Are you Polite?

Being classically well dressed is the ultimate form of politeness.

Laundry Day

Beef Cuts

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Is marriage just a piece of paper?

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Dalrock

Empathologism has an excellent post up dissecting a FamilyLife/Dennis Rainey memo on marriage.  See the link for Empath’s post and the ensuing discussion, but what struck me about the FamilyLife piece is how utterly devoid it is of a sense of biblical morality.  After explaining that at least two thirds of divorces have no possible biblical justification*, Rainey urges his Christian audience:

If you know people in that situation, urge them to fight for their marriage. Tell them not to quit without taking another lap around the track–without stopping to realize that the best marriage to be in is the one they already have.

The advice to not give up isn’t bad from a practical perspective, as statistically divorce doesn’t tend to make people happy.  But by focusing soley on the quality of the romantic relationship, modern Christians like Rainey have accepted the modern secular view of marriage.  They have abandoned all that truly makes marriage moral and sacred, and substituted in its place a pledge of allegiance to the fickleness of emotion.

Read more HERE

Discrimination?

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It works both ways. 

Which are you?

"The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."  -Robert Heinlin

Once again into the Breach.......

Stacy Haiduk

Tuesday Tweed

Gin & Tonic

Eliza Dushku

The Revolution Continues

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America's Budding Tyrants

BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS

WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 2014

            From the Nazis to the Stalinists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, and why is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. Basic to their agenda are the tools of indoctrination, propagandizing, proselytization. Once they gain power, as leftists have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses.

            Back in 1964, it was Mario Savio, a campus leftist, who led the free speech movement at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, a movement that played a vital role in placing American universities center stage in the flow of political ideas, no matter how controversial, unpatriotic and vulgar. The free speech movement gave birth to the hippie movement of the '60s and '70s. The longhair, unkempt hippies of that era have grown up and now often find themselves being college professors, deans, provosts and presidents. Their intolerance of free speech and other ideas has become policy and practice on many college campuses.

            Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, updates us on the campus attack on free speech and different ideas in his article titled “Obama Unleashes the Left: How the government created a federal hunting license for the far left” (http://tinyurl.com/mp5x428).

            Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, one of the nation’s most accomplished women, graciously withdrew as Rutgers University's commencement speaker after two months of campus protests about her role in the Iraq War. Some students and professors said, "War criminals shouldn’t be honored." One wonders whether these students would similarly protest Hillary Clinton, who, as senator, voted for the invasion of Iraq.

            Brandeis University officials were intimidated into rescinding their invitation to Somali writer and American Enterprise Institute scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose criticisms of radical Islam were said to have violated the school's "core values." Brandeis decided that allowing her to speak would be hurtful to Muslim students. I take it that Brandeis students and officials would see criticism of deadly Islamist terrorist gang Boko Haram's kidnapping of nearly 300 Nigerian girls, some of whom have been sold off as brides, as unacceptable and violative of the university’s core values.

            Azusa Pacific University, a private Christian university, canceled a planned address by distinguished libertarian scholar Charles Murray out of fear that his lecture might upset “faculty and students of color.” In response to the cancellation, Murray wrote an open letter to the students, which in part read: “The task of the scholar is to present a case for his or her position based on evidence and logic. Another task of the scholar is to do so in a way that invites everybody into the discussion rather than demonize those who disagree. Try to find anything under my name that is not written in that spirit. Try to find even a paragraph that is written in anger, takes a cheap shot, or attacks women, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, or anyone else.” Unfortunately, such a scholarly vision is greeted with hostility at some universities.

            Earlier this year, faculty and students held a meeting at Vassar College to discuss a particularly bitter internal battle over the school's movement to boycott Israel. Before the meeting, an English professor announced the dialogue would "not be guided by cardboard notions of civility." That professor might share the vision of Adolf Hitler’s brown-shirted thugs of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party in their effort to crush dissent.

            Western values of liberty are under ruthless attack by the academic elite on college campuses across America. These people want to replace personal liberty with government control; they want to replace equality with entitlement. As such, they pose a far greater threat to our way of life than any terrorist organization or rogue nation. Multiculturalism and diversity are a cancer on our society. Ironically, we not only are timid in response but feed those ideas with our tax dollars and charitable donations.

Form & Function

Sexy Simplicity.

