Shades of Red

Warren Meyer points out how Obama fits the mold of a "Corporatist" more than a Socialist. I've also seen people describe him as a Mussolini-style Fascist.

Of course, the media marginalizes anyone who uses such terms (while stupidly lumping libertarians and anarcho-capitalists into the "far right-wing" category, along with neo-Nazis and skinheads, when they are as different as can be).

The term "collectivist" nicely ties the -isms with which to describe Obama into a simple category. Unfortunately, the average person is unfamiliar with the term, and doesn't think much beyond the arcane, useless 1-dimensional left-right continuum.

Entertainment Notes

I haven't been taking the time to make any comments on American Idol here for weeks. I've been disappointed that the women keep getting cut. Previously, I'd predicted the opposite. Of course, the women have had a few flops. Tim Urban should have been cut early, but he's a VTFW pick (these are the people who kept Sanjaya in the competition). Funny enough, he's improved the past few weeks--not enough to win, but not horrible enough to give the worsters much satisfaction. The whole concept behind Vote for the Worst is halfway funny, but also pretty lame. Sure, it's fun to make fun of things, but at some point, if you're obligated to put something down all the time, it wears thin, like the Addams Family, where everything was supposed to be like opposite day. The maturity level is pretty low when the best they can do is talk about Kara DioGuardi, a grown woman, having lots of sex. What are they, 12?

Despite the corniness of the show, I still like Richard Nikoley's description of American Idol as an example of the American Dream.

At this point, I like Siobhan Magnus and Crystal Bowersox the best. I think Michael Lynche deserved another chance. He's better than many of the others, and I wish he'd improve his song choice and arrangements to be sharper.

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I saw How to Train Your Dragon (in 2D, we got the showtimes mixed up). [update: That was a happy mistake, as I doubt a 3 year old would put up with wearing glasses for 2 hours] It's quite entertaining, a good children's movie. But we also learned that it's much too long for our 3 year old granddaughter. She managed to entertain and annoy the audience the last 10 minutes, playing keep-away-from-grandpa under the movie screen, until I could corral her off to the side, out of view. Otherwise, the movie was enjoyable for me.

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After hearing so much about the movie Precious, my wife and I rented it. We almost let our daughter see it, but she wasn't interested. [update: FWIW, I mistakenly thought it was PG-13, not R. Another happy accident that my daughter didn't want to see it.] I would not recommend the movie, unless you like sad stories. Definitely don't let your children watch it, as it is very disturbing and very explicit. I wonder why such movies get such critical acclaim. Sure, the acting was convincing, but damn.

Google Docs

Google offers a cloud-computing version of (Open)Office. Create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and forms. Export them to MS Office or OpenOffice format.

The Organization of No

Warren Meyer points out something which should be obvious, though I can't recall ever seeing it articulated so succinctly:

"Government bureaucracies do not exercise power by allowing activities to occur – they only have power, and thus have reason to justify their continued funding and jobs, when they say no. Every incentive that they have is to say no. When a government agency allows progress to proceed smoothly, it is doing so because some person or small group is fighting against the very nature of the organization."

Dieticians Wrong About Fat, Ignore Processed Carbohydrates

See update below.

Anyone who has been reading about honest nutritional science will not lift an eyebrow when Radley Balko says, "What do you know, the experts may have been wrong again..." to blame saturated fat for cardiovascular disease:

Ultimately, saturated fat...may be neutral for the heart. Meanwhile, some mono-unsaturated fats...and some poly-unsaturated fats...could be good for the heart.

...

If saturated fat doesn't adversely affect cardiovascular health, what does? Sorry, Nabisco: We should be giving a closer look to foods with a high glycemic index—a measure that reflects a food's influence on blood sugar levels, based on how quickly it is digested and absorbed. Typically, that means carbohydrates like cereal, bread, chips, and cookies.

In a 2000 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Harvard researchers...found that the quintile of women who ate food with the highest glycemic load—a measure that incorporates portion size—had twice the risk of developing heart disease than the quintile who ate food with the lowest glycemic load. A 2008 meta-analysis of 37 studies reported a significant association between intake of high glycemic index foods and increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, gallbladder disease, and breast cancer.

Read the full article for more details.

Meanwhile, CNN stupidly ignores the role of sugars in an article titled Fatty foods may cause cocaine-like addiction. Ironically, they call processed food "purified" and "evolve[d]" when comparing its addictive qualities to "evolved" drugs like cocaine (as compared to coca leaves).

