Nobody Wubs Me!!!!

*sigh*

Oh waits! ZOMG!1!1!1!

Somebody DOES wub me!!

Spring Ist Gesprungen

Gonna grill some lamb tonight and have some mashed spuds and creamed spinach.

Yumsters.

Oh and wine, natch.

Morons Of The World Unite!

Had a great time at the Hoboken Moron Meetup last night. A thousand thanks to the organizer.

In joyous celebration thereof, read this

In the Future, Socialism Will Advance Through “Insurance”

There are two functions of real insurance: hedging against a risk and risk-sharing for those risks we choose to share.

One in ten thousand people might suffer rectal cancer. It probably makes sense for most people, on a voluntary basis, to decide (voluntarily) to pay in a little money for insurance so that if they suffer such a catastrophic and expensive illness, they’ll be covered.

…On the other hand there are things which are not risks: Cost of housing. Food costs. Voluntary contraception costs. These are not risks, as the “odds” such costs will be incurred is 100%, and hence cannot be “insured” against.

Do you want to eat? You’re going to have to budget for food. No one can insure you against the possibility you might need food.

Read all of it. Ace has it exactly right on how the “Mission Creep” er creeps down that slippery slide slope of jumbled metaphors.

Spam Of The Day

You are my intake, I have few web logs and sometimes run out from brand

“You are my intake”

That’s a pick-up line I admit I never thought of.

Get This Man A Mandate

It stands to Reason…

Donna D’s Been Here Visiting For the Week and We Had Ourselves a Bingley Moment

…although at 35¢ per succulent slurpiliciousness.

Made such an impression, we decided those empty oyster containers would be dubbed “Dozen ‘Number 1’. Waitress?”

In the background can be seen the veriest hint of a couple really divine, but neglected, oyster po-boys: “neglected” only while icey, freshly shucked yummies were flying in on salty saucers to our table. We got to them eventually. Lip SCHMACKING.

And cheap.

Ah, the heart sings…

Ah, a Mother’s Love “Religion of Pieces” Style

…”I swear I didn’t hurt her, only slightly, just like any parent would do to their children. Nobody would hurt their own children. You can ask her if she can be here with me,” Farhan told a judge, according to a translation.

Guess what?! Now YOU, TOO, can join in the Sharia fun, because it’s COMING SOON TO A CITY NEAR YOU!

PHOENIX – An Iraqi mother accused of beating her teenage daughter for not going along with an arranged marriage pleaded not guilty Monday in a case police said involved burning the teen on her face and chest with a hot spoon.

Yusra Farhan, 50, entered the plea to charges of aggravated assault, unlawful imprisonment and resisting arrest.

The daughter, 19, refused to participate in an arranged marriage with a 38-year-old man, authorities said.

Two other defendants, the victim’s sister, 18-year-old Tabarak Altameemi, and father, 45-year-old Mohammed Altameemi, also pleaded not guilty to assault and unlawful imprisonment.

MyFoxPhoenix.com cited court records showing that on Feb. 7 Mohammed Altameemi got mad at his daughter because she left night class with a boy. The father picked her up at school and took her home.

He is accused of cutting his daughter’s neck with a knife. Police say he admitted he was trying to kill her, but Tabarak Altameemi intervened.

I’d kill her, too, dang it! Little SLUT.

Oh, how I loves me some Sharia Family Values!

We need MORE.

Greece Is Saved!

Well, er, except for the ah minor detail of all the assumptions their “recovery” is based on keep getting revised downward

(Reuters) – Greece’s gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 7.5 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2011, the country’s statistics office said on Friday based on seasonally unadjusted provisional estimates.

The contraction, which followed a 5.0 percent GDP decline in the previous quarter, was deeper than a previous Feb. flash estimate of -7.0 percent.

Funny how the economic numbers from flailing leftist governments always seem to be “revised” downward, isn’t it?

Rocky Racoon Marriage

In Rocky Racoon
She checked in her room
Only to find hubby’s device…

RACCOON TWP. — A Raccoon Township man was charged after police said he hid a listening device under his wife’s bed in an attempt to catch her having an affair.

Suzanne Cripe, no age given, of 111 Grays Lane, contacted police Feb. 20 and said she had found a “transmitter device” under her bed, according to a township police report. She told police she thought the device had been placed there by her husband, Wayne Comet Cripe, 66, also of 111 Grays Lane.

