The Hollywood Holocaust. Not !!

Go here.  I hope you'll read the whole thing.  It's about the "Hollywood Holocaust", when a lot of Hollywood screenwriters lost their jobs because of their communist sympathies. 

And then contemplate this quote from one of my heroes, Glenn Reynolds:

Leaving aside the obscenity of comparing out-of-work screenwriters with gassed Auschwitz inmates, there’s this: Communists are no better than Nazis. Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing, not a sin. Go broke and starve, commies. It’s what you deserve for being eager, willing servants of totalitarianism.


That's kinda harsh, considering that there are major differences between the Nazis and the Communists. 

The Commies killed a lot more people. 

Seriously, would you hire a skinhead who came into your place with swastika tattoos? 
I didn't think so. 
How about the kid who comes in with a Che T-shirt? 

On Price Controls At The Olympics

To charge fair market value for something like the Olympics would be unfair. 
Therefore, price controls were put in place. 

Here's the great Tom Woods, star speaker at the Texas Libertarian Party's recent State Convention, on why you've got empty seats:

The British Olympic organizers restricted ticket purchases, rewarded corporate purchases but not corporate use, imposed price controls on tickets available to the public and state violence against the resulting scalpers (touts) — and are distraught and surprised over the empty seats that characterize so many of the Olympic events so far. To reduce the embarrassment and sense of scandal, organizers have carted in British troops–dressed in their camo!–to fill seats at gymnastics events, while other easily manipulated, low-time-cost groups on the government’s payroll are also being bussed in to other sparsely-attended venues.

Meanwhile, many thousands willing to pay market prices to attend Olympic events are told to bugger off.

And they always act "surprised", don't they? 

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has been having fun for the last 5 years or so, working the word "unexpectedly" into the reports of markets and prices reacting to incentives in ways that surprise the Statists but not many other people.  Go here for a sampling....

Blog Comment Of The Decade

I'm sick and tired of messing with bureacracies. 

I'm tired of the "city" of Richland Hills.  I'm tired of their code enforcement Nazis, and their chief, a little guy who is surfing the First Baptist Church Of Euless website every time I've walked past his office. 

I'm tired of the Department Of Transportation making up arbitrary rules about how far my guys can travel, how long they have to rest, what kind of paperwork they have to have on board, and blah, blah, blah.  Look up CSA 2010 when time permits. 
I'm tired of getting emails from online Sherpas who promise to help me navigate all the CSA 2010 bullshit. 

The government digs a ditch, and then those who dug the ditch go into the private sector and set up shops to help you navigate the ditch. 

I'm tired of The Federal Reserve printing money so George Bush, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and John Boehner can pay their bills without passing legislation or tax increases.  I'm disgusted by the (recent) revelation that The Fed has an entire "education" wing that goes out to propagandize school kids, but can't debate or even discuss their policies with a political party. 

I'm sick of Barack Cokehead Obama carrying out raids on medical marijuana dispensaries. 

I'm p.o.'d about all the highway patrolmen suddenly pulling over people around Loop 820, a stretch of interstate where I've seen very few accidents.  This has nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with revenue.  Between my workplace on the northside and my meeting area on the west side, I typically see 4 revenue generators with radar guns.  It's nuts, nuts, nuts. 

Glenn Reynolds recently linked to a Reason magazine blog comment that I think is freakin' brilliant.  Here goes: 

It's not a coincidence. Politicians, pundits, and professional, revolving-door bureacrats are 100% revenge of the f***ing nerds. Every loser in high school or college that just knew he was smarter and better than everyone else is in DC pacticing politics, writing about politics, and arbitrarily f***ing up the lives of everyone else with regulations just because they can.


Yep.  And we're going to keep putting up with it for how much longer? 

The picture of bureaucratic hell came from here. 

The linking genius of Matt Drudge

The genius of Matt Drudge....the man knows how to put together an appropriate collection of links. 

A fresh coat of Whitening goes to Instapundit for the link.
Let's bring everybody back home, ok?  All the soldiers, sailors, pilots, marines.  And Hillary. 

