLASTIC GUN!! Glock was first introduced, even though that thing has more steel in it than an S&W Chief's Special.

Second only to the average congressman in ignorance about guns is, of course, the media.

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Posted by: andy at 06:17 AM | Comments (140)
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Merry Christmas Eve eve.

Get your shopping done, slackers.

Posted by: andy at 03:42 AM | Comments (200)
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Hello my fellow mass murders, how are you doing this fun sunday morning? I've been playing quite a bit of Natural Selection 2 (which is a nice evolution of the mod and was worth the $10 sale price on Steam) and with all the alien and marine killing, I just can't help myself as I really want to go bug hunting on LV-426. This is going to be real quick as I scramble to wrap presents.

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Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 10:51 AM | Comments (58)
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