The Cripes “have been separated for some time,” and were still sharing a house, but they had separate bedrooms, the police report said.

…Wayne Cripe told the police he put the transmitter under his wife’s bed because he wanted to know whether she and her boyfriend were having sex. He told police he was tired of hearing them and wanted to know “if the coast was clear” before entering his home, the report said.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

Strike that. Rather, I’m more interested in Who Trolls For Derrick Bell.

Take the time and watch the videos (yes, I know it requires some strength to put up with Hannity’s patting himself on the back but courage Merry!).

What else was “hidden” on this guy?

The Colts and No Peyton

That’s just wrong.

“I sure have loved playing football.”

Jesus. This is heartbreaking to listen to.

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident

You have a Right to bacon

None of the Muslim delis I have been to have ever prepared a BLT for me, despite my right to bacon.*

Yeah, you read that right. I have a right to bacon.

See, a right isn’t something given to you by government, or something detailed in the Constitution. You are born with rights and no entity can deny you the free exercise of them.

….And having established my right to bacon, Muslim deli owners have no right to deny me access to a delicious bacon sandwich just because their holy book tells them not to eat it.

They have no right to force their religious beliefs on me. The federal government has a Constitutional obligation to secure my right to bacon, and I think the best way to do this is for Congress to pass a law mandating all restaurants to serve bacon.

I have come to this conclusion using the logic displayed by liberals in the last few months. According to regulations handed down by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Americans have a right to contraception, so all insurance providers must provide it without a copay. This means that any religious organization with religious objections to the use of contraception is mandated by force to violate their beliefs and comply with the law.

Apples and oranges, you say? I can’t compare a woman’s health care rights to my love of bacon.

Oh yes I can. See, rights are rights. There is no hierarchy. You don’t say, “Well, this right is more important than that right, so this right takes priority.”

Read the whole thing.

And make mine crispy.

Speaking Of Sis’s Birthday

Is this part of Obamacare?

One person was killed and six injured when a homemade meth lab exploded at a nursing home in Ohio this weekend, the local fire chief tells WKYC-TV.

A meth lab at a nursing home.

Jeeze Luise.

Happy Birthday Tree Hugging Sister!

Here’s an actor representation of another FAMOUS PERSON for whom March 6th was a reasonably important day

(and it is incumbent upon me to remark that family lore maintains that our dear THS learned much of her prowess at the knee of this other March 6th personality)

Obvious Local Fishwrap Headline of the Day

Well, yes. That’s kinda what they do, isn’t it?

Yes, That Explains All Those Successful Dictatorships Doesn’t It?

If you are looking for an article from the MSM about how “we the people” are well frankly just too stupid to be trusted with our own governing and how we really really need Barack and Co. to take matters in to their own hands for our own stupid good to do what’s best for us in a fair-share way of course well then my friends here ya’ go

People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say

That’s the title, and it really tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it? Because these are scientists, my good man, not your average partisan. No, these are the types of folks who dispassionately interpret facts. As I mentioned above, clearly this premise is therefore supported by the wealth of data showing how amazingly successful dictatorships have been and how poorly democracies have performed, right?

Let’s move on to the body of the article

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it.

No, it doesn’t. Not in any way, shape or form, and such “reasonable” ideas like this are are well-oiled steps on the slippery slidey slope to autocratic fascism.

The assumption at the core of the democratic process is that the people have the right to choose. Sometimes they’ll choose well and sometimes they’ll choose poorly; it doesn’t matter. The key fundamental tenet is that the People, and not some self-appointed Order Of More Betters, has the right to be wrong.

But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The ‘unfortunate aspect of the human psyche’ this research is revealing is the Soviet-style classification of those who disagree with you as mentally deficient and unworthy of civil rights:

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

And the obvious solution to this is to deny them the ability to make these judgements.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, “very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.

“You (and that Rethuglican candidate you elected) are just too stupid to properly evaluate our Smart Ideas, which is why you are blocking them, so we’re just going to put them into effect anyway.”

Sound familiar?

He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people’s ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as “above average” — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile. [Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It]

I’m thinking there’s just a whole truckload of irony here that is going right over some people’s heads.

We’re just as undiscerning about the skills of others as about ourselves. “To the extent that you are incompetent, you are a worse judge of incompetence in other people,” Dunning said. In one study, the researchers asked students to grade quizzes that tested for grammar skill. “We found that students who had done worse on the test itself gave more inaccurate grades to other students.” Essentially, they didn’t recognize the correct answer even when they saw it.