Gary Johnson on the State Of The Union speech

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate for president, sent this email about Obama's State Of The Election Union speech to Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit:

“If the idea tonight was that the President would fulfill his constitutional duty to give us ‘information of the State of the Union’, we should be able to expect some truth. I didn’t hear much truth. Truth is that the real unemployment rate is probably still above 10%. Truth is that after all the hand-wringing and deals of the past couple of years, instead of cutting spending, the President and Congress are going back to the well for another $1.2 Trillion debt limit increase. And the truth is we are seeing nothing from either the President or the Republicans that will really change any of those unacceptable realities.

“Only in the twilight zone that is Washington could a President who has bailed out and stimulated our economy to death stand in the Capitol and declare there should be ‘no bailouts, no handouts, and no cop-outs’. Can anyone spell GM or TARP or Solyndra?

“The President said we deserve a government that plays by the same rules as millions of hard-working Americans. Perhaps that should begin with the government not borrowing and printing 43 cents of every dollar it spends – something hard-working Americans can’t and don’t do.

“Until we see a real plan – not a Washington smoke and mirrors plan – that puts a stop to deficit spending and really puts America back to work, all of this rhetoric is just wasted breath.”

I didn't watch the speech last night (had to wash my hair instead), but I read a few excerpts.  The business about ‘no bailouts, no handouts, and no cop-outs’ probably was the best laugh line. 

On having to ring up your own groceries but pay "full price"

I saw the following quote on Instapundit:

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “I work all day, go to Kroger late night, stock up on groceries and then get to the checkout and have to scan and bag everything by myself and still pay full price while Kroger can eliminate a job. Hmmmmm. That’s the equivalent to you coming into my restaurant, cooking your own food and I still get to charge full price. Am I being unreasonable???”

I honestly don't know where to begin.  For lack of a better place, let's start with the history of grocery stores. 

If you ever find yourself in Memphis Tennessee with a couple of hours to kill, check out The Pink Palace museum.  They've got a beautifully reconstructed model of a Piggly Wiggly grocery store inside. 

Why? 

Piggly Wiggly (founded in Memphis) was the first self-serve grocery store in the U.S.  Instead of handing the clerk behind the counter your list of groceries, if you were a Piggly Wiggly shopper, you took a cart or a basket and got your groceries all by yourself. 

This move didn't save or create any jobs in the grocery industry.  In fact, it eliminated them.  But it saved a lot of money for consumers.  This allowed them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries. 

Skip forward about a half century.  Someone came up with a pattern of lines called a "barcode" that could be read by another device called a "scanner". 

This move didn't create any jobs in the grocery industry.  It made checking out much, much faster, and eliminated a lot of inventory and supply chain jobs in the grocery distribution system.  But it saved a lot of money for consumers. This allowed them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries.

By the time the scanners came along, the U.S. military had already been using a warehouse concept called "cross-docking" for quite some time.  This is a warehouse design where incoming shipments are received on one side, outgoing shipments are shipped on the other, with minimal storage space in between.  Minimal inventory is kept on hand in the warehouse at any given time. 

Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart fame, was the first to apply this concept to the grocery and retail industry. 

This move didn't create any jobs in the grocery industry. It made distribution much, much faster, and eliminated a lot of inventory and supply chain jobs in the grocery distribution system. But it saved a lot of money for consumers. This allowed them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries.

Finally, someone invented the self-serve grocery checkout stand.  If you have a minimal amount of stuff to ring up, you can choose to do it yourself. 

As the Facebook commenter wrote, the customer is doing some of the work himself.  Kind of like the Piggly Wiggly customer started doing in the 1920's. 

This move toward self-checkout doesn't create any jobs in the grocery industry. It makes getting out of the store much, much faster, and it saves a lot of money for consumers. This allows them to eventually purchase more of other things instead of food: iPods, flatscreen TV's, or laptop computers, creating jobs in the iPod, TV and laptop industries.

I hope this has helped. 

We have not become a prosperous nation by "saving or creating jobs".  We have become a prosperous nation by constantly churning the process, always trying to come up with a better way to get things done. 

