**************
A colleague from the UK was visiting our lab this past week. Considering what he usually experiences in the way of winter weather, out frigid New England winter temps were a bit of a shock to him. Of course, being the kind of wise-ass New England Yankee that I am, I told him that what he was experiencing was what we call the January Thaw. (It was -3ºF the morning I told him this.) His response: “You mean it's usually colder than this? Bloody hell!”The look on his face was priceless.
**************
I saw this in a comment to a piece I linked to yesterday and I knew I had to work it into another post. I think it amply demonstrates that even if all wealth was distributed equally, the outcome would not be equal, something the Left still refuses to recognize.If you took all the wealth in America, converted it all to cash, and gave everyone an equal amount, within a few years the ones who had nothing before will have nothing again while those rich before would be again. Look at how many lottery winners go broke while so many wealthy had been bankrupt. Some people are just good at generating wealth, and it's not something that you can learn in school.Indeed. Having a lot of money is not the same thing as being wealthy as it is more a state of mind and action than having someone just dump a lot of money into your bank account. Remaining wealthy takes work, something which many of the chronic poor have no experience. Too many of them have had things handed to them by the government their entire lives.
**************
Deb had a small accident last night on the way home from work. She was only a few hundred yards from home when a small pug ran across the front of her car. She tried to stop, but with the snowfall we'd had last night braking traction was minimal and she hit the poor little dog. To say she was upset would be understating thingsTo make a long story short, we couldn't find the dog even thought she knew it had been under her car. Neither BeezleBub, one of our local police officers, or I could find the little dog, though we did see tracks heading back up the hill from the accident scene.
With all of this in mind I have to ask one question: What was this little dog doing outside past midnight on a night that was well below freezing? Between the temps and the fact that there are plenty of night predators that would easily make a meal of that dog, what the heck was the little guy doing out that time of night?
**************
Wendy Davis isn't getting anywhere near the abuse she deserves.If she's willing to abandon her own family for her political ambitions, what else will she be willing to sacrifice? Maybe her constituents' rights, property, and money? That certainly seems to be her pattern.
**************
Tom Perkins wonders whether a Progressive Kristallnact is coming.Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."I have come to redefine the term “Progressive” to mean “totalitarian”. After all, so many of them are pushing for a totalitarian state where everyone except them will have to submit to the will of The State. Oh, they won't come right out and say it, but when you take all of the programs, propaganda, and push towards ever more restrictive laws that make everyone a criminal, it all leads to one outcome: destruction of freedom and a complete takeover of everyone's lives by a self-proclaimed elite.
This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?
**************
As a follow-up, we can always look to the Totalitarians of New York if we need to see what we're headed for unless we stop this nonsense now.Bill de Blasio's focus after his petty and mean-spirited inauguration was a ban on carriage horses in Central Park at the behest of a real estate developer who backed his campaign and has his eye on their stables, a tussle over who will get the credit for Pre-K with Governor Cuomo and the beating of Kang Wong, an 84-year-old man, over a jaywalking ticket.That's how it starts, with the small 'offenses' and progresses to widespread corruption, arbitrary laws and uneven application of law. Then again with a Marxist mayor now in charge, I expect to see a rapid decline of New York City. What will accelerate the decline is technology, where the need for the financial institutions, i.e. Wall Street, to remain in New York no longer exists. And should de Blasio succeed in driving out Wall Street, New York will become the East Coast Detroit because all of the money the city depends upon will disappear with the Wall Street institutions.
The media had lavished praise on Bill de Blasio after his first photo op shoveling snow and celebrated his call to implement Vision Zero, a Swedish plan to cut traffic fatalities to zero, even though there was no remote possibility of reducing traffic fatalities to zero in a major city filled with cars, pedestrians, cyclists and even pedicabs.
nstead of preparing for the snow, Team De Blasio launched a crackdown on jaywalking in Manhattan where three-quarters of the residents don't own cars. And so the Upper East Side, which didn't vote for Bill de Blasio, became a snarled and unplowed mess and the jaywalking enforcers put an 84-year-old-man in the hospital after arresting him for the tall order of "jaywalking, resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration and disorderly conduct."
And to think the voters of New York voted for the decay of their own city.
**************
Is it a surprise to anyone that ObamaCare is a major #FAIL?However, if it's real purpose was to destroy the health care system in the US and ensure that no one receives adequate medical care, except the elite, of course, then it has been a rousing success.
Of the two I am inclined to believe the first because, quite frankly, I doubt anyone within the White House is smart enough to pull that off. Instead I attribute it to the sheer incompetence that defines the Obama Administration. After all, Obama has always been good at campaigning but has no ability to govern. If nothing else the past 5 years has proven that. All of his speeches sound like a stump speech, filled with vague promises, setting goals with no road map on how to reach them, and excoriating anyone who dares question his ideas or intelligence.
It will be interesting to see if he follows the same pattern again for his upcoming State of the Union address Tuesday evening. If I had to lay odds, I'd say it's a sure thing.