Maybe, and I’m going way out on a limb here, just maybe they didn’t recognize the correct answer because…they didn’t know it? This is a big discovery how?

The reason for this disconnect is simple: “If you have gaps in your knowledge in a given area, then you’re not in a position to assess your own gaps or the gaps of others,” Dunning said.

Gaps in areas such as say humility or ego.

Strangely though, in these experiments, people tend to readily and accurately agree on who the worst performers are, while failing to recognize the best performers.

In other words “academics” were never given the glory and praise due their complete and total awesomeness.

The most incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of expertise.

What we need is for the Most Competent Among Us to make all the decisions for us Incompetents.

And guess which category Intellectuals fall in to?

Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Dunning and Kruger’s theories by computer-simulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters’ own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.

Let’s see: you assume most are ‘average’ and don’t allow average to recognize ‘better than average’ and you express shock that ‘average’ wins every time? This is “science”? What exactly are “leadership skills” anyway?

Us “normal” and “incompetent” people are very capable of recognizing when others are smarter than us; however, unlike the Smarter folks we are also very capable of recognizing that the Smarter folks are just a capable of being wrong on an issue as us Morons.

The difference being of course that we can admit our errors.

Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they “effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders.”

No, their advantage is “merely” that the people are free.

And a crucial, if not the crucial, component of Freedom the the freedom to be wrong.

Thank God We Got Rid Of That Dangerous Cowboy

And are now once again a country of laws, with checks and balances to limit power and protect our rights

“At bottom, the administration is asserting the unreviewable authority to kill any American whom the president declares to be an enemy of the state,” Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said in a statement.

Exactly What I Thought

Three random, unlucky soldiers told to “clean that shit up”. Happens a million times a day on any given base anywhere in the world.

…A NATO military official said last week that it appeared detainees were exchanging messages by making notations in the texts. The Western official confirmed reports that after the writings were discovered, two Afghan-American interpreters were assigned to go through the materials at the library and that 1,652 items were removed.

The items, which included the Korans, were placed in boxes and the Western official confirmed that a decision was taken to dispose of them because of a lack of storage space and because of the notes scribbled in them.

At some point a group of soldiers on a work detail came and removed the books to throw them away. The Western official told The Associated Press on Saturday the three soldiers on the garbage detail had no idea what they were carrying to the burn pit.

The Afghan workers then realized what was being burned and tried to extinguish the flames, some burned their fingers trying to salvage the books. Afghan government officials said initial reports indicated four Koran texts were burned.

But because you’re dealing with murderous, unhinged, 7th century savages, THEY should “face a disciplinary review” for taking out the TRASH? Trash that those same savages had already desecrated?

Every parent and spouse of American troops should rise up and FLOOD the DoD, Congress and White House with vehement objections to this farce.

Obama makes me SICK.

Lies, Damned Lies, And Government Reports

Is there any difference?

Change is in the air. Over the last few months, the economic data has been consistently surprising to the upside thanks to temporary drivers like shoppers dipping into their savings and businesses restocking inventories, helping power stocks higher. This, in turn, has boosted consumer and business confidence back to recovery highs — levels not seen since last summer.

Now, “hard data” based on output and activity, not survey forms, is confirming my pessimistic outlook. The main culprit: Rising prices, especially on crude oil (nearing highs seen last spring) and gasoline (up nearly 40% since November). What makes higher inflation so dangerous is that not only does it tie the hands of the Federal Reserve and other central banks — who have almost single handedly engineered the post-November market rally — but it will pressure consumer spending.

But don’t worry. Bumbling Ben says we ain’t got no steenkeen inflation!

Andrew Breitbart is DEAD

Holy Crap.

I’m in shock.

ths Update:

-ths picture of Breitbart @ Presidency 5 in Orlando, FL, September 2011. A lousy picture, because he wouldn’t hold still.

I’m finally home from work and I can’t add much, but my tears to all the thoughts out there on the innerwebs today. I was privileged to sit a mere five rows back from Andrew when he addressed the delegates at Presidency 5 this September. He was mesmerizing from the moment he gamboled out to the podium. What a treat that was and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world in normal circumstances. Who could ever have imagined this day six months later, when dealing with a force of nature like Breitbart?