The Touchiness Of Contemporary America

By C.Contrary from Return of Kings

"All of these examples, extremely dangerous misuses of language and evidence of idiotic touchiness in the American way, recall Jonathan Swift’s definition of the human as “an animal capable of reason.” Though Americans think they are free, the control of consciousness, thought and language that stems from our narcissistic sensitivity, is endless and endlessly subtle; and the only sure thing, besides its existence, is the almost universally smug response to it: the lunatic, self-righteous assumption that it is just."

Read more HERE

Gun-safety starts with parental responsibility

 -Thomas Sowell
   July 2, 1998
 
POLITICAL REACTIONS to this year's rash of schoolhouse shootings have been classic liberalism: The government should crack down on gun owners who haven't shot anybody. Meanwhile, liberals have very little interest in punishing the young murderers, and instead are ready to listen to psychobabble excuses.

The latest ploy in the anti-gun crusade is shifting from emphasis on gun "control" to emphasis on gun "safety." As with so many other safety issues, few people -- least of all politicians -- seem ready to acknowledge that one kind of safety often comes at the expense of other kinds of safety. 
    
Child-locks for guns are the latest safety craze. But schoolhouse shootings are not being done by infants and toddlers. They are being done by people old enough to figure out any lock that an adult can figure out. Child-locks provide no protection whatever against the premeditated murder of school children and their teachers. 

If you are serious about stopping smaller children from firing guns that they may find around the house, there is an incredibly simple way to prevent that: Don't leave the guns loaded. Moreover, most guns already have safety devices. 

Maybe some parents are not responsible enough or thoughtful enough to remember to take the bullets out of guns that they keep in their homes. But are such parents any more likely to remember to lock the gun? 

More important, how often does this happen? More children die each year from bicycle accidents than from gun accidents, but where is there any such orchestrated hysteria about a need to ban bicycles? 

There is a dangerous down side to locking guns -- and especially adding a child-lock to the existing safety devices. Many people keep guns in their homes to protect themselves and their families. Studies show that these guns have in fact saved great numbers of people from being victims of intruders in their homes. 

Multiple safety devices slow down the very people who need to be able to fire in self-defense. Criminals with guns will undoubtedly already have them unlocked and loaded. Zealots for gun-control laws never seem to understand that criminals do not obey laws. Gun control means unilateral disarmament of law-abiding citizens. 

These law-abiding citizens have used guns to defend themselves at least 760,000 times in a single year. Some people with gun permits have saved policemen's lives by coming to their rescue. 

None of this fits the liberal vision, so you are unlikely to hear about it in the mainstream media. In the liberal vision, the rest of us are such irresponsible slobs that we will go around shooting members of our family or our friends, whether in anger at the moment or out of sheer carelessness. 

But what are the facts? Since the mid-1980s, there has been a 50 percent increase in gun ownership. If guns are the problem, then we should have seen a rise in murders. Instead, there has been a decline in murder and other violent crimes -- especially in places where gun ownership has gone up. 

In a country with more than a quarter of a billion people, you can find isolated examples of almost anything. But the handful of accidental deaths from guns are far outweighed by the reduced murder rate with increased gun ownership. 

If guns are the problem, then there should be higher murder rates in rural areas, where guns are more prevalent, or among whites, who have a higher rate of gun ownership than blacks. In both cases, the facts are directly the opposite. 

A careful and extensive study of the actual effects of gun ownership has just been published by Professor John Lott of the University of Chicago. It is titled "More Guns, Less Crime." You may not hear much about this book in the media because its factual data annihilate the liberal shibboleths about gun control. 

The truly ugly side of the gun-control crusade is in its typical liberal assumption that ordinary people must be deprived of self-reliance and have the government take care of them instead. Unfortunately, the government is in no position to put a cop on every street corner, much less in every home. 

As Professor Lott discovered, gun ownership deters crime. But what will deter liberals? Certainly not the facts. They have too much invested in their vision of themselves as the saviors of us all. Crime.

The Mangina Syndrome

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Authority & Responsibility

“Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

Current Read

Race Bannon

  From Badass of the week

 

Race Bannon

Roger "Race" Bannon wass an ex-secret agent who served as the personal bodyguard to Dr. Benton Quest, one of the most intelligent and well-respected scientists in the world.  He also helped out in tutoring Dr. Quest's two sons, Jonny and Hadji, training them in all the awesome shit that they need to know to become well-adjusted adults:  über-manly skills like shooting, driving and punching.

