Science Daily News.
Artist's Imp;ression |
Artist's Imp;ression |
"Any flat tax calibrated to earnings from labor and capital will necessarily redistribute income to the less well off, because an individual’s share from standard public services, such as access to public highways, does not increase proportionate to his income."Jay Epstein at Hoover.org
New Yorker |
America is now run by dead people—by political leaders from the past who enacted mandatory programs that churn ahead regardless of waste, irrelevance, or new priorities.
Rules have replaced leadership in America. ... Nobody asks, “What’s the right thing to do here?” Instead, they wonder, “What does the rule book say?”
Public paralysis is the inevitable result of the steady accretion of detailed rules.
Clinton and the Pope died on the same day and, due to some administrative foul up, Clinton gets sent to heaven and the Pope gets sent to hell.
The Pope explains the situation to the hell administration, they check their paperwork, and the error is acknowledged. They explain, however, that it will take about 24 hours to make the switch. The next day, the Pope is called in and the hell administration bids him farewell and he heads for heaven.
On the way up, he meets Clinton on the way down, and they stop to chat.
Pope: Sorry about the mix up.
Clinton: No problem.
Pope: Well, I'm really excited about going to heaven.
Clinton: Why's that?
Pope: All my life I've wanted to meet the Virgin Mary.
Clinton: You're a day late.
Margaret Wente |
"Sixty years ago, sexual behaviour among the young caused deep alarm among the puritanical religious right. Today, it causes deep alarm among the puritanical progressive left. Like their forebears, they are doing their best to restrict and regulate it."
Strawberry seducing mammal for reproductive purposes. |
Modern law is too dense to be knowable. “It will be of little avail to the people,” James Madison observed, “if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” The quest for “clear law” is futile also because most regulatory language is inherently ambiguous. Dense rulebooks do not avoid disputes—they just divert the dispute to the parsing of legal words.
"Nursing homes, day-care centers....(have) a maze of input-oriented regulations. “Food shall be stored not less than 15 cm above the floor”; “there shall be .09 recreational workers per resident”—about a thousand rules in most states for nursing homes. Australia ...in the wake of scandalous revelations of poor nursing homes ... abandoned the thick rule book and replaced it with 31 general principles, for example to provide “a homelike environment” and to honor residents’ “privacy and dignity.” The result was an almost immediate transformation for the better.
Principles, ironically, are less susceptible to abuse of state power and gamesmanship than precise rules. One of the many paradoxes of “clear law” is that no one can comply with thousands of rules. With principles, a citizen can stand his ground to an unreasonable demand."
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” " (A quote from Heinlein, via Instapundit).
"Scottish history offers proof that even the most failed state can be fixed – by uniting with a richer and more tranquil neighbour. For most of the early modern period, the Scots kingdom was Europe’s Afghanistan. In the Highlands and the Hebrides, feudal warlords ruled over an utterly impoverished populace in conditions of lawlessness and internecine clan conflict.
Lots to chew over on voting day.
"Another Scotland has sprung up. ...What did history have to do with Scotland’s future as a new Scandinavian-style haven for egalitarianism, inclusiveness, clean energy, world peace and all the other things implicitly repudiated by the gimlet-eyed Tory bampots?"
"So this is our message to the people of Scotland. We want you to stay. Head and heart and soul, we want you to stay. Please: don’t mix up the temporary and the permanent.
"Don’t think: I’m frustrated with politics right now, so I’ll walk out the door and never come back. "If you don’t like me – I won’t be here forever. If you don’t like this Government – it won’t last forever. But if you leave the UK – that will be forever".
Rebellious Scots to Crush (Battle of Culloden) |
"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.
…
They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.
They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn’t done enough for — yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part — something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.
The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason — it is his reason, and not ours".
Do the world's Muslims want their contribution and legacy to the 21st century to be murder and rape? That question does not call for collective punishment. However, it does leave open the question of whether or not Muslims should feel ashamed for the murderous impulses many of their coreligionists feel.
Dress up and be someone new. |
"It has been my observation over the years, that when a group starts to strike often, then that profession is going the way of the dinosaur. Drywall was invented in the late 50's because of all the strikes by the plasterers - anyone can install drywall (a bit more skill is needed to install on ceilings). Again, there were many strikes by the milkmen in the early 60's - we now buy our eggs and milk in the grocery store, no more home deliveries.
The teachers in the public school seem to strike ever 3 or 4 years in all of the provinces. It is my belief that more parents will be sending their children to private or charter schools and sucking up the extra expense, so that they will not have to deal with this nonsense and be held to ransom all the time. OT, I also think that Canada Post will be a much smaller presence in 10 years, again because of all the strikes. With the last strike in 2012, I had all my bills delivered on-line and I pay them on-line. Enough with all this nonsense!"