I can’t. I still can’t.

So I will leave you with his CPAC speech, which is a masterful, Breitbart tour de force and a fitting call to arms for those of us still trying to grasp the fact that this is “for reals”. We had our Happy Warrior flinging himself willy nilly into the fray and now he’s gone.

Gotta do it ourselves. As Andrew said, “We’re not gonna take it anymore.”

Bingley Update: Thoughts from Iowahawk

Yeah. That SuckAss Apology’s

…working out great.

2 US troops killed in Afghanistan following Quran burning

KABUL – Two American soldiers were killed Thursday in a shooting by an Afghan soldier and a literacy teacher at a joint base in southern Afghanistan, officials said, the latest in a series of deaths as anti-Americanism rises following the burning of Qurans by U.S. soldiers.

Both were killed on the same day that the top NATO commander allowed a small number of foreign advisers to return to work at Afghan ministries after more than a week of being locked down in secure locations because of the killing.

Why don’t you tell their folks and families just how calmed down things are?

Barack Obama: Koran burning apology ‘calmed things down’

Barack Obama has defended his decision to apologise to Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, for the burning of Korans at a US airbase last week, insisting the act of diplomacy had “calmed things down”.

You know. Before the next couple of troops get waxed this afternoon…or tomorrow. Or the next day.

Wonderful guy we’ve got in charge.

Proof Positive Obama’s in FULL Campaign Mode

He would NEVER have said anything about it otherwise.

…Obama: Yes, they pretty much swept. So I told them, if you need a lefty. [Laughter.] But I think the very first one was a minor league team out in the Western suburbs that I threw out a first pitch, and I think I did ground it, but, fortunately, nobody knew who I was so it didn’t get on YouTube.

Bill Simmons: Well, how much flexibility do you have with the vest? Like, do you have full, or do you have to go like sidearm?

Obama: It’s a little bulky. You kind of — I give credit — when I think about George Bush and the pitch he threw —

BS: At 9/11. Post-9/11.

Obama: — at 9/11. Unbelievable pitch.

BS: Right down the middle.

Obama: Right down the middle. And huge credit for that. I give that guy a lot of props for that one.

BS: And I think Jeter said to him before the game, “Don’t screw this up,” or something like that.

Obama: That’s exactly what he said. He saw him behind the bullpen and said, “Don’t screw it up.” And he didn’t.

BS: I do feel like it’s, like, a weirdly important thing to have your president be able to come out and throw, like, a half-decent first pitch.

Obama parries that little thrust by ignoring it completely and sharing an anecdote about a “swish” (OH, LORD) he made with a b-ball after being called out on a visit to Iraq as a Senator.

Yeah. “EXACTLY the same” is what I thought, too.

Nutrition Rears Its Ugly Head

Daughter for some reason known only to her beloved teenage mind decided we needed to start eating healthier. Strange child.

So I opened up some wine

This $14 bottle was recommended to me by my barber. Not sure why I need a barber for the 5 hairs I have left but that’s another story. For the price it’s quite good, but frankly it drinks more like a very good merlot than a cab. Lush, sweet full fruit but not really a lot of tannic structure. It drinks great now but I just don’t see it holding up in the cellar for many years (not that that is ever a concern in my household).

Anyhow, I’m told that “healthy” involves these things called “vegetables”

Hmm, ok, now you have my interest.

Anyhow, Daughter declared I must peel the butternut squash, cut it into 1″ chunks, toss in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, rosemary, salt and pepper and then roast in a 375 degree oven for 20 minutes to start

While that was roastilating I opened up a nice little bottle of Freedom Wine for my Bride. I have to give Ave props for finding this for us

Nice pure clean crisp French chardonnay that has never seen even the slightest hint of oak. And for only about $11 bucks quite tasty.

I picked up some tilapia from Costco

and took about a third of the package for us (vac-sealing the rest) and put it in a Pammed baking dish. I melted about 4 tbl of butter in a little dish and added the zest of a lemon, all the juice of aforementioned lemon and some red pepper flakes, salt and black pepper then spooned that over the pesky pescado, cranked the oven up to 400 and put it in on the rack above the squash and turned my attention back to the wine for another 20 minutes. Oh and I steamed some peas.

Not bad, this “nutrition” business. Lemony, a little heat from the red pepper, some nice caramel sweetness on the squash.