Beagle Scout

1. Buzzmachine asks and answers the question: Should the news media be government sponsored, like Pravda?
   http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/10/19/giving-up-on-the-news-business/
2. Mika Brzezinski: Every producer, anchor, reporter, and editor at CBS over ten years was pro-gun-control, pro-abortion, anti-military, and anti-Bush, except one
   http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2009/10/19/mika-one-exception-every-cbs-reporter-director-anchor-liberal
3. White House and Congressional Democrats make war on the US Chamber of Commerce
   http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28445.html
4. Comparing Austrian with Keynesian stimulus packages, by Wladimir Kraus
   http://blog.mises.org/archives/010853.asp
5. An Interview with Peter Godwin, about COIN and the politico-socio-economic collapse of Nigeria
   http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/306-noonan.pdf
6. Another anti-Limbaugh racial smear
   http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2009/10/chicago-sun-times-runs-rush-as-klansman-cartoon/
7. Yes, Virginia, Donovan McNabb really is an overrated QB
   http://newsrealblog.com/2009/10/18/newsreal-sunday-rush-was-right-mcnabb-was-over-rated-and-still-is/
8. Complete video of Lord Moncton’s speech on Obama at Copenhagen is online
   http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/18/video-of-moncktons-speech-on-obama-poised-to-cede-us-sovereignty-in-copenhagen/
9. Bill Whittle’s modest proposal on how to treat Congress. Pay them to do jack and squat
   http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bwhittle/2009/10/19/a-modest-proposal-to-reform-the-congress/
10. Stimulus? Are you sure that word means what you think it means?
    http://www.insideronline.org/blogarchive.cfm?blogid=5DD80286-03E8-85BA-68F25C62909A89EA

Enough to watch this all the way through.

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This review will not take long. Darling wife and I took our three young children and a neighbor kid from across the street to a movie followed by Five Guys for burgers.

We saw Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze’s tragically flawed adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic. Perhaps you like watching depressing movies about relationship problems between people who refuse, idiotic, to change. Then you might like this movie. Perhaps you like watching a movie with the message that your friends are waiting until you slip up, at which time they will eat you up, cannibal-like. Then you might like this movie. Perhaps you like movies that speak the unselfconscious symbolic language of children while carrying a lesson that relationships cannot last, that marriage ends in divorce and mutual alienation, that only relationships between simpletons like Ira and Judith can last, and that on a more basic level relationships are just a bummer. Then you might like this movie. Or perhaps, like me, you recognize the seductive beauty of the movie, and hate it for the psychic poison it delivers to the defenseless minds of kids.

We will not be buying it on DVD.

Did I mention that while rushing to the bathroom to pee, our 4 year old Sugarlump vomited her popcorn all the way down the carpeted hallway behind the theater? And that after cleaning up and returning to our seats she curled up in her daddy’s lap and went to sleep? That made the rest of the movie more bearable.

We finished the evening at Five Guys with the best burgers and fries the kids ever ate. That’s what they said. Evening saved.

Other reviews: NYT, Tech Banyan, Entertainment Weekly, HuffPo, NRO

Technorati Tags: Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are, Movie Review

All hands alert!

I don’t have anything to add because this is so shattering there is nothing that can be added. If this extract scares you then you have to read the whole thing. And then we all shall have to do something.

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

[laughter]

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

Read the treaty. Read the rest of Lord Moncton’s remarks. If this is signed and passed, it will be the greatest act of BETRAYAL that has ever been committed on the American people. We all must act, every one of us, doing whatever we can.

This must not stand!

Technorati Tags: Obama, Copenhagen, Climate Treaty, Environmentalism, Tyranny, Constitution, Treason

After the NFL has made a mockery of itself by obsequiously smacking its forehead against the ground on which DeMaurice Smith, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton walk, it is up to NFL fans to find out if it is possible for the NFL to be embarrassed any more. Remember, this is the league that welcomes people convicted of homicide, rape, burglary, wife-beating and dog-fighting back into the players’ ranks. Yet it is also the league that refuses to let a conservative radio personality and lover of the game of football become a minority owner of a team, using vile, racist quotes invented out of whole cloth to smear him.

The question begs to be asked. Can fans embarrass the hell out of the NFL? Not by throwing ice-balls at opposing teams; Not by booing lustily at little kids; Not by wearing nothing but body paint on their torsos in midwinter; But can fans embarrass the hell out of the NFL by making a spectacle of rejecting the new NFL determination to goose-step to the drumbeat of the race hustlers and slanderers of the progressive left?

Some have proposed cutting up team jerseys and sending the pieces to Roger Goodell’s office. Some have proposed canceling your NFL Sunday Ticket. Those are good, and they hit at the wallets of these hypocritical leftist slimeballs, but they are not embarrassing enough. Embarrassing an organization as big and wealthy as the NFL with all its television time and bootlicking local sports reporters requires strategic planning.

