Rules of the Road
Those of us who drive have all taken and passed road tests, where we learned all sorts of rules governing how we're supposed to behave when driving on public roads. Yet many who commute regularly (I log 90 or more minutes a day, 5 days a week, on the highways of NYC's...
The Koch Brothers
The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. - Charles Koch From the Wall Street Journal. Over 3500 comments were posted, many of them...
More Minimum Wage Malarkey
Robert Reich, who was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, and who is currently a professor at Berkeley, made a "put it to rest" pronouncement regarding raising the minimum wage, offering 7 reasons why it should be $15 per hour. I was going to comment only on the...
The War on Mobility
Hot on the heels of the Administration's and the Democrat's push to raise the minimum wage comes an announcement that rules regarding overtime pay will be changed. For those not familiar with the byzantine rules regarding overtime, employees who operate in a...
The Toxic Selfishness of Modern Liberalism
Selfishness is a dirty word. It invokes images of naked greed, heartlessness, egocentrism, lack of caring for one's fellow man, and even irresponsibility. From a young age, we're taught that selfishness is bad, bad, bad. Sharing, we are told, is the opposite of...
The Happiness I Pursue
Much noise has been made in the conservative blogosphere about the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, and the difference between the pursuit of happiness and the providing of happiness. The key point, one that should be obvious, is...
Sloppy Logic Gone Viral
My friend John sent me this video, which has gone viral on YouTube (6 million hits), knowing I'd enjoy analyzing it. It's awash in sloppy logic and fallacies, and gives the illusion of being a sound line of reasoning when it is anything but. Watch it, then contemplate...
People Can’t Be Trusted
Ask someone with statist leanings why we need government regulation, and some variation of these four words are very likely to escape his mouth. Perhaps not right away, perhaps only after some probing and questioning and challenging, but it's almost a given that this...
Health Care’s Unhealed Wound
The history of government activity regarding health care and health insurance in the USA, if regarded from our 21st century perspective, can be summarized as law-problem-edict-problem-reform-problem-regulation-problem-fix-problem, going back decades. Yet the decades...
A Prediction Regarding ObamaCare
Obamacare's in a death spiral, with 38 and counting extra-legal changes, the mandate not working to get people to enroll, and so forth. Watch as, at some point, spin doctors come out and say Obama wanted single payer all along, that single payer will fix all that ails...
Growth for Growths Sake
I saw an interesting quote today on the Internet. The quote, by Edward Abbey, read: Growth for Growth's Sake is the Ideology of the Cancer Cell. It's a strong aphorism, well constructed, aggressive and confrontational. It also immediately struck me as very wrong, or...
Everything Affects Everything
As a brutal February rolls into a hopefully less brutal March, some of us start contemplating the spring planting season, with its promise of home-grown, straight-from-the-vine tomatoes. If you've never had a tomato straight off the vine, you've missed out on one of...
The One-Number Trap
Back in the 1980s, the local blood bank, which would visit our company every quarter for donations, offered free cholesterol screenings for those who donated blood. We'd get a number and a reference note that indicated the cut-off between good and not-good was 200. A...
Connecting the Dots
The NSA domestic spying scandal has prompted outrage from many corners of society and the political sphere. Many, but not all - there are people who welcome the intrusiveness in exchange for security (or the false perception of it, but set that aside for another...
Obama’s Greatest Legacy
To date, there have been 37 changes made to the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare). It shouldn't come as a surprise that a law that affects 1/7th of the nation's economy, that consists of 381,517 words, and that has spawned over 11 million words worth of regulations...
Tyranny and Complicity
Consider four quotes from President Obama: I am elected by you. I am constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders put in place. - April 2013 Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than...
First Do No Harm
A few years back, I was having a chat with my auto mechanic, an old family friend. He was lamenting the difficulty in finding good help (a common complaint and issue for anyone who employs people), noting that so many "experienced" mechanics are simply, as he called...
Why Be Outraged?
A staple of conservative and libertarian press and blogging is the story of the liberal academic or college student who calls for the censoring of non-liberal speech or ideas on campus. These stories usually (and intentionally) invoke shock, outrage and indignation....
A Fortunate Few
President Obama recently delivered a speech, in which he stated: those at the top are doing better than ever too many Americans are working harder than ever just to keep up it's our job to reverse those trends, and we've gotta build an economy that works for everyone,...
You Don’t Need Conspiracy Theories…
... to Distrust the Government I was talking with my brother as he was sitting in traffic on the Belt Parkway one sunny Saturday afternoon, when he chimed in with "chemtrails." He was being sarcastic, of course, amusingly associating the condensation trails formed by...
This Week's Poll
Loading ...Most Liked Posts
Most Liked Comments
on We Condemn Bigotry, Except When We Celebrate It 9+
on Trump’s Bullies 7+
on Gun Rights Lesson #551 – Sensible Gun Regulation 6+
on Let The Squirming Begin 5+on Clinton The Bulletproof 5+
on Fact-Checking Trump 5+on Is the Earth’s Climate in Trouble? 4+
on Congratulations, Democrats! 4+
on Whence Morality? 4+- on Bernie-Bros, Meet William Hauser 4+
Active Comment Threads
Most Commented Posts
Universal Background Checks – A Back Door to Universal Registration
COVID Mask Follies
When Everything Is Illegal…
An Anti-Vax Inflection Point?
“Not In My Name”
The Great Social Media Crackup
War Comes Through The Overton Window
The First Rule of Italian Driving
Most Active Commenters