Plato got it ...

"The price good men pay for indifference to publiuc affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

Nice to know

who's running things.

Interesting stuff

about memory and how it works.

and another piece from the same site about how opinions are formed.

Malice and Incompetence

from Jerry Pournelle. Says he (I'm paraphrasing):

• President Obama is and always has been a liberal socialist.
• Probably this doesn't make him malicious.
• It does put him in direct conflict with the US Constitution which generally emphasizes individual (and state's) rights over collectivism.
• The upcoming election will be very important.
  

Despite strong (decent, at least) showing in the World Cup

Some expect U.S. men's soccer to decline going forward due to the shrinking number of NCAA Division I Men's soccer programs.
I guess time will tell.
My impression is that soccer is still a growing sport in the U.S. and skilled, passionate players don't necessarily have to go to college (particularly Division I schools) to wind up playing professionally somewhere. As anyone who watches the World Cup knows, it doesn't matter where a person plays professionally when it comes to fielding national teams.

Uh-oh

I just got an email from the UN Secretary General that I have an overdue payment ... I better get right on that.

You know what they say about learning from history ...

Walter Russell Mead discusses the role that peace activists and appeasers played in creating political environments that led to genocides and pogroms in the 20th century.

Fortunately the destructive doves weren't able to fool FDR about the Nazis.  "You can't turn a tiger into a kitten by stroking it," he once said — but the pious nincompoops and delusional intellectuals were persuasive enough here and abroad so that France, Britain and the United States were unable to step while Hitler was still weak and prevent World War Two by enforcing the peace.

Had these people wised up and supported moderate programs of rearmament in the early 1930s and insisted that the western democracies take a stand against Hitler early on, there would have been no Nuremberg Laws, no Holocaust, no mass terror bombings of European cities, no Stalinist occupation of central Europe — and no Cold War.

Morally of course this was nowhere near as bad as what the Nazis and Communists did.  The peaceniks didn't will the slaughter of millions of innocent people: out of ignorance and conceit they merely created the conditions which let it happen.  But while the peace movement wasn't as evil as the dictators, the dictators could never have achieved their goals without their sanctimonious and timorous enablers in the western world.

 

It is just not true, historically speaking, that 'peace movements' lead to peace or, for that matter, support policies that will bring peace.  More often than not, the opposite is true.  Winston Churchill was a grizzled old British imperialist of the worst kind, but if Britain had listened to him instead of to its peace campaigners in the 1930s there most likely would never have been either a World War Two or Cold War.

You don't get peace just by talking about it and wishing for it.

Hopefully we're not doomed to repeat this lesson.

quote for the day

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote,"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."

If I were ever in a position

to fund a multi-billion dollar foundation, I hope that I wouldn't name it after myself ...

A parent's

nightmare

When math gets scary ...

The problem facing the Western world isn't very difficult to figure out: we've spent tomorrow today, and we can never earn enough tomorrow to pay for what we've already burned through. When you're spending four trillion dollars but only raising two trillion in revenue (the Obama model), you've no intention of paying it off, and the rest of the world knows it. In Greece, the arithmetic is starker. To prop up unsustainable welfare states, most of the Western world isn't "printing money" but instead printing credit cards and pre-approving our unborn grandchildren. That would be a dodgy proposition at the best of times. But in the Mediterranean those grandchildren are never going to be born. As I pointed out in my bestselling hate crime America Alone four years ago, Greece has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet—1.3 children per couple, which places it in the "lowest-low" demographic category from which no society has recovered and, according to the UN, 178th out of 195 countries. In practical terms, it means 100 grandparents have 42 grandkids. Greek public sector employees are entitled not only to 14 monthly paycheques per annum during their "working" lives, but also 14 monthly retirement cheques per annum till death. Who's going to be around to pay for that?

from Mark Steyn 

Another shocker

"Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster."

from here

What he said ...

here

I particularly like this bit:

I think it's very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the emancipation proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less in an all-knowing government.

When the election results were in, the one thing I was happy about was that the stranger (a black man) I spoke to at Burger King several months before turned out to be wrong when he told me he didn't think this country was ready to elect a black man president. I hoped we would finally be able to start getting past identity politics. I haven't seen much evidence that that's happened, yet.

Unexpectedly ... you keep using that word ...

A report on weekly jobless claims showed the number of people filing for first-time unemployment benefits rose unexpectedly by 25,000 to 471,000 last week.

from here. 

Seriously, though, why are the numbers always 'unexpectedly' bad. 

I mean, I expect it. 

Who doesn't? 

And why does anyone continue to care about their 'analysis' if it's always wrong?

What's going on with the police?

POLICE: MORE MILITARIZED THAN THE MILITARY? Radley Balko has a letter from a military officer:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.

For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they're after is present at the location, and that it's too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I'm a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call "cordon and knock": they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn't happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we're going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don't have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don't see any reason why they can't use similar methods.

Quite different from using door-busting tactics to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders. Of course, one difference is that we care about winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan . . . .

another post shamelessly lifted from Instapundit 

Why government should be small....

BUT REMEMBER, THE SOLUTION TO EVERY PROBLEM IS MORE REGULATION: "The federal agency responsible for ensuring that the Deepwater Horizon was operating safely before it exploded last month fell well short of its own policy that the rig be inspected at least once per month, an Associated Press investigation shows. In fact, the agency's inspection frequency on the Deepwater Horizon fell dramatically over the past five years, according to federal Minerals Management Service records. . . . In fact, last year MMS awarded the rig an award for its safety history."

from Instapundit 

Global Green Meltdown Gains Momentum

About time. 

We trust the experts less and less, but they keep coming to us for money.

In this atmosphere, the fight for a massive global treaty to fight climate change that involves annual payments of $100 billion and more to (mostly) corrupt and incompetent governments in developing countries that make Greece look as tidy as Sweden has no chance.

see rest here

Why should all of our Supreme Court justices be from two schools?

What's so special about Harvard and Yale?

Seems to fly in the face of anything resembling intellectual diversity ...

Bureaucracy and Tyranny

The Founding Fathers well described "swarms of officers sent hither to harass the people." It is worth pondering how bureaucracy may have inside it a tyranny trying to get out.

read the rest, it's short.

Why aren't Communists more closely associated with Nazis?

"In the world's collective consciousness, the word "Nazi" is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis' ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history."

Read the rest ...
 

The holocaust killed 6 million Jews, and is rightly reviled as one of the most horrifying tragedies in the history of mankind.

Where, then, is the outrage for the 150 million killed by Communists? Why do they get a pass? How is Nazism's racial genocide worse than the ideological genocide of Communists the world over?

We would be wise to remember where Communism tends to end up and to be suspicious of those who look kindly on it.