Eddy Grant is 65 years old today.

This video happened about the same time Mom caved and let us get cable TV, and thus, MTV.

Her acceptance of the microwave oven was still a few years off, and even then she made us keep it in the garage. She was certain it was dangerous and would cause me to grow a gigantic foul, oozing hunchback.

Eh. Three-minute pizza is worth it.

Open thread.

Posted by: LauraW at 05:49 AM | Comments (381)
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Indicator Species

1. a species whose presence indicates the presence of a set of other species and whose absence indicates the lack of that entire set of species;

Vacuum Interrupters, a sort of high voltage, high amperage switch/breaker are a key element of industrial/commercial power distribution and manufacturing. When VI sales decline, the economy is in deep shit. VI's are not tech fad, they're core bedrock commercial/manufacturing infrastructure stuff. You can't replace them with computers, or any other crap. When you need them, you need them. Period. Without them factories and buildings shutdown.

Everyone has heard about the power "grid". Vacuum Interrupters are found in the places where you've stepped off the national "grid" onto large enterprises that get medium voltage (thousands of volts) fed into them...places that have their own substations. Not the "small" stuff where you'd get 480V 3-phase or less fed in from the power company.

So what's up with the vacuum interrupters? Well, Eaton, a major player in the power/electrical business is laying off 33 of 275 people working at vacuum interrupter plant in NY. You may not have heard of Eaton, but there's a good chance you've seen some of their smaller scale products at Home Depot -- they make the Cutler-Hammer brand of electrical stuff.

There's other VI vendors of course. ABB, Siemens, GE, and Schneider all sell them too...and they've all suffered layoffs in the past too.

If the Vacuum Interrupter business is faltering, America is faltering. These 33 people losing their jobs at Eaton says more about what's going on in the street than all of the hot air coming out of Washington.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:05 AM | Comments (157)
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• Unbelievable: CO Dem Tells Rape Survivor A Gun Would Not Have Helped Her Because Statistics Weren't On Her Side
  
• Sequestration: Women And Minorities Hardest Hit
  
• Brit Hume: Time for Obama To Put His Big Boy Pants On
  
• Day 1 Of Sequester: Fed Post 400 Job Openings
  
• Tax Bill For the Wealthy Hits 30 Year High
  
• Credit Rating Agencies Shrug Off Sequester, Say More Cuts Needed
  
• Robber Brings Fake Gun To Robery, Bank Employee Brought A Very Real .357 Magnum
  
• School Offers Counseling For Students Troubled By Pastry Gun Incident
  
• Daily Caller Claims WaPo Can't Tell The Difference Between Hookers
  
• College Fail: Employers Say Grads Are A Disappointment
  
• Social Media Endangers And Empowers China's Activists
  
• Airports Contradict Janet Napolitanos Sequester Claims
  
• How To Revive The GOP
  
• Man Unable To Find Work For Some Reason
  
• Gun Control Bill Advances In Colorado, Would Ban Standard Pump Aciton Shotgun
  
• It Turns Out North Korea Isn't A Great Topic For Bar Conversation
  
• Washtington State Pensions In Crisis Too
  
• Bad News Guys, Brian Williams Is Disappointed In Us
  
• Jeb Bush's False Flag Operation
  
• Seven Sentences That Sound Crazy But Are Still Grammatical
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:14 AM | Comments (167)
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Yesterday the WaPo claimed a hooker in the Daily Caller's report on Bob Menendez admitted she was lying. Today the DC tells WaPo, "you've got the wrong hooker."

If you've seen one Dominican hooker, you've seen 'em all, I guess.

Posted by: andy at 02:44 AM | Comments (331)
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David Frum Takes a Dump on Andrew Breitbart's Grave

Frum couldn't contain himself and published a screed against Breitbart on the day he died. Now on the one year anniversary of Andrew's death he republished it - along with some extra smugness and snark.

This indifference to detail suffused all of Breitbart's work, and may indeed be his most important and lasting legacy. Breitbart sometimes got stories right (Anthony Weiner). More often he got them wrong (Sherrod). He did not much care either way. Just as all is fair in a shooting war, so manipulation and deception are legitimate tools in a culture war. Breitbart used those tools without qualm or regret, and he inspired a cohort of young conservative journalists to do likewise.

Why would Frum do such a thing? Because he's more thoughtful, reasonable, civil, empathetic and caring than the likes of all you and he knows it. Why can't you extremist losers see that he's the one that needs to be in charge of conservatism?

