Category Archives: Commentary

Thomas Sowell on Lots of Things

Thomas Sowell has published another of his Random Thoughts columns. It is well worth reading. Sowell is my most favorite commentator on government, politics and economics. He understands the threat that Barack Obama poses to our culture of freedom and independence.

New Tires, Wrong Track, Judgmental, Lipstick

It looks like the government (meaning the taxpayers) is going to rescue people who made bad home-buying decisions. The government is helping so many people with financial problems now; I wonder if it would be willing to help me pay for a new set of tires for my car. I didn’t count on them wearing out as soon as they have. And it’s a public safety issue; if I keep driving on them I might have a blowout and kill someone.
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Quite frequently lately I hear about some survey finding that about 70 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. They never mention that every person surveyed probably has a different definition of the wrong track and the right track. One person’s wrong track might be another person’s right track and vice versa. It’s surprising to me that 30 percent think we’re on the right track. I don’t think I’ve ever believed we were on the right track. How close to the right track do we have to be to be considered “on the right track?”
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I’ve long thought the fact that we are constantly entreated not to be judgmental is kind of stupid. It would be hard to be successful in our personal or business lives without judging the people with whom we have to interact. I can remember when not being judgmental simply meant not judging someone harshly based only on superficial knowledge of that person. But, like many other things, it has been hijacked by the politically correctness crowd and now constitutes an outright ban. I’ll bet it hasn’t been long since you heard some teenager shout “don’t judge me!” — even if just on television.

Just yesterday I judged a bum (what we used to call homeless people) who approached me at a Burger King and asked for a buck because he was hungry:

Me: “I saw you walk across the parking lot carrying a large pack on your back. What’s wrong with you?”

Him: “What do you mean?”

Me: “There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with you. Why don’t you have a job? If 12 million illegal immigrants can find work here why can’t you?”

Him: “Uhhhh…”

Me: “Basically, you’re just a bum, right?”

Him: “Yeah.”

Me: “Okay, here’s a buck.”

Him: “Thanks, man.”
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It’s a certainty now that the Democrats will nominate a lipstick-wearing candidate. I’m sure Obama was wearing lipstick (or at least lip gloss) in a speech I saw reported on television this morning.

This and That - Part 14

They’re still talking about whether or not the water-boarding interrogation technique is a form of torture. I think it’s a bit silly to try to define torture. Torture means different things to different people. Apparently a lot of people voluntarily watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I would consider it torture to be forced to watch Olbermann. Or to listen to Hillary Clinton speeches.

Think I’m too flippant regarding a serious subject? Then consider that one technique used to break terrorism suspects is to force them to listen to long sessions of loud rock music.

(After writing this, but before publishing it, I read a column by Bert Prelutsky in which he makes a similar point.)
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A few days ago I read an article (lost the link) about the ongoing debate on the conflict between Darwinian evolution and the account of the creation of humans in the Bible’s book of Genesis. In Genesis it says that God created man in his own image. Darwin says that humans evolved from monkeys. The resolution of this conflict is simple. God looks like a monkey.
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Imagine this: You’ve decided that you’re not satisfied with your current job. You want one that gives you more power and maybe a little more pay. You tell your boss that you’re going to spend 90% of your time over the next year looking for that better job, and that you expect her to keep paying you a full salary during that year.

Well, that is exactly what several of the candidates for president have done. Senators Cllinton, Obama and McCain and Representatives Kucinich, Paul, and Hunter obviously aren’t spending much time on their current jobs, but they’re still getting paid.

Pathetic Lives on Display

Fox News reports on a public-relations stunt conducted in Times Square where people were invited to shred or demolish with a sledge hammer their bad memories from 2007.

Apparently there are a lot of people who needed to be embarrassed publicly before they could face the new year. But the most pathetic of them all was Joe Costarella of Staten Island who took the opportunity to demolish a tall garbage can from his kitchen with an opening too narrow to scrape his plate. Before this, could you have imagined someone carrying a tall garbage can from Staten Island to Manhattan to destroy it so he could get a new one? Don’t you think placing it beside the road for pick-up and stomping on it a couple of times would suffice for most people?

Perhaps he got the idea from the commercials running on TV that show people dramatically destroying their old trucks so they can get a new one. I came up with an apparently very clever idea years ago; I sell the old truck and use the money on the purchase of a new one.

Since I’m off the subject now, why do the commercials showing people driving with booze sloshing around in their cars imply that they have been drinking? It seems to imply the opposite to me.

On Liberals and Tolerance

It’s curious to me that liberals wear their "tolerance" like a badge of honor. To tolerate something is to endure it without repugnance. That is, you can barely put up with it without having to hold your nose or look away.

A modern, softer, political definition of tolerance is "a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one’s own." Even it says that if you’re tolerant of something you inherently disagree with it.

Tolerance is also defined as "freedom from bigotry." How can someone promote "freedom from bigotry" and practice tolerance at the same time? Bigotry is a practice that most of us abhor, but it seems that we aren’t supposed to be tolerant of bigotry. So who gets to choose what is to be tolerated or not tolerated? Apparently the liberals do.

Anyway, what constitutes tolerance? Where do we draw the line between tolerating something that we disagree with and not tolerating it? The race hustlers demonstrated the limits of their tolerance when Don Imus called some women basketball players nappy-headed hos. Why are celebrities forced to apologize when they do or say something stupid? It would be fine with me to just tolerate them. It seems that tolerance is something you practice only when it doesn’t really matter to you that much.

