Archive for November, 2012

Apocalyptic Rides

Posted in Art, Humor on November 26th, 2012

Sculptor Carrin Welch used her artistic powers to summon these apocalyptic rides. By the powers of her craft she called forth the Rocking Horses of the Apocalypse and proved to many that eschatology need not be a grim and foreboding subject of study.

Rocking Horses Of The Apocalypse

Sadly, while Ms. Welch’s powers were strong, only three of the Rocking Horses Of The Apocalypse appeared at her call. Pestilence was indisposed due to illness. 😆

Armchair Christians

Posted in Humor, Religion on November 26th, 2012

Thanksgiving has past and it’s now the Christmas holiday season and, more importantly to the vast majority of Americans, it’s the official start of the Christmas shopping season. Now is time when, in an orgy of consumerism, we spend money that we don’t have on stuff that the people we give it to don’t need.

Well, in keeping with the holiday spirit and expressing my understanding that America is and always has been a Christian nation, I found the perfect gift for members of the dominant sect of Christianity in America today, the Armchair Christian.

Perfect for the Jesus of the modern armchair Christian
Jesus, Not So Much Risen As Reclined

This seems the perfect Christmas gift for them. They can sit in comfort with the trapping of those parts of their religion they’ve chosen to accept and follow wrapped about them.

Give them a few DVDs from one of the megachurches and they can nurse their form of faith in peace and comfort without any impetus to think about their duty to their God or put themselves through the exercise and discomfort of letting their religious beliefs inform their public opinions and acts, political or otherwise. 😉

NOTE: I am very much not a Christian, so when I say that America is a Christian nation is in an observation made as someone very close to being an outsider and is made with rueful acceptance, not fondness for the situation. I, unlike the Godless filth, know history, can see the present, and have reached the point of acceptance of what is.

Dumb Ways To Die

Posted in Humor, Music on November 25th, 2012

There are so many dumb ways to die and mankind seems to make a habit of finding them. One result of this is that Melbourne Metro Trains produced a public service announcement video called “Dumb Ways to Die” as part of a campaign aimed at preventing train-related deaths in Victoria, Australia.

Dumb Ways To Die

The song is performed by Tangerine Kitty, who are Ollie McGill from The Cat Empire and Emily Lubitz of Tinpan Orange. And yes, if you’re so inclined, you can purchase this song on iTunesicon.

TANSTAAFL

Posted in Books & Reading, Politics, Society on November 25th, 2012

TANSTAAFL – Learn it; accept it. You have no choice except to live it. TANSTAAFL is one of the fundamental laws of the universe, though one too many choose to ignore or refute.

Acronym: TANSTAAFL (/tan’stah-fl/)
Meaning: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
Source: Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ( 1 )

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody always pays. To continue the analogy – It might be the diner, but in a way that is deferred or that he or she doesn’t recognize as payment. It might be restauranteur, either willing or due to some form of coercion. Or it might be some third-party, again either willing or due to some form of coercion. But, no matter who is getting stuck with the tab, somebody always pays.

Much like the law of Entropy, TANSTAAFL has it roots in thermodynamics but extends throughout all facets of existence. This is why Socialism and all the dreams of the entitlement society promulgated by the Liberals and Progressives are doomed to failure. Somebody always pays and, sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money or, at least, the ability to access their money.

Yet Liberals and Progressives, despite their purported love of science, can’t understand this. The federal government, with their bipartisan adoration of wimpynomics, certainly doesn’t understand this. The eaters and takers living off of other people’s money most certainly refuse to consider understanding this. But in all these cases their refusal to accent and understand reality is moot; ignorance of the law is no excuse.

The problem is that TANSTAAFL, like all natural laws, isn’t subject to being broken. It is inviolate and cannot be circumvented any more than the law of gravity can be circumvented. It also, however, carries no punishment for attempted transgression; it merely has consequences.

It’s simple. Every regulation placed upon industry carries the price of reduced employment and higher costs. Every tax placed upon people carries the price of reduced spending power. Every time someone or some group is given a handout somebody else has their circumstance worsened.

None of the above should be construed as a blanket statement against social safety net programs or industry regulation. There’s a certain understood value in both.  The price of these things, however, needs to be carefully weighed before they’re put into place and this is something that neither the Leftists and their dependent demographics are willing or able to do.

~*~

NOTE: While Robert Heinlein popularized this acronym and attendant phrase, he did not create it. The earliest known occurrence of the phrase, “There ain’t no such thing as free lunch”, appears as the punchline of a joke related in an article in the El Paso Herald-Post of June 27, 1938, entitled “Economics in Eight Words”  and was repeated used multiple times before the 1966 publication of  The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress:

  • The phrase later, in 1942, appeared in an article in the Oelwein Daily Register.
  • In 1945, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” appeared in the Columbia Law Review
  • In 1947 it appeared in a column by economist Merryle S. Rukeyser.
  • In 1949 In 1949 the phrase appeared in an article by Walter Morrow in the San Francisco News and was part of the title of Pierre Dos Utt’s monograph, “TANSTAAFL: a plan for a new economic world order”
  • In 1950, a New York Times columnist ascribed the phrase to economist Leonard P. Ayres.

Heinlein’s popularization of the phrase may, however, have been the inspiration for economist Milton Friedman using it as the title of a 1975 book, There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.

Failures As Women?

Posted in Politics, Society on November 23rd, 2012

For as long as I can remember, and that’s getting to be a long time indeed, the Liberals and Progressives have ranted about the military-industrial complex and the various American arms manufacturers. They’ve, in their racism, ageism, and sexism, described them as evil, murderous entities which are poisoned by testosterone and run by those horrid Evil Old White men.

One has to wonder if some part of the Liberals’ and Progressives’ screed will end or change now that three of the top six defense firms are headed by women.

Linda Hudson is CEO of BAE Systems’ US operations; Marillyn Hewson is the new CEO of Lockheed Martin; and Phebe Novakovic is the new CEO of General Dynamics. All three of these new defense industry CEOs are women and all three happen to be White.

So will the Liberals and Progressives alter their rants against the firms that produce the material needed to keep Americans both safe and with access to their needed resources, or will they label Linda Hudson, Marillyn Hewson, and Phebe Novakovic as failures as women or as traitors to the gender because they lead corporations “traditionally” headed by those evil, warmongering and war profiteering Old White Men? It’s a bit of a quandary and impossible nigh on impossible to predict what they’ll do.

On one hand, Liberals and Progressives have been quick to deride and attack any Black who got off their plantation and assimilated into America as an Oreo, Uncle Tom, Sell Out, and race traitor. It be easy for them to apply the same “niggerization” to women who rose to power in the defense industry.

On the other hand, the Liberals and Progressives are deeply tied to the Feminists, which might cause them a logical frisson since Feminism is predicated on women becoming men and, if possible, supplanting them. Hence, it might be difficult for them to attack Hudson, Hewson, and Novakovic for both political and ideological reasons.

Or, on yet another hand, will they just ignore these inconvenient women and continue their diatribes about the Evil Old White Men and their murderous machismo? This is the outcome that I expect since Liberals and Progressive place the truth second to the message.