What America needs now, and what the Republican party most especially needs, are moderate-minded people who are also tough-minded - who won't be shrieked down and who won't be intimidated. "Civility" cannot mean: you yell, I yield. Conservatives deplore those old-line 1960s liberals who shriveled up when challenged by student radicals and Black Power militants. Well, now it's happening in our house, and it is we who are being tested: Do we dare confront our own radicals? It's not enough to have greater wisdom, greater tolerance, and greater patriotism if you don't also muster courage, endurance, and will to win.

Andrew inspired people. Frum mostly inspires people to actively dislike him.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:25 PM | Comments (502)
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Imbeciles, the whole lot of them

A commenter nails it dead on with all proper legal cites

Apparently "lawmakers" who are completely ignorant of current law.

18 USC 922(d)(1)-(9) makes it a crime to transfer to a prohibited person.
18 USC 924(a)(2) specifies fine and up to 10 years in prison for doing so.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/922
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/924

Either these "lawmakers" are completely incompetent or just looking for camera time.”

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:50 PM | Comments (153)
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You have to accept two propositions:

1. Rape is a heinous moral crime, in a separate category from every other trespass except murder.

And simultaneously:

2. Everything you disfavor is kind of pretty much rape.

I can accept one of those. I guess I'm not enlightened enough to see the simultaneous truthfulness of both.

Posted by: Ace at 03:31 PM | Comments (391)
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Actually overall the sketch is "balanced," I suppose, at least by SNL's standards.

Pretty amateur stuff, though.

Much funnier is this NBC comedian, claiming the parody newscast he anchors every night is "right down the middle" and "cleansed" of political opinions.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:47 PM | Comments (177)
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Yeah this is why you can't rely on prostitutes so much. Even here, one could object "Once the police pressured them of course they retracted their claims," and that's plausible too.

Of course, it's also always been plausible they were just paid to tell a lie.

An escort who appeared on a video claiming Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) paid her for sex has told Dominican Republic police that she was instead paid to make up the claims in a tape recording and has never met or seen the senator before, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim.

The woman identified a lawyer who approached her and a friend to make the videotape, according to affidavits obtained by the Post. That man has in turn identified another lawyer who gave him a script for the tape and paid him to find women to fabricate the claims, the affidavits say.

Posted by: Ace at 02:18 PM | Comments (110)
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Several people including ArthurK. are recommending The Law, by Bastiat. I'm putting that on the list because they used the magic word ("short").

I got a recommendation from Jonah Goldberg for Eric Voegelin. He's the guy, it turns out, who coined the phrase "immanentize the eschaton." He mentioned the book to me because I dropped an aphorism -- "God save us from those without a god but bursting at the seams with Religion" -- and thought it sounded like Voegelin. I'm reading his Science, Politics, and Gnosticism on Kindle.

I'm only like 30 pages in so I can't review it. I can say it has a mindblowing premise.

First, I have to explain Gnosticism. Gnosticism is the belief that the world was not created by God at all, but by an imperfect, lesser being who may actually be evil, and might even be Satan. Gnosticism holds that the material world we live in a false world, a world of lies created by either an incompetent or a demon, and that escape can only be had by gnosis, "enlightenment" (though I don't think that's a spot-on translation), which will free people from this Devil's world to the real world we faintly remember having been cast out of.

Gnostic teachings claim that we are exiles in this false world, castaways who drifted up on the shores of a hateful and alien island.

By the way, how wild is that? It's like science fiction. What a premise.

Voegelin claims that gnostic though has remained with us from the 2nd century when it was born, and I don't mean "sort of remained with us," or echoed with us, I mean he thinks it really remained a belief system into the modern age, and that Gnostic belief spawned all sorts of totalizing political movements which disdain the real world in favor of theory and party doctrine, such as Naziism and Communism. I think, again -- and this is wild, I have no idea if he can prove such a thing as I'm only 30 pages in -- he is not saying that Naziism and Communism were born out of an echo of Gnosticism or Gnostic-like thought, but out of genuine, real Gnostic religion/cosmology.

I have strong doubts that such a wild premise could ever be proved -- I think he'll strain to even establish it -- but it certainly is a wild enough premise that I want to see where he goes with it.

So that's what I'm reading; what's on your list, as far as this sort of book?

Posted by: Ace at 01:48 PM | Comments (325)
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