I remember watching the original Jonny Quest episodes every Saturday morning with my dad and my brother and thinking that Race Bannon was the most badass guy I had ever seen.  First off, he's a former employee of the Intelligence One agency, so he's well-versed in covert actions, intelligence gathering, security, electronics and espionage.  On top of that, the guy can fucking pilot anything.  He can fly fighter jets, drive hovercrafts, ride wild alpacas... you name it.  If it can be driven, he knows how to pilot it.  Plus he's a master of small arms, capable of holding his own with all manner of pistols, rifles, slingshots, blowguns and machine guns, and unlike a lot of wussy cartoons out there these days he doesn't have any compunctions about getting his hands dirty and blasting a quarter-sized hole in anything that he deems a threat to the Quest family.  He's also an expert in hand-to-hand combat, willing to punch the shit out of anything that even looks at him cross-eyed.

Race busts through a motherfuckin' window and kicks some idiot in the back.

Now a lot of people out there think that since Jonny's mother never appeared in the show, Race was actually more than just Dr. Quest's bodyguard.  Bullshit.  First off, Mrs. Quest was killed by Dr. Quest's arch-nemesis.  How can any man remarry in good conscience knowing that the death of his first wife was an indirect result of his own actions?  Impossible.  If you're looking for hard evidence, this article disproves the theory while further illustrating the badassery of Race Bannon:

Two scenes stood out in the series and would never make it onto any kind of children's programming today, or in the future.  The first was when CIA agent and Dr. Quest protector Race Bannon is in Hong Kong to meet a contact to pump them for some information.  The contact is a hot Chinese babe who invites him back to her private boat to discuss the info he needs.  Cut to the Jonny/Hadji/Bandit storyline for a scene.  Cut to the Dr. Quest for a moment.  Go to commercial.  When we come back, Race's "informant" is standing near him wearing a robe while he is sitting on the corner of her bed putting his boots on.  He thanks her for the information and leaves.  Even at a young age I knew that Race had just "pumped" her for all the info he needed to get the job done.  Jonny couldn't have a better role model and neither could I.

That's fucking awesome.  Race is the fucking man.  Even his name is badass.  You don't see too many guys named "Race" anymore.  That's a fucking name you can set your watch to.  Well Race travels around the world having all sorts of crazy adventures and bailing out the Quest family whenever they get in over their heads.  He's fought everything from pirates to mad scientists to sea monsters to Nazis... you name it and he's probably punched it so hard that it's teeth came out it's urethra.  He doesn't even give a shit.  You throw Race Bannon in a room full of two-legged air-breathing bloodthirsty mutant piranhas armed only with a broken-off table leg and he'll spend the next half hour building a four foot high pyramid of bludgeoned fish carcassas.  He's an unstoppable killing machine.

Race fights a pack of goddamn dinosaurs with a torch while everyone else stands around being useless.

He also has the sorts of adventures that would make James Bond crap his pants.  The nature of Dr. Quest's crazy inexplicable science work takes him to the edges of civilization, deep into uncharted territory, and to all manner of hostile environments.  Through it all, Race is ready and able to take on whatever challenges come up, to pilot anything that moves, to get it on with hot babes and to serve up a nice warm knuckle sandwich to anything that's capable of feeling pain.  He's the brawn to Dr. Quest's brains, and the sort of manly man that all kids want to be when they grow up.  He's awesome.


Race Bannon sized up perfectly in one picture.

Remain Calm

Neil Reynolds

Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself

Neil Reynolds

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Jul. 19 2010, 5:00 AM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Sep. 06 2012, 4:01 PM EDT

Stanford University physicist Robert Laughlin says governments - and people generally - should proceed with more humility in dealing with climate change. The Earth, he says, is very old and has suffered grievously: volcanic explosions, floods, meteor impacts, mountain formation "and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict." Yet, the Earth is still here. "It's a survivor."

Writing in the summer issue of the magazine The American Scholar, Prof. Laughlin offers a profoundly different perspective on climate change. "Common sense tells us that damaging a thing as old as [Earth]is somewhat easier to imagine than it is to accomplish - like invading Russia." For planet Earth, he says, the crisis of climate change, if crisis it be, will be a walk in the park.

