The Perfect Image For This 4th Of July

H/T: Mut and Dean and WC and B-Daddy and probably lots more. I'm not sure of the pedigree of this image. If I recall, I came up with the slogan, but the artwork was done and published by the rest of the SLOBs.

Go Along To Get Along

I'm having English Muffins with Duerr's Manchester Marmalade this morning. I figure if the American government wants to go back to a tyrannical autocracy where certain religions are singled out for harassment, I might as well join in the fun.

God save the Queen!

That whole Revolution thing was a big mistake.

When Does It Stop?

I was perusing the Interweb Tubes this morning when I came across this article about Detroit's fiscal woes on the Reason site. It was pretty standard stuff - the progressives had driven the city right into bankruptcy through the familiar combination of taxing, spending, regulating and union payoffs. This snippet, however, got to me.

Had Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder not stepped in and let it borrow $137 million on the state’s credit card, Detroit would have defaulted on its debt obligations as well as payment to employees and vendors months ago.

But in exchange, Snyder wanted the authority to clean up the city’s books so that it wouldn’t be back rattling its tin cup again next year. His original proposal would have left Detroit Mayor Dave Bing ...and the city council, a corrupt and dysfunctional entity, in charge of the city’s daily operations. But it would have handed the city’s finances to a board with powers to sell city assets, outsource services, lay off employees and void union contracts...

This was much too threatening for city leaders, who joined hands with unions and professional race-baiters like Jesse Jackson and accused Snyder of orchestrating a white conspiracy to send Detroit’s predominantly black population “back to the plantation.”

Oh, please. This is total nonsense and no one with even a spark of rationality would think that Governor Snyder is some kind of closet Klansman seeking to subjugate the blacks of Detroit. Mayor Bing and his cronies, of course, got away with it and Governor Snyder backed off.

Why? When does this end?

My suggestion: This will end when someone like Governor Snyder responds to the racial grievance crowd like you would to a tantrum-throwing four-year-old. Something along the lines of, "OK, work it out of your system. March and chant and picket all you want, but you're still going to be subject to a governance board. If you want to spend our money, young man, you'll live under our rules." I'd have my staff put on an air of exasperation and make sure they practiced rolling their eyes and shaking their heads for the cameras. I'd treat this like the transparent, childish nonsense that it is. I wouldn't give them a syllable of sympathy and under no circumstances would I ever treat their accusations with anything even resembling seriousness.

And if they don't agree to terms, they can just go bankrupt.

Note: I'm sure Michigander Tim can correct my errors here. Is it really as simple as this?

Gorgeousness of the Day

This is a beautiful ad. Not sure if anyone watching this has purchasing decision authority, but the ad itself is great.

Why Are We Even Arguing About This?

... where "this" could be practically anything these days.

We're told over and over again that America is becoming more and more polarized. Well, duhh. Politics is all about arguing. As Leviathan grows to envelop more and more things in our lives, we naturally take political sides and argue with each other about it.

It's not that we're becoming more polarized, it's that there are ever new dimensions upon which we can fracture.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu came out recently and said we need more electric cars. Why? Who asked him what we need to drive? The dude has backed one green energy toad after another and has a practically unblemished record of failure, yet he sees the need to rush about telling us all what kind of cars to buy. Thanks to Steve, our collective car purchasing habits are now in the domain of politics.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius, noting how Catholic grade school teachers at our kids' school had a three-day gun battle with goons hired by the Diocese where 10 whole blocks of San Diego were laid waste over the lack of birth control coverage in their insurance plans, decided the government had to put an end to the Church's War on Women and jam contraceptives down our throats*. Consequently, people who would never have had a reason to be nasty with each other are re-enacting the 30 Years War on line.

The ruins of San Diego after the Catholic Condom Riots of 2012.

What is wrong with these people? Why can't they get some sense of humility? There are nearly sixteen trillion reasons for them to shut up and go away. Instead, they keep finding new things to manage in our lives and we find new reasons to argue with each other.

