Thursday, May 05, 2011
A few tabs while sitting Lola Savannah's on the 5th of May
They said that if I voted for John McCain the federal government would pressure universities to abrogate the civil rights of students, and they were right!
Commodities prices had a mini-crash today, having run up in the last few months. One theory -- not mine -- is that it is all about the dollar. Ridiculous, I say, but if I knew what made commodities prices move I would not work for a living, so what do I know?
The president "walks back" the dumbest idea in the history of the universe.
Finally, a role for property lawyers in the war on terror.
The last-known combat veteran of World War I has died in Australia at age 110. Can I have his genes? And get this:
Claude Stanley Choules, the last known combat veteran of World War I, died on Thursday in a nursing home in Western Australia. He was 110.
Claude Choules and his daughter Daphne Edinger in 2009.
His death was confirmed by his 84-year-old daughter, Daphne Edinger.
Mr. Choules was defiant of the tolls of time, a centenarian who swam in the sea, twirled across dance floors and published his first book at 108. He also became a pacifist, refusing to march in parades commemorating wars like the one that made him famous.
Mr. Choules (rhymes with jewels) was born March 3, 1901, in the small British town of Pershore, Worcestershire, one of seven children.
World War I was raging when Mr. Choules began training with the British Royal Navy, just one month after he turned 14. In 1917 he joined the battleship HMS Revenge, from which he watched the 1918 surrender of the German High Seas Fleet, the main battle fleet of the German Navy during the war.
The recent recession notwithstanding, our lives are so comfortable that we do not begin to comprehend the lengths to which we would go if we had a genuine national emergency.
A bad idea, from a Republican:
Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged Thursday that Republican plans to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature health care law were “dead.” Instead, Camp predicted, the GOP would turn its focus to overturning the most controversial portion of that legislation: the mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance.
There is no shorter path to a fully-socialist single-payer system than to repeal the individual mandate without repealing the rest of Obamacare. So unless Rep. Camp is playing some devious game of which I am unaware, he is working in the service of the left.
From the TigerHawk archives: What Cinco de Mayo and a French expression have in common.
TTYL.
2 Comments:
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Thu May 05, 08:50:00 PM:
The mandate is what holds the whole rotten structure together. A keystone. Remove it, and the structure is totally unsustainable, setting the stage for total reform.
Given the horrific state of national finances, I'm not terribly concerned about a public option. There's no money, and slavery is illegal here.
By 
, at
Sun May 08, 06:00:00 PM:
1) Am I reading this right? The feds just mandated a rule that colleges must apply a 50.1% standard when dealing with "He Said / She Said" sexual harrassment charges. So any corroboration at all -- e.g. the girl's roommate's hearsay -- wins the day in Kangaroo court. This is wrong in so many ways.
Meanwhile the EPA now wants to stop extraction of shale gas by rule-making, in addition to all the other roadblocks they're putting up to energy development. Collectively, these bureacratic terrorists are a far greater threat to us than the Islamist variety. I'm absolutely serious about that. We need to blow out half the DC bureacracy, including whole departments. Some should be blown out just to start over -- especially the EPA.
2) Commodities are up because no big time currency is safe to hold -- including the dollar -- so that commodities are acting as a substitute store of value. When pricing oil in dollars, this effect has multiplied the decline of the dollar. Speculators are piling in too, but they're not the root cause. For speculators, buying oil and grain futures is a way to double down on both the stupid fiscal AND energy policies of the USA continuing out to our current event horizon. Oil now highly correlates with grains, because of ethanol. Go figure. Anyone disagree? Those are general observations, and hardly makes me a plugged-in trader. If I could, I'd be adding bricks of cocaine to my personal portfolio -- you can't eat or snort gold.
3) "Taxing gas mileage" by embedding a mandatory meter in our cars keeps bubbling up as a serious proposal, even though Obama is walking away from it at the moment. Given that we already tax gas sold at the pump, this makes no sense except to establish the groundwork for future non-price rationing. ... because essential government workers -- and people Obama likes -- should have priority over just plain folks like me.
4) Re: the 110-year-old WWI veteran. This guy was on a fighting ship at 14? He was in serious harms' way before we'd today let him drive a car, let alone sip a beer. Suburban mom's today want to bubble-wrap kids that age.
5) Re: the individual mandate, I'm inclined to agree with DF82, and like the keystone analogy. It irks me that Obama is still saying that Obamacare will cut the deficit by $1 trillion in the near-term. That lying sack of shit. I'm still saying that the Supremes will overturn the Individual Mandate, and it'll be 6-3.
Bonus: Canine SEALs?
This is a hoot and worth checking out, for the pictures alone.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/04/war_dog
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, indeed!