No one can predict what the next way will be.  No one knows which kid is working in the Produce Department of an Albertson's Grocery Store who has already come up with a better way to distribute and merchandise fruit and vegetables, and who just can't wait to open his own store and try out his idea.  No one knows which computer geek in his Mom's basement has already come up with a system to make distribution and logistics more efficient. 

These people are going to bring us improvements and levels of progress that we can't even imagine, here in the primitive year 2011. 

The only thing we do know is that there will always be someone complaining about the cost of progress and doing everything in his power to keep it from happening. 

From the emails of The Blogfather

From an email sent to Glenn Reynolds....

Reader Geoff Lackey emails: “You’ve been writing about this lately, so I thought I’d pass this on: Yesterday, about a week after Verizon announced its iphone data plans, AT&T notified me that the size of my data plan was now doubled (2GB up to 4GB) with no rate increase. Wow, this free-market competition stuff kinda works. Someone tell Obama.”

Is there any doubt that opening up the medical/pharmaceutical monopolies to some unregulated competition would help with costs?  Give me a choice between something that Joehn Boehner and Barack Obama have regulated and a product with an "unregulated" sticker on it at a lower price?  Guess which one I'm picking. 

Lord have mercy, I love Glenn Reynolds' site (Instapundit).  From now on, Mr. Reynolds shall be known as "The Blogfather". 

Another "Instalanche"

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has looked upon my typing and smiled. 
This is my second "Instalanche" - that's what they call it when Reynolds links to something you wrote and sends you a small fraction of his 300,000 hits per day. 

If I'd known this was gonna happen, I would've used spell-check. 
Go here.  I'm the 4th link from the top. 
And yes, being excited about this makes me a total geek. 

An Army officer comments on the Columbia Missouri drug raid

This video has now been seen by more than 1.2 million people.

Go here for my thoughts on why we continue to put up with government employees breaking down a door in the middle of the night, shooting two of the family dogs in front of a 7-year-old boy, finding a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, and then charging the homeowner with "child endangerment".
(It's because we're sheep.) 



Here's an email to Radley Balko from an army officer serving someplace in Afghanistan:

I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.


For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they're after is present at the location, and that it's too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I'm a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call "cordon and knock": they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn't happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we're going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don't have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don't see any reason why they can't use similar methods.

And here's Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit on the officer's comments:

Quite different from using door-busting tactics to serve warrants on nonviolent drug offenders. Of course, one difference is that we care about winning the hearts and minds of people in Afghanistan . . . .

Glenn Reynolds on "The Knowledge Problem"

If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?" -- President Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981.

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Market mechanisms, like pricing, do a better job than planners because they incorporate what everyone knows indirectly through signals like price, without central planning.

Thus, no matter how deceptively simple and appealing command economy programs are, they are sure to trip up their operators, because the operators can't possibly be smart enough to make them work.

Later on in the essay:

Hayek's insight into economics and regulation is often called "The Knowledge Problem," and it is a very powerful notion. But recent events suggest that it's not just the economy that regulators don't understand well enough -- it's also their own regulations.

This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation. The additional costs created by Obamacare, conveniently enough, weren't going to strike until later, after the November elections.

But both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. As the Atlantic's Megan McArdle wrote:

"What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It's earnings season, and they offered guidance about , um, their earnings."So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable

And there's more:

Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there's some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here!

More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what's more striking is that Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation -- well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.

In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created. It's like a second-order Knowledge Problem.

Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb, and God knows there's plenty of evidence that Congress isn't a repository of rocket scientists. But it's just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn't make much difference.

The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing

He continues:


The bad news is obvious: We're governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can't help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good:  Incompetence is built into the system.

The good news is less obvious, but just as important: While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don't know what they're doing.

If that doesn't encourage skepticism toward big government, it's hard to imagine what will.

I loved everything about this essay except the last sentence.  As long as politicians are promising free healthcare, money, salvation, chickens in every pot, etc., there will be those who believe every word of it. 

Go here to read the whole thing. 

The contradiction pics came from here and here and here and here.