If we want more civility and less polarization in our lives, we need less politics.

* - How's that for a mental image?

Mockery Is A Coward's Way Of Arguing

... and I should know because I've been doing it the last few days.

Over on Twitter, there's the #fortnight4freedom hashtag to collect tweets related to the Church's self-defense against government aggression*. A couple of people have come in to leave nasty, bigoted comments attacking Catholics. I finally had enough and have spent the last two days pounding on one dork in particular.

Early on, I decided he was intractable and so I made it my goal to neutralize him. I wanted to make his life so painful through ridicule and mockery that he'd go away. He's not been able to put up much of a defense as he's unskilled in logic, ignorant of fact and lacks debating skills in general. He's one of those terribly serious people who is convinced that the LGBT community is under constant attack by the Catholic bishops. Quite literally, the bishops. He's a delusional, paranoid, ignorant bigot who fancies himself some kind of superhero fighting for the rights of cross dressers everywhere.

And so I went to work on him.

Was at a party for a friend's son who graduated from Georgetown. Lots of Catholics. Good thing you stayed home under your bed.

Afraid of the Church much?

Oh shucks. And here I'd planned to burn a bunch of gays at the stake this weekend. Darn.

Stay strong for the LGBT, my friend. For the bishops will come down upon them as wolves among sheep. #dingbat

Keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour of the bishops coming.

I think (bigot) needs professional help. He's afraid bishops are coming to get him.

All in all, it was a lot of vapid fun for me, a chance to beat up on an ignorant, destructive moron. It was also an act of total cowardice and I figured that out pretty quickly.

When you go for mockery, you expose nothing of yourself. You take no serious positions. It's like slathering your cherished beliefs in Crisco before you get into the ring to debate - the other side can't grab hold of anything. About three tweets into the exchange, I decided to deliberately avoid almost anything substantive and just make his life miserable. I found I could make the point that his positions were untenable, but I did nothing constructive. I only contributed to the overall chaos of the general debate.

All in all, it was pretty unimpressive. I guess I supplied suppressive fire for our side, but I didn't exactly cover myself in glory or live my faith.

I've always thought Jon Stewart was a jerk. By becoming one on Twitter, I found out why.

* - A topic for another post.

Unhappy with Google Photos and Picasa

Normally I'm a big Google cheerleader. I recently downloaded Picasa to my laptop and started using Google Photos. Meh. Google Photos is little more than a hard drive on the web with albums instead of directories. You don't have a photo stream, you have a set of exclusive albums. That is, any picture you upload can only exist in one album at a time and there's no stream of all of your content. If you want to create a couple of different web slideshows using some of the same photos in each, you're out of luck.

I used to use Yahoo's Flickr, but Yahoo charges you $$$ once you get past 200 photos. Flickr has all of the attributes I want, but I'm not up for paying for them. Yet. Google's 1GB limit looked like a great move, but not so much any more.

Off to look for something else ...

Photobucket

Serious Meh. I uploaded a handful of photos, created two albums and when I moved photos between the albums, I got this message.

Moving your file will cause any links to this file to break. Click Move File to move the file.

Blork.

Update: Shutterfly for the Win!

I just created an account on Shutterfly and gave it a whirl. I love it! Unlimited storage and unlimited reuse of photos between albums. Shutterfly is Kodak's foray into web photo storage. They make their money from producing prints, mugs, photo books, calendars, etc. from your images. They just got a new customer.

A Simple Analogy

Obamacare is fiscal high speed rail connecting the US to Greece.

Do You Have An Appointment To See Her?

The Chief Catican Guard asks to see some ID before allowing you to visit with our Maximum Leader.

Quote of the Day

Whatever you think of the ObamaCare decision, John Roberts has managed to get off what must be one of the greatest lines in the history of Supreme Court decisions.

It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.

I found that in this article in the WSJ which argues that ObamaCare is doomed from the start because there just isn't the money to implement it.

