Paul M. Jones

Don't listen to the crowd, they say "jump."

Congress isn’t gridlocked — it’s just totally irresponsible

What we’re actually witnessing -- and have been for years now -- is not gridlock, but the abdication of responsibility by Congress and the president for performing the most basic responsibilities of government. Despite the fiscal crisis that Washington knows will occur if it fails to deal with unsustainable spending and debt, it hasn’t managed to produce a federal budget in more than three years. 

To their credit, House Republicans have drafted, voted on, and passed a budget, but they are busy now trying to worm their way out of the very spending cuts -- the sequestration deal -- they insisted on as a condition for raising the debt limit last summer. 

One of the most egregious failures of the president’s budget was that it, as in his previous budgets, offered no serious plan to stabilize the largest entitlement programs. Instead, the president and congressional Democrats lambasted Republicans for actually addressing the problem in their budget. 

The plain fact is that neither party is working honestly to tackle the nation’s fiscal issues. Why stick your neck out when it’s easier to just blame the other side?

via Congress isn’t gridlocked -- it’s just totally irresponsible - The Hill - covering Congress, Politics, Political Campaigns and Capitol Hill | TheHill.com.


Chick-Fil-A: Marriage, or Mayors?

I understand there has been a ton of people (even more than normal) eating at Chick-Fil-A today. The news reporting narrative has been "customers showing up in support of the CEO's stance in favor of traditional marriage."

I'm not sure that's entirely true. I'll be going for dinner tonight, but it will be because I'm *against* the dictator-like pronouncements of the mayors and aldermen threatening to deny the business permits to operate. I wonder how many others supporting Chick-Fil-A today share my opinion?


Help Someone With Their Dog, Become A Registered Sex Offender

In May 2007, my husband and I were asked to assist an acquaintance in putting down a 14-year-old dog because the owner was not strong enough to do so on her own. As we own several dogs and cannot bear to see an animal suffer, we agreed.

The teenaged daughter of the dog's owner witnessed this discussion and protested the plan vehemently. One week later, the day before the planned euthanasia, a county police officer and an investigator stood on my front porch. The investigator who whisked my husband of 15 years into his vehicle told him that the girl had accused him of touching her.

My husband was never alone with the girl. He is a moral and truthful man. We were shocked by this claim but certain that nothing could or would come of it. Unfortunately, we were wrong.

This is old (2010) but still relevant. Yes, girls (and women) *do* lie about this stuff to get what they want. Via Sex offender registry: The result of legislative predator hysteria | HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com.


You Didn't Lift That: North Korean weightlifter credits Kim Jong Il for world-record feat

"I am very happy and give thanks to our Great Leader for giving me the strength to lift this weight. I believe Kim Jong Il gave me the record and all my achievements. It is all because of him," Om said.

North Korean athletes habitually heap praise on their former leader, Kim, and when weightlifter Pak Hyon Suk won the women's 63-kilogram division in Beijing four years ago, she said she was 'overjoyed' by the fact that she had brought joy to Kim. (ANI)

via North Korean weightlifter credits Kim Jong Il for world-record feat of lifting thrice his weight - Yahoo! News India.


Milton Friedman: An Economics of Love

The libertarianism of Rand (and she hated the word “libertarian”) was based on an economics of resentment of the “moochers” and “loafers,” the sort of thing that leads one to call a book The Virtue of Selfishness. Friedman’s libertarianism was based on an economics of love: for real human beings leading real human lives with real human needs and real human challenges. He loved freedom not only because it allowed IBM to pursue maximum profit but because it allowed for human flourishing at all levels. Economic growth is important to everybody, but it is most important to the poor. While Friedman’s contributions to academic economics are well appreciated and his opposition to government shenanigans is celebrated, what is seldom remarked upon is that the constant and eternal theme of his popular work was helping the poor and the marginalized. Friedman cared about the minimum wage not only because it distorted labor markets but because of the effect it has on low-skill workers: permanent unemployment. He called the black unemployment rate a “disgrace and a scandal,” and the unemployment statute the “most anti-black law” on the books with good reason. He talked about two “machines”: “There has never been a more effective machine for the elimination of poverty than the free-enterprise system and a free market.” “We have constructed a governmental welfare scheme which has been a machine for producing poor people. . . . I’m not blaming the people. It’s our fault for constructing so perverse and so ill-shaped a monster.”

via Milton Friedman: An Economics of Love - By Kevin D. Williamson - Exchequer - National Review Online.


Snark: A Sign Of Weakness

There is a reason that the weak are drawn to snark while the strong simply say what they mean.  Snark makes the speaker feel a strength they know deep down they do not possess.  It shields their insecurity and makes the writer feel like they are in control.  Snark is the ideal intellectual position.  It can criticize, but it cannot be criticized.

via Snark Attack « Gucci Little Piggy.


Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman: The Man Who Saved Capitalism

Friedman stood unfailingly and heroically with the little guy against the state. He used to marvel that the intellectual left, which claims to espouse "power to the people," so often cheers as states suppress individual rights.

While he questioned almost every statist orthodoxy, he fearlessly gored sacred cows of both political parties. He was the first scholar to sound the alarm on the rotten deal of Social Security for young workers--forced to pay into a system that will never give back as much as they could have accumulated on their own. He questioned the need for occupational licenses--which he lambasted as barriers to entry--for everything from driving a cab to passing the bar to be an attorney, or getting an M.D. to practice medicine.

He loved turning the intellectual tables on liberals by making the case that regulation often does more harm than good. His favorite example was the Food and Drug Administration, whose regulations routinely delay the introduction of lifesaving drugs. "When the FDA boasts a new drug will save 10,000 lives a year," he would ask, "how many lives were lost because it didn't let the drug on the market last year?"

He supported drug legalization (much to the dismay of supporters on the right) and was particularly proud to be an influential voice in ending the military draft in the 1970s. When his critics argued that he favored a military of mercenaries, he would retort: "If you insist on calling our volunteer soldiers 'mercenaries,' I will call those who you want drafted into service involuntarily 'slaves.'"

By the way, he rarely got angry and even when he was intellectually slicing and dicing his sparring partners he almost always did it with a smile. It used to be said that over the decades at the University of Chicago and across the globe, the only one who ever defeated him in a debate was his beloved wife and co-author Rose Friedman.

The issue he devoted most of his later years to was school choice for all parents, and his Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice is dedicated to that cause. He used to lament that "we allow the market, consumer choice and competition to work in nearly every industry except for the one that may matter most: education."

As for congressional Republicans who are at risk of getting suckered into a tax-hike budget deal, they may want to remember another Milton Friedman adage: "Higher taxes never reduce the deficit. Governments spend whatever they take in and then whatever they can get away with."

via Stephen Moore: The Man Who Saved Capitalism - WSJ.com.


DEA Gone Wild

In short, the DEA here commandeered private property from a law-abiding businessman and ineptly deployed it in an operation that got a man killed and now endangers a family that had nothing to do with the case. There is a term for what the DEA did with that truck: grand theft auto.

The DEA is running neck-and-neck with the ATF for the title of most dangerous federal law-enforcement agency; in my view, both should be dissolved and their responsibilities handed over to some more responsible party, such as a group of drunken rodeo clowns or ADD-addled teen-agers.

Whoever approved this operation belongs in a jail cell next to whoever approved Fast and Furious.

Wait, *conservatives* are asking for the DEA to be abolished? Glad to see it. Via DEA Gone Wild - By Kevin D. Williamson - The Corner - National Review Online.


Why You Should Be More Interested in Mars Than the Olympics

This summer, if you want the world's best story of international human triumph, you'll have to look past London (even beyond the amazing hurdlers with very popular warm-up routines). You'll have to look 200 million miles away, in fact, to discover a spectacular feat of endurance more grueling than the longest ultra-marathon. You'll have to look to Mars. Yes, the planet. And the dream team that's about to land NASA's nuclear-powered super rover called Curiosity.

This one-ton, laser-beam-blasting wonder is going to land on Mars via a "sky crane." Most of us have zero idea what it does or why it's going to Mars. That's a real shame, because the Curiosity story is a modern epic of explorers on the path to discovering a second genesis. It will be a tiny blip on our summer radar -- landing somewhere between the shot put finals and the Kimye engagement rumors -- before it fades away without any of us ever knowing its true brilliance.

Why won't you hear about it? Because NASA isn't going to tell us. Sure, they'll tell you a little bit -- press conferences about what they discovered, an inspirational video. NASA partners will create fun websites, and bits of awesome will trickle out. But there is a larger narrative tragedy, and it's a bigger conspiracy than any tinfoil-hatted crank could come up with -- a conspiracy born out of fear.

via Andrew Kessler: Why You Should Be More Interested in Mars Than the Olympics.


Hunter-gatherers, Westerners use same amount of energy, contrary to previous hypotheses

These findings upend the long-held assumption that our hunter-gatherer ancestors expended more energy than modern populations, and challenge the view that obesity in Western populations results from decreased energy expenditure. Instead, the similarity in daily energy expenditure across a broad range of lifestyles suggests that habitual metabolic rates are relatively constant among human populations. This in turn supports the view that the current rise in obesity is due to increased food consumption, not decreased energy expenditure.

Perhaps obesity is primarily diet related, not in a simplistic calories-in/calories-out way, but in a type-of-food way. Could it be that the Federal food pyramid guide is the problem? Gary Taubes, call your office.

Via Hunter-gatherers, Westerners use same amount of energy, contrary to theory | Science Codex.