"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
So, a week ago today, my Wonder Woman explained the mystery of why she’s stayed with me so long. Inertia. Seems, according to her, that once we got going together, it was just easier to stay on the wagon and keep moving along together.
Maybe that’s because it’s been all downhill for her… *heh*
Whatever; as long as she’s comfortable with it, I’m staying on the wagon too.
Here it is, 9:00 on a Wednesday morning. I’m looking at a full plate of “work” to do (why the scare quotes? Because it’s all “work” I can approach as play… when I finally get off my fat… fundament and do it), and yet here I sit with four browsers open in three machines (one “real” and a couple of VMs hosted in it), with something over 100 tabs open among the four browsers…
Now, that’s a problem. I’m not doing real multi-tasking but semi-background serial semi-multitasking in a major ADHD/schizo fashion. Sure, things from nearly all the tabs are perking in the background while the foreground is being dealt with (as I write this, things from John Ringo’s rants page and thoughts from Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor Musings are mixing it up with Thomas Sowell and John Agresto over at NRO, while some XBox geek is whispering in my third ear about XBox modding and my gripping hand is grappling with the weird pre-emptive sound problem that’s cropped up in Linux again and my first and other hands are juggling a Mercedes Lackey book and a Dean Koontz book and an Ann Coulter book–offline/online, mix n match).
I think I need to take a break from the computer. Except part of the “work” I need to do is right here sitting on my fat fundamental.
I blame it all on the fact that this is the most comfortable chair in the house. Riiiiiight. *heh* (Well, maybe some of it is due to the fact that I seem to have developed the attention span of a gnat with ADHD. NEED MORE COFFEE!!!)
Maybe it’s time once again to look to Wordsworth (open another tab… ;-))
THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Political Byline, Faultline USA, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, DragonLady’s World, Rosemary’s News and Ideas, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, CORSARI D’ITALIA, Democrat=Socialist, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
“Spring forward, fall back.”
Yep. just a heads up for those of y’all still wondering about the silly changes in DST. This year, at 2:00 a.m. Sunday, November 2, most of the U.S. will roll clocks back to 1:00. That means, for those of us who don’t plan on being awake at that time, rolling clocks back tonight before heading off for some shuteye.
Personally, I plan on making tonight a “storage battery” night and heading off to get some much needed rest even earlier than usual. Ginormously pooped out already, and it’s only 8:00 (DST) in the ayem here. Sure, been up since 5:00, but that’s no real excuse, now is it? As a matter of fact, I think I’ll go take a nap now, too.
Buh-bye!
Note: I am NOT going to link to the facts below. Why? Because unless you do your own digging to either verify or attempt to prove this post a bunch of hot air, you’ll never learn for yourself. This is an issue it’s important to get right, and anyone reading this who doesn’t care to do their own homework is simply a part of the problem. So there. Besides, I got all the info I needed from a few clicks: a google search and a search of US Census reports. It’s so easy a Geico commercial would be harder. *heh*
The “47 million uninsured” meme has been bruited about so much, and without specific all too often, that I begin to wonder if the spirit of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels isn’t infusing the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind.
First, subtract from that inflated number at least 10 million illegals Obama and the Dhimmicraps want us to pay for. Those folks should be denied ALL health care save for genuine and extemely urgent and life-threatening emergencies. Period. Without exception. Let them go back whence they came, get in line and enter the country legally, and then maybe social services of ANY kind might be properly made available to them.
That’d whittle the leftards’ and Hivemind’s number down to around 37 million right there.
Now, subtract the number of folks making over $50,000 a year who are just too cheap to buy their own insurance. How many? About 17 million.
Oops. We’re down to less than half the brutal numbers leftards are whining about.
But the hits keep on coming: according to the Congressional Budget Office, between 40% and 50% of “uninsured” are transitory uninsured who are simply between coverages. Yep. Within three months or so, nearly half the “uninsured” at any one point are simply on their way to different coverage.
Now, we’re down to the 8-13 million the Kaiser Foundation estimates to be the range of those who are uninsured and unlikely to be able to afford their own insurance.
So the next time you hear an Obamaniac or other leftard weep and wail and gnash their teeth over the need to take YOUR money and use it to provide health coverage for illegal aliens, deadbeats or folks who are simply between coverages, just blow ’em a big fat raspberry.
Probably. (As Napoleon is said to have opined, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.)
In the last few weeks, Congress has once again validated two aphorisms:
The eight most dreaded words in the English language are, “I’m from the government; I’m here to help.”
and
“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”- Mark Twain
(Perhaps I should add another Twainism to the list of aphorisms Congress has recently validated: “There is no native criminal class except Congress.”)
Anywho…
The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 that was signed into Law by Dhimmi Kahtah had ostensibly good intentions: allow folks who were being redlined (supposedly because of race but actually because they were BAD RISKS) to obtain mortgages for homes. Eventually, this led to
Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992, passed during a lame duck Repugnican’t presidency by a Dhimmicrappic Congress, ” …required the Federal National Mortgage Association, commonly known as Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, commonly known as Freddie Mac, to devote a percentage of their lending to support affordable housing. This in part, contributed to increased Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pooling and selling of such loans as securities , (i.e. securitization), and expanded the secondary market for those loans.”*
In part. The 1992 act required “a percentage” of Freddie/Fannie lending to support so-called “affordable housing” but it was in the hands of the Clintoon Administration that the practices accelerating the downfall of mortgage lenders reeally took off. Contra Bubba’s recent disclaimers, “In early 1993 President Clinton proposed new regulations for the CRA which would increase access to mortgage credit for inner city and distressed rural communities.[7] The new rules went into effect on January 31, 1995… “*
And so it goes.