Relax, Prof. Laughlin advises. Let it be. "The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we gaze into the future," he says, "not because it's unimportant but because it's beyond our power to control." Whatever humans throw at it, in other words, Earth will fix things in its own time and its own way.

Prof. Laughlin is the co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize for physics. Brilliantly imagined, incisively expressed and vastly entertaining, Prof. Laughlin's essay on climate change (What the Earth Knows) has been adapted from his forthcoming book on the future of fossil fuels. (His 2008 book, The Crime of Reason, documented pervasive government and corporate "sequestering" of scientific knowledge.)

You can't discuss climate change, Prof. Laughlin says, without looking backward across geologic time. He puts ordinary rainfall into perspective to illustrate the point. The rain that now falls on the world in a normal year measures a metre - "about the height of a golden retriever." The rain that has fallen since the beginning of the Industrial Age measures 200 metres. The rain that has fallen since the age of dinosaurs would fill Earth's oceans 20,000 times. The rain that has fallen since oxygen formed would fill the entire world 100 times.

Yet, the amount of water in Earth's oceans hasn't changed significantly in all of this time. In Earth's most recent glacial melting, 15,000 years ago, the sea level rose by one centimetre a year for 10,000 years - and then abruptly stopped. The heat required to produce this melting was 10 times the total energy consumption of all human civilization.

Excess carbon in the atmosphere? It happens all the time. And Earth deals with it. Anything that humans do to mitigate it will be a waste of time. Governments and citizens delude themselves when they think they can make a difference.

"The Earth doesn't care about any of these governments or their legislation," Prof. Laughlin writes. "It doesn't care whether you turn off your air conditioner, refrigerator and television set. It doesn't notice when you turn down your thermostat and drive a hybrid car.

"These actions simply spread the pain over a few centuries, the bat of an eyelash as far as the Earth is concerned, and leave the end result exactly the same: All the fossil fuel that used to be in the ground is now in the air and none is left to burn."

The Earth will dissolve the bulk of this atmospheric carbon dioxide in its oceans, a process that will take roughly 1,000 years. (The oceans now hold 30 trillion tons of carbon - 30 times the world's coal reserves.) Over tens of thousands of years, the Earth will transfer excess carbon dioxide into rocks, a process that will ultimately restore carbon dioxide concentrations to the same level that prevailed before humans existed.

How do we know the Earth will turn excess carbon dioxide into limestone? We know because the world's carbon dioxide levels are determined "by a geologic regulatory process." The proof is in Earth's rocks.

Prof. Laughlin concedes that excess carbon dioxide could - "in a handful of examples" - contribute to the extinction of species. He cites corals as an example. But he insists that keeping carbon in the ground for a little while longer won't make much difference to animal or to organism.

The real extinction problem, he says, is human population pressure: habitat destruction, pesticide abuse, overharvesting, species invasion. This is a distinction of great importance because it might help direct environmental concern to goals that people can actually achieve: Forget Gaia, save a marsh; forget the planet, save a frog.

The Earth regulates climate change in geologic time, Prof. Laughlin says, "without asking anyone's permission or explaining itself." If the Earth determines that Canada should freeze again, the best response would simply be to sell your Canadian real estate. The Earth moves on, Prof. Laughlin says.

So should we.

Sunday Workout with Jordan Carver

I got you

(Link)

The High cost of Liberalism (Parts 1-3)

By Thomas Sowell 
04-23-14

Part I

Liberals advocate many wonderful things. In fact, I suspect that most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world envisioned by liberals, rather than in the kind of world envisioned by conservatives.
 

Unfortunately, the only kind of world that any of us can live in is the world that actually exists. Trying to live in the kind of world that liberals envision has costs that will not go away just because these costs are often ignored by liberals.

One of those costs appeared in an announcement of a house for sale in Palo Alto, the community adjacent to Stanford University, an institution that is as politically correct as they come.

The house is for sale at $1,498,000. It is a 1,010 square foot bungalow with two bedrooms, one bath and a garage. Although the announcement does not mention it, this bungalow is located near a commuter railroad line, with trains passing regularly throughout the day.

Lest you think this house must be some kind of designer's dream, loaded with high-tech stuff, it was built in 1942 and, even if it was larger, no one would mistake it for the Taj Mahal or San Simeon.