Tolerance, like diversity and multiculturalism, is just another empty, meaningless concept that liberals are trying to use to advance their agenda — which seems to be to destroy the American culture.

This and That - Part 11

A problem we face is that we rarely find a great leader who can get elected. The best candidates for president are not likely to be willing to do what they have to do to get elected. This is why we mostly get shallow bozos like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for our presidents. I believe that Ronald Reagan was an exception to this recurring dilemma. And I don’t believe Fred Thompson is an exception. In fact, there are no exceptions in the 2008 race at this time.
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There is a basic difference between Western countries and countries like Iraq. Western countries want law and order above most all else. We are willing to bend quite a lot to avoid violent confrontations and to preserve our orderly system of government. We prefer to work out our differences through the political or judicial processes. Sure, there are a lot of Iraqis that would prefer law and order. But the problem is that there are too many that don’t.

There was a lot of violence in our past but we managed to reach where we are today in just a few hundred years. The Mesopotamians and other Iraqis have been there for thousands of years and they still can’t coexist peacefully.
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Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, has boasted that the United States was being defeated in Afghanistan, Iraq and other fronts. I hope he knows the difference between defeat and cutting losses. Sometimes a cost-benefit analysis indicates that you should give up certain pursuits, but it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t succeed at some cost.

I hope he understands that, even if we pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq, we can still destroy both of them and Iran without breaking a sweat — if we become sufficiently motivated.
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A popular argument against allowing the use of cheap Mexican labor in America is that the taxpayers are paying for their healthcare and other social services.  The biggest problem though is not the use of cheap Mexican labor.  It is the fact that government provided healthcare and other social services exist in the first place.
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For what it’s worth, my favorite columnists are: Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Burt Prelutsky, Jonah Goldberg, Paul Greenberg, David Limbaugh, Debra Saunders and Diana West. I used to like Pat Buchanan but lately he seems to have flipped his lid. You can find all of them at Townhall.com.

Iran Able to “Confront” Cruise Missiles

The AP reports that an Iranian military official, General Mohammad Alavi said:

One of the issues enemies make publicity about is their cruise missiles. Now, we possess the necessary systems to confront them (cruise missiles).

OK Mo, but do you really expect to prevail in that confrontation? A six-year-old child can confront a heavily armed policeman.

Alavi also warned that Israel was within Iran’s medium-range missiles and its fighter bombers, while maintaining that Israel was not strong enough to launch an aerial attack against Iran.

If you were really smart, Mo, you would reconsider the fighter-bomber thing. You should take a moment to think about how long it has been since fighter-bombers have been effectively used against the US or one of its allies. Then you should contemplate the reason for that.

I’ll give you a clue: There aren’t enough women and children up in the sky for the fighter-bombers to hide behind. Now you take it from there.

Apologies to Firefox Users

I just discovered tonight that this site has been buggered in Firefox for about a month. Apparently it occurred when I made a small change in my stylesheet. I’ll try to remember to test in both Firefox and IE7 when I make even the slightest change. It seems to be fixed now.

Bush and Rove’s On-the-Job Training

In a column on Townhall.com Debra Saunders discusses a survey that found that liberals read more books than conservatives. “The poll found that among people polled who read at least one book in the last year, liberals read nine books and conservatives read eight.” Some moonbat and former Democrat congresswoman named Pat Schroeder crowed that this proves that liberals are smarter than conservatives. However, the pollster said that the one-book difference “is within the margin of error, it’s not a statistically significant difference.”

Saunders also mentions that George Bush and Karl Rove compete to see which one can read the most books. Last year the score was: Rove, 110 books; Bush, 94. I’m not real comfortable with the fact that the leader of the free world and one of his (former) top advisers is each spending his time reading about a hundred books a year. That seems a bit like a surgeon reviewing the latest medical journals while performing critical surgery.

This and That - Part 10

I’m thinking about legally changing my name to Your Name Here. Then if I lose my credit cards the finder will think they are invalid promotional cards and discard them.
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It’s easy to form the impression that athletes and entertainers are more prone to destroying their bright futures by doing something stupid than are others. This might be true but do you really expect to hear about it if the life of some math or science wizard goes off the rails?
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I hadn’t really noticed until now that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton have essentially the same nickname: Sly Penis. Nixon was called Tricky Dick and Clinton is called Slick Willie. Both tricky and slick can mean sly, and both dick and willie are slang terms for penis.
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Have you noticed how the victims of fatal accidents and crimes are always wonderful people? It kind of makes me want to dirty up my act. I never hear about a really rotten person being killed in an accident or crime.
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To me nothing is more ridiculous than the utterances of radical feminists. They seem to be guided solely by the belief that, no matter what they say, if they speak loudly and rapidly enough they can change ground truth.
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Politicians are missing a great opportunity by not hiring Jimmy Carter to advise them on their campaigns. Think about it. Each of you can probably name at least a half dozen people in your hometown who are more impressive than Jimmy Carter. He seems to never miss an opportunity to demonstrate his ordinariness through his statements and actions. Most political observers think of him as the worst President in recent history. Yet he somehow managed to get himself elected as governor of Georgia and president of the United States. The man has to be a political genius.