Making a long story longer

The funniest thing I read today

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:27:03 -0600

Is this Urban Dictionary entry on Atlanta (Definition 26):

If you like ghetto fabulous craphole dumps, you will think you have died and gone to heaven in Atlanta.

The simple and direct entry on Forsyth County is good (and somewhat accurate) too.

Making little rocks out of big rocks

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:44:10 -0600

Sorry for the dreadfully light blogging lately - for the record, here is a short summation of my thoughts lately.

Bush will issue between 150-200 pardons between now and when he leaves office
I'm still furious about the bailouts
I think my initial view of Obama, as being an excellent figurehead, with no fixed ideology, is coming into sharper focus.
And this is the funniest commentary on the bailouts I've seen yet. It's a good indicator that popular opposition remains strong.

Quick Sunday link

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:06:20 -0600

Wrapping up a miserable week, and onto another

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:50:25 -0600

Work has sucked, my dog has somethign wrong with him, and I've got a massive toothache. But paying in art instead of money makes me smile.

Something funny

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 20:33:53 -0600

From this Wikipedia page on Melungeons

On the other hand, in the tensions about race and slavery leading up to the Civil War, several Melungeon men were tried in Hawkins County, Tennessee, in 1846 for "illegal voting", under suspicion of being black.

It brings to mind the Dick Gregory joke

"I'd rather be black than gay because you never have to tell your parents you're black."

Link clearing roundup

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:56:56 -0600

Thoughts on the recent events soon, here we are just to clear off some tabs

Realtime election results

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 13:39:29 -0600

For the State of Georgia can be found here
http://www.sos.georgia.gov/elections/election_results/2008_1104/

Election predictions

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:11:35 -0600

Obama by 3.5 percent nationally (the polls overstate the Democrats, but not by enough to matter), the Dems pick up 20 or so house seats and make it to 58 senators, Allen Buckley pushes the Georgia Senate race into a runoff, which Chambliss will pull off by a narrow margin in three weeks. Bob Barr does better than any recent LP candidate with over 1% of the vote, coming in at 3% in Georgia. Obama will be a good winner, and McCain will be gracious in defeat, and out long, lurid parade of tired whores will finally be over.

Now everyone read this article on why voting in unimportant.

Line of the moment - morning edition

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:00:03 -0600

From Tom Palmer's entry on the DC gun case

“When seconds count, the cops are just minutes away”
John Steinbeck.

Good bailout commentary

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 09:13:30 -0500

Quote of the moment - election edition

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:53:37 -0500

From this diavlog (by Brink Lindsey) -

We've reached a point where a top income tax rate of 35% is Social Darwinism, and a top income tax rate of 39% is socialism.

Weird news from the Motherland

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:48:34 -0500

82-year-old traded drugs for sex, Kentucky cops say - in Berea no less!

Political annoyances

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 15:07:53 -0500

I've gotten three robocalls today; why would that make anyone favorably disposed to a candidate?

On productivity

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:23:41 -0500

For the programmers out there - did any of you know about this feature (code snippets) of Visual Studio? Somehow I didn't. If not, it's the best 14 minutes you'll spend today

Monday links

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:58:58 -0500

Sorry I've just been posting links lately, I've been working a ton and my brain doesn't have much energy left for original thought. In any case, read these

Reason inteviews Bob Barr
Radley Balko on why the Republicans should lose big - basically it's the only way they'll clear out the deadwood. One thing to bear in mind; after the election of 2004 everyone was making noise about the demise of the Democratic Party and the permanent Republican majority - things change in a hurry, and the nature of the American system basically IS a push and a pull, and a mix of the good cop and the bad cop.
Plastic surgeons voice their opinions
McCain and Liddy - How high of an opinion does one have to have of politicians to be shocked by criminal associations anyway? Political careers are naked grabs for power.
What we do or who we are...

Quote of the moment

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:29:33 -0500

I remembered this recently, it's from Findlay Dunne, not Mencken

A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large.

From this quotations page.

Howard Stern makes himself useful

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:55:45 -0500

Via these questions to Obama supporters - basically he attributed McCain's positions to Obama and the people shown approved of them. Although perhaps there's some wisdom in this - we have ever fewer ways of gauging the future, and campaign rhetoric is harder to enforce (see Bush's 2000 foreign policy speeches, and every economic speech he's ever made) , so choosing on personality doesn't seem ridiculous...

Loner Updates

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:43:39 -0500

Sorry for all the light blogging - I've been in a frenzy building the new company/web application. I also installed (with a friend) a new carrying beam in the basement - the house is far more stable and level now.

In the meantime - check out the following links

British Health Services uses private doctors for their own people. It's a lot like American public school teachers sending their own kids to private school. It's a dramatic lack of faith in the system, but I suppose the government knows best, just like they say.
In Nebraska, the safe haven laws, usually intended for infants, can be used for children up to age 18. People have been coming in from out of state to abandon their teenagers.

Line of the moment

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 21:05:04 -0500

From this post on Naomi Klein

and then quietly suffocates Klein’s own ideological dreams (so like his, once!) with a pillow and a sigh.

