The Council Has Spoken: May 15, 2009
Congratulations to this week’s winners:
Council: Joshua Pundit - The Two State Solution Fallacy
Noncouncil: Infidel Bloggers Alliance - Obama’s “Blood Tax”
Full voting here.
Archive for May 2009
The Council Has Spoken: May 8, 2009
Congratulations to this week’s winners:
Council: Wolf Howling - Waiting For The Iranian Shoe To Drop
Noncouncil: The Augean Stables - What Do I Think of the Arab-Israeli Conflict? Answers to a Questionnaire
Full voting here.
Cheney Gets It – But the GOP Doesn’t
I’ll admit I’ve always like Dick Cheney since he was Bush I’s Secretary of Defense (BTW I have never liked Bush I). In this interview with North Dakota’s Scott Hennen, Cheney shows he understands what Republicans need to do to save their party.
“I think it would be a mistake for us to moderate,” Cheney said. “This is about fundamental beliefs and values and ideas … what the role of government should be in our society, and our commitment to the Constitution and constitutional principles… Most Republicans have a pretty good idea of values, and aren’t eager to have someone come along and say, ‘Well, the only way you can win is if you start to act more like a Democrat.’”
What I don’t get is why the rest of the GOP leadership doesn’t get this. It’s an easy lesson to me. Did Barack Obama lead the Democrats to where they are today by being like Republicans? After all it was just 6 short years ago that the Democrats fretted about being leaderless. Heck, 7 years ago I recommended that the Democratic Party in effect become Republican-lite. Lucky for them they completely ignored my advice.
The Democrats returned to power by becoming more like themselves – wimpy, wealthy, eco-whiners – but guess what? It worked, and Republicans need to take a hard look at how it worked if they plan to replicate the strategy.
The party must stop moderating. Extremists bring excitement and new ideas to the party. They also raise shedloads of cash. We need to encourage extremists, not shy away from them or blush when we are questioned about our relationship to them the way many veteran GOPers have done with Rush Limbaugh.
It also needs to learn from Reagan. After all, Obama did.
This gets back to the 80% rule. If you agree with me 80%, then stay. If you are goin to let your little petty 20% get in the way of doing what we need to do, then you can go elsewhere. But, guys, you say, this can’t work. Um, yeah, it did. Look at what Reagan did with these groups who disagreed:Pro-choice women were welcomed into the tent as voters so long as they didn’t try to change the party’s position on the issue of abortion, one which Reagan held dearly enough to have written a book about while still in office. Union members were courted by Reagan, so long as they didn’t mind Reagan’s tough policies toward organizing which included his firing of striking air traffic controllers and eventually came to be known as “Reagan Democrats.” Those jittery over Reagan’s bellicose statements on foreign policy were also welcomed, provided they could live with his tough posture toward communism. And even Rockefeller Republicans were allowed to stay in the tent so long as they realized that they were joining his party and not the other way around, that while they would be horrified by the new boss’s position on social issues for instance, they’d find something to cheer about in his tax cuts.
Leigh Scott points out that Conservatives need to rebrand themselves as the punk rockers of politics:
Conservatism is all about freedom. That’s the sales pitch. Conservatives endorse freedom. We are the modern day rebels. We are the punk rockers of politics. We like to work hard and party harder. The government is “The Man.” “The Man” tries to hold you down. Anybody who wants the “safety net” of cradle to the grave government support should be ridiculed. And rightfully so.
It should be cool to be Republican again because we aren’t the establishment. We are the radicals that terrify the establishment.
And like all good radicals we need new ideas, new leaders, and a bloodbath of the old ones. Dick Cheney senses this, and it’s why I know that once the young firebrands of the party get organized and start kicking butt, he’ll disappear.
“Little Girl” the Feral Cat Is In Labor
And the entire household is on tenterhooks. Here’s an introduction to Little Girl.
They need to come out with a feline edition of “What To Expect When You’re Expecting,” ...
UPDATE: 2:32am Friday May 8, 2009
One ER visit (for a bad cat bite to the Wife – who got a little too close during a kitten birth) and 4 kittens later…
Note that 3 of the 4 are completely black.
Guess I just can’t escape my goth heritage…
Windows 7 Experiment
I recently completed building my latest creation – The Crystal – a scratchbuilt desktop with an acrylic case having the following specs:
CPU: Intel Q6600 (currently running at stock speed)
Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45-UD3L
RAM: Corsair 2×2gb
GPU: Radeon 4870 512mb
HD: Hitachi 1tb
Since the completion coincided with the release of Windows 7 RC1 to the public, I’ve loaded that OS. Installing Windows 7 was actually the easiest install of an operating system that I can recall. You simply answer a few questions, enter the product key, and less than 1/2 hour later your PC is ready to go.