This was always the fatal problem of ObamaCare. Reality could not have instructed President Obama more plainly: The last thing we needed, in a country staggering under deficits and debt, a sluggish economy and an unaffordable entitlement structure, was a new Rube Goldberg entitlement. The last thing we needed was ObamaCare. The nation and the times were asking Mr. Obama to reform health care, not to double-down on everything wrong with the current system.

Even with this week's Court success, he failed—and it's not as if there wasn't a deep well of policy understanding in Washington that he could have drawn on to take the country in a better direction. Regardless of any Supreme Court ruling, reality will pass its own judgment on the Affordable Care Act and it won't be favorable.

Hmm. It seems like I've heard that song before.

Update: You're fast, WC, but not fast enough.

Nobody Won Nothin' Yesterday

I'll see you, Mut, and raise you one level of disgust and determination.

Downfall, the Hitler movie everyone uses in parodies, shows Hitler planning to defend Berlin with Wehrmacht divisions that did not exist. Well, that's what we're doing now. We're spending money that doesn't exist now and won't exist in the future.

Source

In any meaningful sense, there isn't going to be an ObamaCare any more than our current trough of entitlements is going to remain full. There isn't enough money to do all the things we've promised. It's all just narcissistic preening by Barack Obama and his cronies. In order to make themselves look like big shots, they're spending us into poverty in the future.

The solution to this problem hasn't changed one bit and there still isn't anyone who's going to solve it except us.

Cheezburger of the Day

see more

Graphic of the Day

H/T: Our Monastery of Miscellaneous Musings.

Special H/T: DooDoo Economics, who came up with the graphic.

So What's The Big Deal?

If you're hoping that 9 guys in robes are going to save you from your own feckless greed and laziness, you've got some serious problems. With the Supreme Court decision upholding ObamaCare, the culture of demanding what you have not earned rolls on.

Update: Left Coast Rebel hits it out of the park.

I know I've always said economics underpins everything in a country, but what underpins economics? Core values. One such core value that has ensured the United States has stayed on the path to prosperity is liberty. Liberty today has been dealt a potentially fatal blow, though the fatal moment may still lie much further in the future. This sets a scary precedent in terms of the Commerce Clause and what is allowable.

It's all about the values, my friends. A nation of looters will wash over your court decisions like a tsunami no matter which way the judges rule.

How To Tell If You've Been Cooking French Food

Every burner on the stove is being used.

Your kitchen is a disaster area and your sink is full of dishes.

Link Of The Day

Can someone please explain to me how it's a good thing if you can't communicate with the person next to you and if you have no control over your borders at all?

At the most basic level of human interaction, one would think you'd want to do more than grunt and point and pantomime. Right?

Robert Reich is a very smart economist. He clearly knows something we don't because he thinks we'd all be better off imitating Marcel Marceau when we wanted to talk to each other.

And Over To You, Stockton

Don't you think that after we have a certain number of these in close succession, the culture of debt will change?

STOCKTON, Calif.—The city of Stockton, Calif., late Tuesday voted to adopt a new budget under which it can operate if it is under bankruptcy, a move widely considered the last step before it formally files for Chapter 9 protection. 

City officials are expected to officially file for Chapter 9 protection sometime this week, possibly as early as Wednesday... 

Under the new budget, Stockton will cut $10 million in debt payments to creditors, scale back retiree health care, and cut employee salaries and benefits. Under California law, Stockton must adopt a balanced budget by July 1... 

Stockton, with 300,000 residents and $700 million in debt, would be one of the largest cities ever to file for Chapter 9 protection, according to municipal finance experts and bankruptcy officials.

Someday someone somewhere* will start tallying up costs of promises and proposals automagically in an overlay graphic during televised election debates so everyone who doesn't want to spend quality time with fiscal data and Excel can see just how much a particular windbag is planning to spend. I seriously doubt the citizens of Stockton thought it would be a good idea to spend themselves into bankruptcy.

* - How's that for precise prognostication?

