Al Fin: "Cowboy Commentary", aka "Eat your veggies" The Flag banner is posted in order to defy those who would make patriotic symbols illegal or disreputable.
Despite popular belief, every culture of every nation draws a line in the sand against government tyranny. The problem is, many draw this line so close to total defeat that it rarely matters.Cliven Bundy and his family claim that they can trace their family ownership back to around the 1870s on their current property in Clark County...This corresponds with the Homestead rights that were established during the Lincoln administration in 1862 to entice people to settle the western frontier and expand the U.S. agricultural enterprises. This 19th-century policy was meant to encourage and support settlement by families like the Bundys. Now, over 150 years later, what seemed to be borderless country surrounding small-town Bunkerville in Nevada is an inhospitable petri dish for the experiments of growing Federal regulations.---Monica Morrillcomment:
One must wonder if sabotage has been the higher order directive.
Idea for reforming the government. Since we had one Civil War over the election of the President, might well have another one because of the actions of a wayward president, we could consider a rotating presidency consisting of the governors of the various states. Each presidents term will be short so as to allow each state to have a turn at governorship. Let's say about 6 months. Since there are 50 states, then that would take 25 years to cycle through every state. The cabinet positions would become elective offices. Let's limit that to a small number of offices. The final outcome should yield a much reduced in power of the office of the presidency, while retaining the functionality of the office.
"A level of suspicion and confusion we haven't had before." That's right. And it's made worse by the increasing politicization of Silicon Valley, and the transformation of its leaders from rebels into what Joel Kotkin calls "the new oligarchs," people who once talked about technology as liberation, but who now seem more interested in using technology as an instrument of control. It's not just NSA spying; it's that the companies gather data on everyone, with comparatively little legal oversight.
Which brings us to former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who answers Klein's article with a blog post titled "Asymmetric Stupidity." It's meant to be an explanation of what Krugman calls "a genuine intellectual puzzle." But it turns out to be an example, and quite a funny one, of biased thinking--in this case, biased thinking about biased thinking. It might have been subtitled "An Autobiography."---James Taranto
His wife, Carol Bundy, said that roughly 200 armed agents from the BLM and FBI are stationed around their land, located about 75 miles outside of Las Vegas. Helicopters circle the premises, and the airspace and nearby roads remain blocked.All of this for a stupid tortoise.
A "victory for gay rights,"
The group was founded in 1964 in Harlem by Clarence Smith, who later changed his name to Allah, a former student of Malcolm X who disagreed with the Nation of Islam over the nature of God.--- Gary Buiso
“He was doing nothing but standing there and filming the landscape,” Bundy said of his brother Dave. “We were on the state highway, not even off of the right-of-way. Even if they want to call [the area that we were filming] federal land; which it’s not; we weren’t even on it. We were on the road.”
None of the family members were armed, but as soon as Dave Bundy began filming the cattle in the distance, 11 BLM vehicles each with two agents arrived and surrounded him --- by Paul Joseph Watson
In July 2010, Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act. The Wall St. Journal wrote of this:
“Senator Chris Dodd’s 1,400-page financial reform bill contains many economic land mines, and here’s one of the worst: Provisions that would make it harder for business start-ups to raise seed capital.”
“Currently, wealthy individuals who want to invest directly in a new business can do so with minimum interference from regulators. The law requires only that the investor be “accredited” by meeting thresholds for net worth ($1 million) or income ($250,000). Entrepreneurs depend on these “angel” investors, since many new businesses lack the collateral for bank loans and are too small to interest venture capitalists. “
“Amazon, Yahoo, Google and Facebook all benefited from angel investors, who typically target companies under five years old. According to a 2009 Kaufman Foundation study, such firms are less than 1% of all companies yet generate about 10% of new jobs. Between 1980 and 2005, companies less than five years old accounted for all net job growth in the U.S. In 2008, angels invested some $19 billion in more than 55,000 companies. “
“Mr. Dodd’s bill would change all this for the worse. Most preposterously, it would require that start-ups seeking angel investments file with the Securities and Exchange Commission and endure a 120-day review. Rare is the new company that doesn’t need immediate access to the capital it raises, and a four-month delay is the kind of rule popular in banana republics that create few new businesses. “
“The Dodd bill also raises the net worth and income thresholds to $2.3 million and $450,000, respectively. The Angel Capital Association, a trade group, estimates that these provisions would disqualify about 77% of current accredited investors.”[ emphasis added ]
So, while Maher’s on the right track, he picked the wrong organization. Yes, there’s thuggery involved, which is a mafia tactic. But unlike the mafia, which was just in it for the money, the new Soviet is in it to subordinate the individual and his beliefs entirely to the will of the Leftist state.---BookwormThe Gramscians have taken over. The new orthodoxy says you'd better get in line, or else.
The removal of Eich is about fascism...a whole mechanism now exists for persecuting people whose views are deemed unacceptable. Today it is directed against Eich; once it was directed against Summers; on other occasions it was employed against Clarence Thomas. But sooner or later, probably sooner, they understand it will be directed against them — or us — or someone. And if it can get a corporate CEO who is widely regarded as the father of Javascript it can get pretty darned anyone.---Richard Fernandez
One of my inmates said that his problem was that he’s a cat in a world of mice.---Tom ChiversThat would seem to be the way I understood it before reading the piece. These people are a different breed of cat alright.
Today, we get a possible answer thanks to the work of Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail. He says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet.---Free Republic quote
Democrats are working hard to draw the Kochs into a more open political battle and help shape the public perception of them as Americans learn more about the money behind the blizzard of midterm advertising. But the battle so far has been asymmetric.---JEREMY W. PETERS and CARL HULSE
The charge that the Walter Reed Project was "recruiting youths into homosexuality" is positively ridiculous and displays a fundamental ignorance on the part of the Ugandan Police and other authorities: sexual orientation is NOT a product of "training", "socialization", "seduction", "improper parenting", "imitation" or the like. Rather, sexual orientation -- which refers to the inclination that a person experiences to be attracted sexually and emotionally to people of the same sex, the opposite sex, or both sexes -- is INNATE and IMMUTABLE.---NdiliMfumuHow can homosexuality be innate and immutable and someones sex is not? In other words, these same people will say that someone who wants to change their sex is not wrong because that is mutable, whereas sexual orientation is definitely not. Sex is definitely in ones genes, but homosexuality has not been proven to be in anybody's genes. It is being asserted as such even without the proof. Even if such proof is found, has does that square with the obvious fact that someones sex is indeed innate and immutable? "A contradiction, that would appear to be", says Yoda.