This house is not an aberration, and its price is not out of line with other housing prices in Palo Alto. One couple who had lived in their 1,200 square foot home in Palo Alto for 20 years decided to sell it, and posted an asking price just under $1.3 million.

Competition for that house forced the selling price up to $1.7 million.

Another Palo Alto house, this one with 1,292 square feet of space, is on the market for $2,285,000. It was built in 1895.

Even a vacant lot in Palo Alto costs more than a spacious middle-class home costs in most of the rest of the country.

How does this tie in with liberalism?

In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and "open space" is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

Anyone who has taken Economics 1 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.

Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.

What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of "open space" — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.

Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.

There are people who claim that astronomical housing prices in places like Palo Alto and San Francisco are due to a scarcity of land. But there is enough vacant land ("open space") on the other side of the 280 Freeway that goes past Palo Alto to build another Palo Alto or two — except for laws and policies that make that impossible.

As in San Francisco and other parts of the country where housing prices skyrocketed after building homes was prohibited or severely restricted, this began in Palo Alto in the 1970s.

Housing prices in Palo Alto nearly quadrupled during that decade. This was not due to expensive new houses being built, because not a single new house was built in Palo Alto in the 1970s. The same old houses simply shot up in price.

It was very much the same story in San Francisco, which was a bastion of liberalism then as now. There too, incredibly high prices are charged for small houses, often jammed close together. A local newspaper described a graduate student looking for a place to rent who was "visiting one exorbitantly priced hovel after another."

That is part of the unacknowledged cost of "open space," and just part of the high cost of liberalism.

Part II 

Liberals can be disarming. In fact, they are for disarming anybody who can be disarmed, whether domestically or internationally.
 

Unfortunately, the people who are the easiest to disarm are the ones who are the most peaceful — and disarming them makes them vulnerable to those who are the least peaceful.

We are currently getting a painful demonstration of that in Ukraine. When Ukraine became an independent nation, it gave up all the nuclear missiles that were on its territory from the days when it had been part of the Soviet Union.

At that time, Ukraine had the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Do you think Putin would have attacked Ukraine if it still had those nuclear weapons? Or do you think it is just a coincidence that nations with nuclear weapons don't get invaded?

Among those who urged Ukraine to reduce even its conventional, non-nuclear weapons as well, was a new United States Senator named Barack Obama. He was all for disarmament then, and apparently even now as President of the United States. He has refused Ukraine's request for weapons with which to defend itself.

As with so many things that liberals do, the disarmament crusade is judged by its good intentions, not by its actual consequences.

Indeed, many liberals seem unaware that the consequences could be anything other than what they hope for. That is why disarmament advocates are called "the peace movement."

Whether disarmament has in fact led to peace, more often than military deterrence has, is something that could be argued on the basis of the facts of history — but it seldom is.

Liberals almost never talk about disarmament in terms of evidence of its consequences, whether they are discussing gun control at home or international disarmament agreements.

International disarmament agreements flourished between the two World Wars. Just a few years after the end of the First World War there were the Washington Naval Agreements of 1921-1922 that led to the United States actually sinking some of its own warships. Then there was the celebrated Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which nations renounced war, with France's Foreign Minister Aristide Briand declaring, "Away with rifles, machine guns, and cannon!" The "international community" loved it.

In Britain, the Labour Party repeatedly voted against military armaments during most of the decade of the 1930s. A popular argument of the time was that Britain should disarm "as an example to others."

Unfortunately, Hitler did not follow that example. He was busy building the most powerful military machine on the continent of Europe.

Nor did Germany or Japan allow the Washington Naval Agreements to cramp their style. The fact that Britain and America limited the size of their battleships simply meant that Germany and Japan had larger battleships when World War II began.

What is happening in Ukraine today is just a continuation of the old story about nations that disarm increasing the chances of being attacked by nations that do not disarm.

Any number of empirical studies about domestic gun control laws tell much the same story. Gun control advocates seldom, if ever, present hard evidence that gun crimes in general, or murder rates in particular, go down after gun control laws are passed or tightened.

That is the crucial question about gun control laws. But liberals settle that question by assumption. Then they can turn their attention to denouncing the National Rifle Association.

But neither the National Rifle Association nor the Second Amendment is the crucial issue. If the hard facts show that gun control laws actually reduce the murder rate, we can repeal the Second Amendment, as other Amendments have been repealed.