I’m currently loading drivers. ATI already released a Windows 7 one, but the ethernet driver isn’t playing nice. If I try loading the Vista version it says “This driver cannot be installed under Windows XP” and if I download and try installing the XP version of the driver I get the error “This driver cannot be installed under Vista.” Oh well there had to be some trouble somewhere – otherwise people would trust computers and the professionals that shepherd them.
Yet More Green Hypocrisy
U2’s the Edge owns 156 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains and plans to build five 10,000 sq ft mansions on his property. “These homes will be some of the most environmentally sensitive ever designed in Malibu — or anywhere in the world,” the guitarist, whose real name is David Evans, said in a prepared statement released to the press. This being America even if it is a post-Kelo America, property rights should trump p***ing off the locals which The Edge’s plan seems to be doing.
“It is going to look nice to the human eye but at what cost?” said surf shop owner and City Councilman Jefferson Wagner. “When is enough enough?”
Surf-dude, enough is enough when you own the property you are whining about – unless you want someone like me to violate your property rights by convincing the council to turn your shop into something truly useful, like a Wawa.
As a property owner myself I support the Edge’s right to do whatever the heck he wants to with that 156 acres. If he wants to clear-cut it and turn it into a parking lot, that it is his right. Ditto with the Surf-dude councilman. If he wants to sell wannabees boards that they aren’t qualified to ride, then that’s his business – not mine.
But one difference between the Edge and me is that I don’t claim to be green. He’s considered by the MSM to be an environmentalist yet I’m considered to belong to a group that would drop-kick the Lorax into a chipper-shredder.
Funny thing is that I’m currently looking at properties with acreage in rural North Carolina with the intent on protecting it from development. In fact the Wife just checked out 75 acres along a river with old growth timber on it. Unfortunately it was also infested with hippies and Rainbow People-types. The owner was charging top dollar for the property but insisted that in any contract he was going to write a clause that allowed him access to a cave on the property anytime he wanted, and that the hippies would be allowed to continue to “gather” on the property.
The Wife laughed heartily at that and then mentioned that the Kid and I planned to set up a shooting range. The owner smiled a bit wanly, evidently imagining me running my very own hippy hunting reserve.
I don’t care about my carbon footprint and evidently The Edge doesn’t care about his either. Supporting each of five 10,000 square foot mansions takes a lot of carbon to build and maintain. I do care about wilderness, preserving what remains and returning land that has fallen out of use by Man to the wild. I look at the blocks of empty lots and vacant buildings that blight the urban landscape, and imagine fencing the area off with razor wire, removing the concrete and asphalt, planting trees and adding a pack of wolves and a herd of deer. But I don’t have the money for my crazy “green” ideas like the Edge does.
Meanwhile I live in a 1,200 square foot home. My Wife and I are adherents of the Not So Big House philosophy which is the anti-thesis of current American housing culture. In place of a large McMansions on postage stamp piece of land our ideal is a small cozy cottage on a large tract of land. We have considered how much house we really needed and decided that the answer was under 2,000 sq. ft.
Does the Edge need 10,000 square feet? That is just under a quarter of an acre, and over 4x the average home size in the USA. According to Wikipedia, Edge has a wife and two children. Does each need the equivalent square footage of the average American house? More importantly does he need to offer such mansions to 4 other families?
The price of the lots alone are $7.5 million, and selling all four would net him $30 million – 3 1/2 times the original cost of the entire 156 acre parcel. The project would require the removal of 70,000 cubic yards of earth and the grading of a road up the steep hillsides.
Edge claims that the properties will be “environmentally sensitive” in terms of blending into the landscape and using state of the art power and water conservation technologies. But reducing the environmental damage caused by building a single 10,000 sq. ft. house doesn’t eliminate the damage such construction causes in the first place, not to mention the ongoing damage caused by the maintenance of such a behemoth.
So what ego requires 10,000 square foot? The Edge’s ego and no doubt his pocket book; it has nothing to do with being green – and that’s hypocrisy in my book.
The Council Has Spoken: May 1, 2009
Congratulations to this week’s winners:
Council: Wolf Howling - Words Have Meaning Rick
Noncouncil: Legal Insurrection - Which city would you sacrifice?
Full voting here.