The Children's Crusade

Last night, I went to another of the Fortnight for Religious Freedom events put on by the Diocese of San Diego. It was beautiful in an innocent, naive, childlike and tragic sense. The Diocese will hold a Eucharistic procession in downtown San Diego on July 1, accompanied by a choir. A men's choir. Singing hymns. In Italian.

I laughed in amazement as I sat there practicing the songs with them. While the Diocese provides excellent and organized schools for our children, is an absolute political infant. Disorganized, unsophisticated and floundering would best describe what I saw. It made the paranoid loonies who fear a coming theocracy seem all the more crazy. These people can barely organize a small procession. Taking over the country is the equivalent of the Diocese launching a manned mission to the moons of Saturn.

In that innocence, however, was great beauty. My son went with me and sang along lustily even though he, too, thought the whole idea was madness. It was a lovely slice of Americana, a bit of our not-so-distant and much gentler past.

Oh yeah, these folks are plotting a coup. No doubt about it.

Many thoughts came to me as we sat there, struggling through the Italian lyrics. The first was that of Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind where he joins the Confederacy because he always had a thing for lost causes. The people at this event probably rarely use the Internet and they certainly weren't familiar with the mouth-foaming coming from open-minded progressives like NARAL. Lysol as a birth control? Well, we certainly use Lysol to clean the counter after we make our cookies for the parish bake sale, but we're not so sure about that whole birth control thing.

Another thought was that I wanted to take all the HHS mandate supporters and rub their noses in this event and scream at them, "What is your problem? Why do you have to run around telling everyone what to do all the time?" How divorced from America do you have to be to decide you need to ram things down our throats? Why can't we live the way we've always lived? If you really feel the need to manage everything a group does, then form your own and erect barbed wire fences and guard towers, just like in the old country.

The third thought wasn't so much a thought as it was a moment of grace from the Holy Spirit. Last night, I let go of my bigotry about Mormons. I've been so fixated on logic and proofs that I had become obsessed with the silliness of the Book of Mormon. Archaeology and biology and this and that, it was all wrong, Wrong, WRONG! No, the wrong part was me. Somewhere in Utah was a little Mormon church meeting room where a bunch of naive, innocent, childlike, loving, gracious people gathered to sing and worship. Forget about the Democratic Party's cornucopia of hate-filled bigots, I was the one who needed to be asked, "What is your problem?"

And maybe, for me at least, that was God's purpose for this whole #fortnight4freedom thing. It was an opportunity to find a little more grace in my life.

Viva Cristo Rey.

It's Genocide Against Teeth!

Over on Twitter, one of the trolls on the #fortnight4freedom thread has been shouting about the Catholic Church's "war on women" because the Church doesn't want to cover contraceptives in their employee health plans. Well, my current plan doesn't cover it, either. So I asked the logical question and got a surprising* response.

@tmore_esq: Yes! RT @ktcat:If my health insurance doesn't cover contraceptives, has my employer been waging a war on women all along? #fortnight4freedom

Well, I don't pay for dental coverage, either. I guess that means I'm waging genocide against teeth. And if my employer doesn't even offer one, then they might as well wear brown and goosestep around my molars singing the Horst Wessel Song.

It sounds so much better in German: Ich habe vor, euch alle vernichten!

 * - My surprise is probably just an indication of my naïveté.

Update: If I don't carry collision on one of my cars or I have a high deductible, I must be waging a War on Bumpers!

A Moment Of Parental Joy

One of our boys is attending the University of San Diego. The university requires him to take some philosophy and theology classes. Talking with him on that topic this weekend, I recommended he listen to 10 Books That Screwed Up The World And 5 More That Didn't Help, a thorough plumbing of some of the most wretched philosophies ever.

Last night, I walked past his room. As he is an avid gamer, it was dark as usual. Out of it came the sonorous tones of that audiobook. He and one of his brothers were sitting in the dark, listening to it while he played one of his first-person shooters on his computer. At dinner we had a long discussion about Nietzsche, Mills, Hitler and Darwin. He said he's going to listen to it at least twice because there is so much to absorb.

Insert touchdown dance here.