If in fact tighter gun control laws reduced the murder rate, that would be the liberals' ace of trumps. Why then do the liberals not play their ace of trumps, by showing us such hard facts? Because they don't have any such hard facts. So they give us lofty rhetoric and outraged indignation instead.

Part III

 Income inequality has long been one of the liberals' favorite issues. So there is nothing surprising about its being pushed hard this election year.

 

If nothing else, it is a much-needed distraction from the disasters of ObamaCare and the various IRS, Benghazi and other Obama administration scandals.

Like so many other favorite liberal issues, income inequality is seldom discussed in terms of the actual consequences of liberal policies. When you turn from eloquent rhetoric to hard facts, the hardest of those facts is that income inequality has actually increased during five years of Barack Obama's leftist policies.

This is not as surprising as some might think. When you make it unnecessary for many people to work, fewer people work. Unprecedented numbers of Americans are on the food stamp program. Unprecedented numbers are also living off government "disability" payments.

There is a sweeping array of other government subsidies, whether in money or in kind, which together allow many people to receive greater benefits than they could earn by working at low-skilled jobs. Is it surprising that the labor force participation rate is lower than it has been in decades?

In short, when people don't have to earn incomes, they are less likely to earn incomes — or, at least, to earn incomes in legal and visible ways that could threaten their government benefits.

Most of the households in the bottom 20 percent of income earners have nobody working. There are more heads of household working full-time and year-round in the top 5 percent than in the bottom 20 percent.

What this means statistically is that liberals can throw around numbers on how many people are living in "poverty" — defined in terms of income received, not in terms of goods and services provided by the government.

Most Americans living in "poverty" have air conditioning, a motor vehicle and other amenities, including more living space than the average person in Europe — not the average poor person in Europe, the average person.

"Poverty" is in the eye of the statisticians — more specifically, the government statisticians who define what constitutes "poverty," and who are unlikely to define it in ways that might jeopardize the massive welfare state that they are part of.

In terms of income statistics that produce liberal outcries about "disparities" and "inequities," millions of people who don't have to earn incomes typically don't.

The more people who are in a non-income-earning mode, the greater the disparities with the incomes of those of us who have to work for a living, and who have to earn more to offset high tax rates. Yet liberals often act as if this is an injustice to those who don't work, rather than an injustice to those who do work, and whose taxes support those who don't.

Actually, the liberal welfare state is an injustice to both, though in different ways.

Despite whatever good intentions some liberals may have had in creating the ever-growing welfare state, practical politicians know that more dependency means more votes for supporters of bigger government.

There are no incentives for either politicians or the bureaucrats who run the welfare state agencies to get people off their dependency on government programs. Moreover, the eligibility rules create a very high cost to individuals who try to rise by getting a job and earning their own money.

It is not uncommon for someone who is receiving multiple government-provided benefits — housing subsidies, food subsidies, etc. — to lose more in benefits than they gain in income, if they decide to take a legitimate and visible job.

If increasing your income by $10,000 a year would cause you to lose $15,000 worth of government benefits, would you do it? That is more than the equivalent of a 100 percent tax rate on income. Even millionaires and billionaires don't pay that high a tax rate.

Liberals don't talk — or perhaps even think — in terms of the actual consequences of their policies, when it is so much more pleasant to think in terms of wonderful goals and lofty rhetoric.

Summer

Calvin Harris Summer (Link)

Overindulge

The Value of Leisure

 

A Great article on the Value of Leisure by ROK

By C.Contrary

“Happiness is leisure.” One of Aristotle’s most-quoted maxims, this terse sentence expresses one of the fundamental truths of human life. And it is a pretty simple one. For leisure is necessary for virtually any activity that makes us happy. Such an activity is intrinsically worthwhile, in the sense that we do it not for money or for the sake of any other burden, but because it is inherently good or satisfying. The only exception to this rule is that rare sort of work people actually enjoy, and which they’d do even if they did not get paid. This exception is something of a moot point, however, for there is effectively no difference between work and leisure if the former finds us doing what we want; that is not work in the commonly burdensome sense of the word.

Read the rest HERE

Buttoning Rules

I always prefer the "Sometimes, Always Never" Rule.  ;)

Race Day!

It's Coming

Get your Mint Juleps ready.  Saturday May 3rd!