Don’t just cut up your stuff. Don’t just cancel. Make a spectacle of it!

How to Make a Spectacle
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At the top of the news are a few Nobel Blogs about the very deserving winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics

• Michael Spence gives an overview
• Peter G. Klein on Oliver Williamson
• Paul Romar on Elinor Ostrom
• Peter Boettke on Lin Ostrom

Barack Obama is George Soros’s marionette?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/what_soros_wanted_obama_delive.html

Liberal warnings of TEA party violence are pure psychological projection. Bitten off any fingers lately?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/liberals_violence_warning_come.html

The Nobel Peace Prize sucks. The world need a Reagan Peace Prize.
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/13/the-reagan-prize

Eliot Spitzer wants to crush the US Chamber of Commerce because it takes conservative positions and doesn’t buy into environmentalist wackjob hype. Herein he lays out his evil plan to James Bond. And you.
http://www.slate.com/id/2232441/?from=rss

Lieberman is ready to make some Democrat heads explode
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574473293212092518.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

How the Baucus healthcare bill will cause a health insurance market death spiral
http://healthcare.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODA4ZmI2YTI0Yzk2OTkyMzczYTRjYjViODgxODA1OGE=

Running the numbers that damn Baucuscare
http://healthpolicyandmarket.blogspot.com/2009/10/senate-finance-health-bill-has-no.html

How to distort statistics to say a poll shows the opposite of what it says
phohttp://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/republican-party/poll-only-28-of-republicans-believe-american-health-care-best-in-world/

The statistics that are so brutally warped by the previous article
http://pewresearch.org/databank/dailynumber/?NumberID=825

Ron Paul vs. Lindsey Graham in a steel cage death match
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/10/14/ron-paul-vs-lindsey-graham-on-the-future-of-the-gop/

The vile and mendacious racialist calumnies of the Southern Poverty Law Center (Vadum too)
http://spectator.org/blog/2009/10/12/extreme-irony-alert-or-springt

How to nail Terry Krepel of Media Matters to the wall with his own vile smears
http://newsrealblog.com/2009/10/14/with-every-reply-krepel-just-keeps-digging-a-deeper-hole-to-defend-smear-of-beck/

How long will the Recession last? Forever!
http://mises.org/story/3764

When the Government and some Private Companies collude to drive other private companies out of the marketplace and give overwhelming financial benefits to the colluding companies for campaign contributions for colluding politicians, why is that the fault of the free market instead of the fault of government meddling with the free market?
http://mises.org/story/3761

Islam4UK demands full sharia law over the United Kingdom, replacing all other laws
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/10/uk-muslim-group-demands-full-sharia-law.html

Death Panels anyone? Robert Reich, Democrat and proponent of single-payer health-care, says that HEALTH CARE TO SENIOR CITIZENS AND VERY SICK PEOPLE WILL BE RATIONED UNDER ANY GOVERNMENT PLAN
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/10/obama-advisor-admits-senior-health-care.html

Another Clinton Scandal
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/10/15/another-clinton-scandal

Iowahawk’s $33 art stimulus has opened the floodgates of the underground art world
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2009/10/the-art-just-wont-stop.html

Technorati Tags: Roundup, Interesting Articles

1. The biggest news of the day is the slow melt of the glaciers of journalistic support for the pseudo science of anthropogenic global warmening. Today Drudge has the following links above the fold
   • BBC: What happened to global warming?
   • US CHILL MAP…
   • Montana cold breaks records…
   • Record Cold temps in Idaho threaten potato crops…
   • Austria: Earliest snowfall in history set to break records…
   • Man has microphone cut off after asking about ‘errors’ in Gore film…
   • Video…
   • Soros says aims to invest $1 Billion in green tech…
   • Greenpeace activists clamber on to Houses of Parliament in climate change protest…
   • Energy crisis postponed, new gas rescues the world…
2. Obama didn’t win the 2009 Nobel in Economics. In a shock development felt worldwide, some economists won it instead (NYT)
3. Argentina’s media clampdown continues
4. Time Magazine thinks we should blog about Education!
   • Few things in France can provoke heated debate faster than moves to tinker with the country’s vaunted public-education system, which embodies republican values that date back to the French Revolution. It’s especially true when the changes involve an …
   • Successful Schools Avoid False ChoicesEducation Week News (subscription)
   • Education Secretary Criticizes Education CollegesInside Higher Ed
   • Community must be involved with education in HarrisburgThe Patriot-News – PennLive.com
   • Hartford Courant -Examiner.com -Torrington Register Citizen