Saturday night special

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 23:24:04 -0500

Inequality and the Sergei Brin effect - self selection on a grand scale
What Paulson might get out of the bailouts
Cobb Country gets a tank - for real. I grew up there, and in general, the place makes Mayberry look like Escape from New York. Perhaps it's to quell the riots should (really, when) McCain lose.
Tom puts it quite well with
the penchant for blaming the problems on “greed” is the Great Chicago Fire on oxygen.
My neighborhood makes the news. Apparently it's "rich in tolerance and diversity". I was not interviewed for it, though I still like it a lot.
Rocksploitation now has a real music video - sort of.

A lovely new site

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:49:44 -0500

Check out Skeptoid. It's a bit better than Snopes.

4 things

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:15:59 -0500

Wilkerson pegs the lack of ideology with McCain and Obama with
McCain doctrine and Obama doctrine for use of force in humanitarian situations: Obama: There might be moral issues at stake. Surely we should stop Holocaust. Rwanda. Standing idly by diminishes us. Basically, I have no principle. I leave it at the discretion of my evolved moral intuition.
Why do we have to guess what these people want to do?
This graphic gets it right
Death to the Four Year Degree - I've felt this way for a while actually.
And we need this guy back again

Something that goes unmentioned

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:58:34 -0500

Many people have mentioned that Palin has benefited from being an attractive woman, and Obama has benefited from being black. One thing that has not been mentioned is that Obama is a good looking black guy. If he were eight inches shorter, 80 pounds heavier, and sweated a lot, would anyone even remember him at this point, or would he be hanging out with Richardson on the short list for Secretary of State?

Thoughts on the debate - VP Edition

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:29:48 -0500

In random order

Regarding Palin - If you can cram enough into 6 weeks to pull off an acceptable job at a debate, either the interview process is flawed or the job simply isn't that hard. The fact that McCain and Obama can not show up for work for two year periods would suggest the latter.
While I don't think Palin won the debate (it wasn't set up to have a winner really) she clearly took and held the initiative the entire evening
Biden looked like the knowledgeable guy he probably is, which is really all the veep should be.
Should McCain lose this election - which it seems he will - Palin probably will be competing with Huckabee for the face of the Republican party, and winning. It certainly seems to going in a populist direction
The deep love of Israel was particularly noxious on both parties. Granted, Palin is a tribal candidate, not an ideological one, but there seemed to be more love and affection for Israel from her than there was for America as a whole (small town America is a subset). Biden was just foppish on that matter.
It's insulting to only mention Israel when talking about our allies, particularly when the UK and Australia have always stood buy us. Neither mentioned those members of the Anglosphere.
The constant mentions of energy independence destroyed any ability for me to take either seriously.
While I've seen several mentions of Palin winking at the camera, I haven't seen any mention of her refering to him as "Senator O'Biden" nor of Biden's reference to "Bosniaks".

Friday link clearing

moodyloner@gmail.com (Steve French) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:02:26 -0500

Since these have been piling up in Firefox, here's what I've been reading

Obama and the Born-Alive issue - ghoulish stuff. The controversy of abortion is where one draws the line on person vs potential person. Even the most ardent pro-choicers seem to draw it at birth, but it seems not everyone does.
Via Will Wilkerson
Obama terrifies me: an intelligent, thoughtful, well-prepared, capably extemporaneous man ascribing a future holocaust to some sort of non-existent, fantastical, steroidal Iran; talking about unsanctioned cross-border incursions into Pakistan because we found bin Laden, or some such, and must “take him out”; warbling around about “main street” while, in a lawerly, circumlocutory way signaling that he’s ultimately going to get behind hundred-billion-dollar cash bailouts to institutions that ought to be dismantled, destroyed, scattered to the wind. He wants GM to make electric cars. He wants the American people to know that he will appear before them to make extravagant xenophobic declarations in order to assuage their insecurity about the rise of other competing economies. He does this all in a calm, perfectly reasonable manner, with a convincing boardroom demeanor, and judging by the reactions of my liberal friends, with whom I listened, this was basically pleasing to them.
McCain is of course out of his mind: forgetful, vicious, reactionary. And his ideas are even crazier than BO’s, but there’s a certain comfort in the fact that their insanity is laid so plainly and mercilessly bare by the grinning psychopath’s delivery. He provides no quarter for those who want to convince themselves that by Killing People for Their Own Good we are not actually killing them, or that by suborning corporate malfeasance we are combating it, or that by desperately seeking to maintain the geography of radial sprawl and the automobile we are seeking “energy independence.”
I've had the thought lately regarding McCain, Bush, and bailouts - if we're going to have corporate socialism shouldn't we have a Democrat do it? At least they don't have the supposed association with the free market that Republicans do.
David Friedman on the bailout
The failure of a firm doesn't wipe out wealth, except to the extent that the firm itself—its firm culture, web of relationships and such—has some value. When a firm fails, that is at least some evidence that that value was negative, which is why nobody chose to buy out the firm and keep it going. The ordinary assets of the firm—its buildings, land, stocks, bonds, mortgages, and whatever it owns—don't vanish when the firm fails, they get sold to someone else.

The bailout is not a way of preventing the loss of value. The loss (or transfer) of value occurred when people made bad mortgage loans. What happened more recently was the recognition of that loss. All the bailout can do is to shift the loss from some people to others, from the stockholders and creditors of firms that are now effectively bankrupt to the taxpayers.