More recently,
“In 2002 there was an inter-agency review of the effectiveness of the 1995 regulatory changes to the Community Reinvestment Act and new proposals were considered. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Office of the Controller of the Currency put new regulations into effect September of 2005. The regulations were opposed by a contingent of Democrats because the action ‘undercuts the statutory purpose of the Act for institutions to meet the needs of low and moderate-income persons and communities by OTS.'”*
So, Dhimmis conspired to leave the CRA free to wreak havoc on our financial system by appealing to two base traits shared by many humans: risk avoidance (after all, don’t make those loans to people who might default and you KNOW the Feds are gonna squeeze your privates for “discrimination” or some such bullshit) and greed (“If I have to make these crappy loans, I might as well get as much as I can out of ’em before they go toxic”).
Let me leave you with this video. Watch the whole thing. Yes, the whole thing. Get a cuppa joe or two to help you sit still that long if you’re AADHD or whatever, but WATCH IT!
Now, go watch this one, too.
Do note, America’s Third World County isn’t participating in the CRA-Freddie-Fannie-Wall Street kerfuffle. Sure folks elsewhere are losing their shirts, but around here, the banks are solid (don’t ask about St Louis or KC, though–those places on on another planet far, far removed from America’s Third World County), business and life goes on.
NOTE: I did use Wikipedia for the citations, despite its notoriously uneven content. The key to using Wikipedia wisely is filtering. One must learn a great deal from elsewhere about a subject so that filtering out the B.S. and outright stupidity that frequently creeps into Wikipedia articles–Jerry Pournelle has given up on correcting misstatements of verifiable fact in the biographical Wikipedia article on himself, for example–becomes simply an exercise in doing ones own homework. When, as here, I find a Wikipedia article worth citing because of accuracy and concise treatment, I’ll use it. But that doesn’t happen all that often.
Trackposted to Diary of the Mad Pigeon, , Faultline USA, Woman Honor Thyself, McCain Blogs, The World According to Carl, Shadowscope, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, and Conservative Cat, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Due to some email I received recently from a visitor who just didn’t “get” a post of mine, I added the following to the “What is third world county about?” page:
I reserve the right to speak complete nonesense (see “silliness” reference above) if I wish to. Usually, I’ll give some indication that I’m doing so, but if I do write something that’s nonsense, and I don’t hang out some obvious sign that I’m doing so, AND you are simply too dull to catch it, no problems. We’ll both just blame your mother.
Are we clear now?
*heh*
Longtime Republicans have called their own party “The Stupid Party” because of phone calls like I just recieved from the McCain Campaign. Seems I’m invited (only God knows why) to a McCain-Palin “Victory Rally” 75 miles away from twc central. The doors open at 8:30 a.m. and the rally begins at 10:30 a.m.
Monday morning.
Cluebat to The Stupid Party: Your base isn’t manufactured “victim” welfare Democrats. Your base actually works for a living.
Dumbasses.
Trackposted to Pet’s Garden Blog, No Apology, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Pink Flamingo, Woman Honor Thyself, and Democrat=Socialist, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
One excerpt then you’d better click through to read the whole thing or I’ll disown you.
🙂
She is so absolutely, remarkably, spectacularly ordinary. I think the magic of Sarah Palin speaks to a belief that so many of us share: the sense that we personally know five people in our immediate circle who would make a better president than the menagerie of candidates the major parties routinely offer. Sarah Palin has erupted from this collective American Dream — the idea that, given nothing but classic American values like hard work, integrity, and tough-minded optimism you can actually do what happens in the movies: become Leader of the Free World, the President of the United States of America. (Or, well, you know, vice president.)
(Yes, I am serious about reading the whole thing; that’s why I made the whole of the blockquoted material clickable. Go!)
h.t. BeldarBlog
Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Democrat=Socialist, The World According to Carl, and Shadowscope, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Reading (back) weekly installments of Doug Wilson’s novel-in-progress, Evangellyfish, I ran across this lil gem:
“We really need to do our part to reduce this epidemic of illicit banging in the evangelical world. Before this week I had no idea. Back in Arkansas, we were all good Christians until we got our drivers’ licenses. After that we were good pagans. It is this mixing of categories that I find so troublesome.”
*ROFLKASTM@FO*
Now, that’s some funny stuff.
(The book’s posted in blog format, so just page down to the bottom to begin. Actually, the best format for reading the book would probably be via newsreader. Just hit the RSS feed button in a mature browser–or even in Internet Exploder Infinite Security Holes version (which is any version at all), now–and have all the chapters in your default newsreader.)
Trackposted to Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Rosemary’s Thoughts, , The World According to Carl, DragonLady’s World, Shadowscope, The Pink Flamingo, , , Dumb Ox Daily News, Democrat=Socialist, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Via email:
T H E 1 0 C O M M A N D M E N T S
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this:You cannot post ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal,’ ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,’ and ‘Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness’ in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians, because it creates a hostile work environment.
Yeh, poor babies. Wouldn’t want lawyers, judges and politicians *spit* to feel assaulted by *shudder* moral standards of behavior.
(With apologies to the few honest, decent lawyers, both judges and the politician who do observe decent moral standards. OK, so I’m assuming there’s a politician somewhere who is still a decent person fifteen minutes after becoming a politician. And, actually, there may be more than that, since there are so damned many of the critters–and no, I am not using profanity when I refer to politicians–as a class–as “damned”. Think about it. )
Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, , Adam’s Blog, Conservative Cat, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.