5. Insurance Industry projects $4000 per year per family in added costs for health insurance. White House throws tantrum. Memeorandum links. White House promises to hold breath until it turns blue. (That last sentence was wishful thinking)
6. Top on memeorandum: White House bites the hand that feeds it. Calls gay activists the “Internet left fringe.”
   • BREAKING FROM NBC: White House official calls gays part of “Internet left fringe”  —  UPDATE FROM PAM: … And let me just add that if we’re all insignificant children who don’t understand politics, and who the White House doesn’t worry about, then why did a White House official feel the need …
     Link Search: Technorati, Google, IceRocket, and Ask
     Discussion: Washington Monthly, Politics Daily, The Hill, Another Black Conservative, Left Coast Rebel, La Shawn Barber’s Corner, Ruby Slippers, American Power, Mock, Paper, Scissors, Le·gal In·sur·rec· tion, Stop The ACLU, RedState, The Stranger …, Breitbart.tv, Gates of Vienna, The Other McCain, Pundit & Pundette, Osborne Ink, Confederate Yankee, Raw Story, RADAMISTO, Time and Times of London
7. Democrats set to ratchet up personal attacks, dirty tricks in 2010.
8. Obama’s Safe Schools Czar wrote that killing someone for calling you names was “not aberrant behavior”
9. Obama White House has already planned to put severe restrictions on “sport fishing.” That means you going fishing with your kid in fresh or salt water.
10. Lindsey Graham backs “cap and trade making electricity too expensive for ordinary people to afford it” bill

Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard is not really a book. It is an article from the “Philistine” magazine of March 1899 that became immensely popular and was reprinted as a pamphlet in Russian, German, French, Spanish, Turkish, Hindi, Mandarin and Japanese, perhaps more. It is freely available on the Internet. Briefly, it is about two things:

1. Excellence;
2. One person can change the world.

There are those who do things excellently, as opposed to those who only partly do a thing if they bother to do it at all. The excellent can make huge changes. Those who do not seize excellence can barely do their job. The common wage-earning man of 1899 was useless when given any task requiring judgement and initiative.

make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio”.

Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?

On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:

Who was he?

Which encyclopedia?

Where is the encyclopedia?

Was I hired for that?

Don’t you mean Bismarck?

What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?

Is he dead?

Is there any hurry?

Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?

What do you want to know for?

Such a man is a waste of a position, and might as well be let go. He will never be a great success unless he changes something in himself. Such a man must transform himself to be more like Col. Rowan, who was asked by Pres. McKinley to carry a message to Col. Garcia, the leader of the Cuban rebels against Spain. Rowan had lived in Cuba and written a book about the island. Rowan traveled by himself in small boats to Cuba, then hiked by himself across an island occupied by the hostile Spanish, through jungle and over mountain to Garcia’s jungle encampment, where he made contact, delivered his message, developed a rapport, then left the island and returned with a command of American soldiers to assist Garcia in his successful rebellion.

Cuba was able to throw off the Spanish yoke because Rowan reached Garcia and delivered McKinley’s message. Without Rowan’s excellence in every task he had to complete in order to carry that message it would not have happened.

How relevant is this pamphlet?

Though nobody knows the story of Rowan and Garcia, the problem still exists. The article is more than a simple historical curiosity. There are still plenty of workers like the man who only works when he is being supervised, only does what he is told, fobs off his responsibilities on others, argues against every new assignment, complains, and makes excuses for his failures when he bothers to do his job at all. Unions and HR Departments exist to protect such people and keep them employed.

One man can change the world. He doesn’t have to be extraordinary, but he has to embrace excellence. We need to remember this in these days when the progressive march to eliminate individual freedom in these United States has been advancing, almost without interruption for 110 years.

Take heart, stay optimistic, and think strategically. We have nothing to fear but panic, nothing to lose but mediocrity, and our country’s freedom to win again.

Technorati Tags: Message to Garcia, Conservatism, Book Notes

The Business Insider asks the question that is almost never asked.

An interesting detail from John Mauldin’s latest economic note:

The average federal worker makes $75,419 a year, while the average in the private sector is $39,751.

Why is that, exactly?  Is it because Federal workers are 80% better than private-sector workers?

Somehow I doubt it. I think it has more to do with progressives giving taxpayer money away to other progressives, just like their progressive universities give honorary degrees away to other progressives.

Update: More details at Seeking Liberty.

Technorati Tags: Bureaucracy, Prudence, Common Sense

The Guardian recently analyzed David Cameron’s speech to the British Conservative Party Conference for the popularity of his applause lines. I’ve extracted in popularity order all the lines that got more than 15 seconds of applause, while excluding the introduction. The interesting thing to me is that all the most popular lines are based specifically on conservative principles.

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