Feuilleton du Jour

The Wildies of Alberta They have the look of a Shetland pony

—short, stout, strong but not sleek. They have evolved to climb hills and cross bogs, they can run through the bush backwards. You could ride one if you captured it and decided to train it, but “it’s like riding a Dodge with no tires.”

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Limbaugh: Republicans Won't Impeach Obama -- and Democrats Will Not Abandon Him - There is no political will to do it.

And without that, it's a waste of time, if you don't have the political will. Meaning, if the Republican Party doesn't have the gonads, and if the American people are not desirous of it, then it's just whistling into the wind.

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Cut Off Glassholes’ Wi-Fi With This Google Glass Detector “These are cameras, highly surreptitious in nature,

with network backup function and no external indication of recording. “To focus on the device is to dance past a heritage of heartfelt protest against the unconsented video documentation of our public places and spaces.”

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We need a theory of jerks. We need such a theory because,

first, it can help us achieve a calm, clinical understanding when confronting such a creature in the wild. Imagine the nature-documentary voice-over: ‘Here we see the jerk in his natural environment. Notice how he subtly adjusts his dominance display to the Italian restaurant situation…’

Aeon

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“Going Out of Business” The list of dramatic markdowns is breathtaking.

They include trading away five murderous terrorists for a likely Army deserter, an open invitation to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants to cross the Mexican border, and a decision to recognize the terrorist group Hamas as part of the Palestinian government.On the home front, environmental regulations will cost thousands of coal miners their jobs and drive up the cost of electricity for millions. The ObamaCare mess is hardly resolved, and the Veterans Affairs scandal keeps getting worse.

New York Post

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Like a jalopy falling apart on the road, dropping a screw here and a spring there, the Obama administration

is gradually shaking itself to pieces. It can go on for a long time shedding parts, but eventually the axle falls out. Centralized regimes may seem to collapse suddenly, but in reality they have usually been fall apart for a long time. The process usually follows this path. First their narratives become so infested with lies they go out of sync with their own administrators on the ground. In the second stage their edicts become unenforceable from sheer impracticability. Grandiose plans are announced, “pivots” are ordered, Red Lines are drawn, all manner of schemes are announced with a maximum of hoopla — but everybody ignores it. They know the latest fad will pass and the regime will Move On. At some point the entire structure of governance becomes a system of workarounds with all real power devolved to the man on the ground.

Belmont Club

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If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists' puppets.

Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man's opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man.

C.S. Lewis Essay - Willing Slaves of the Welfare State

Posted by gerardvanderleun at June 9, 2014 10:04 AM