Look at the ingredients on your box of "low-fat" whole-grain packaged food. You'll see dozens of laboratory chemicals and industrially mutilated plant byproducts. How is that more pure than a grass-fed rib-eye steak? Or a serving of vegetables, nuts, or fruit you buy in their whole, unadulterated form and prepare yourself? And, how can they use the word "evolved" without remembering how the human metabolism evolved almost entirely before agriculture (and definitely before industrial junk food and sedentary TV/Internet lifestyles)?

Eat like our paleo ancestors did, whole foods including fatty meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, and fruit. Skip the packaged stuff. Stay active as much as possible, but don't engage in unnatural aerobic or "cardio" workouts (animals don't run on treadmills--they walk around all the time and occasionally sprint).

Addendum: Mark Sisson gives the lowdown on sugar, how it is so destructive to our health. And still, the "common wisdom" is that fat is the evil.

Some Background on the Window War

A comment at the Walls of the City blog:

I, too have been following Vanderboegh in real time, before his Sipsey Street Irregulars website came into existence, via David Codrea's War on Guns website (which chronicles daily a dozen or more stories of police corruption, particularly with regards to gun laws--the sheer number of articles itself is a very bad reflection on the state of law enforcement) and the Western Rifle Shooters blog.

Vanderboegh wrote about a fictional Window War a decade or so ago, by his reckoning. It was a cautionary tale about gun control in the twilight of the Clinton administration. His repost occurred Feb 2009, just after Obama's inauguration, during the uncertainty of a gang of top administration officials who were far more leftist than anyone before in such high office, who brought with them the brazenly corrupt Chicago-style political thuggery. Couple that with the rotten, power-drunk federal law enforcement agencies, who even during the Bush years were already running amok, and anyone paying attention quickly saw the potential for more Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents (which occurred or started during Bush 41, before Clinton upped the stakes with the scary-looking gun ban).

The Window War has been in the works for a long time. Personally, I believe Vanderboegh is a principled man who is not itching for a fight.

Internecine Criticisms

At Walls of the City I comment on this post, which is a roundup of criticisms of Vanderboegh's Window War:

I wrote a couple posts here and here about your article The Substance of Things, an objectivist critique of Vanderboegh's Window War. I personally think that such tactics are a miscalculation, which run the risk of "copy cats" escalating the subversive acts to things like cutting propane lines to a house (wrong address, actually) or making death threats. As Vanderboegh himself put it (in reference to a different matter), that's the Law of Unintended Consequence--you lose control over how things play out. Innocents get hurt. Bad people exploit the chaos to grab power.

My read of history is that civil disobedience--not just waving signs, but actual non-violent lawbreaking--gets much better results. It puts those in power in the position of showing who they really are, highlighting for the "fence sitters" and unaware just what is wrong with forcing people to buy health insurance, for example.

On the other hand, Roberta X's call "to regroup and plan for elections...for the states to take the matter to court" doesn't strike me as any more productive than the Window War. You can't vote yourself into freedom. Elected officials, by their very nature, will never relinquish power once attained, even if it is at the price of your rights. Trying to win a majority is a losing proposition.

Which lead me directly to your claim that "the government has never been the problem with our country." I could not disagree with you more.

Government was the problem when it ensconced slavery into the Constitution, when it interfered with the free market by imposing a government monopoly on mail delivery (something affecting us this very day), when it made Jim Crow laws, when it engaged in colonialism and foreign interventions (something affecting us this very day), when it imposed one collectivist "reform" or market "regulation" after another. No corporation or non-governmental group has the power of government to trample our rights and to behave unethically (harming the rights of others) purportedly in our name.

Spooner, Garrison, and Thoreau explicated the reasons why the government was wrong, why "its very Constitution is the evil." Government is aggressive force instead of persuasive reason, which by its very nature is immoral.

Now, while I assert that non-violent civil disobedience will likely get better results now than the Window War, the cartridge box or the ballot box...I do not agree with the notion that violence is never the answer. See this post at The Smallest Minority, or the Solzhenitsyn quote Vanderboegh cites here.

I've been reading Vanderboegh for years and I know he has not "been wishing for our backs to be against the wall" nor is he an "extremist... who pleasure[s] [himself] at the thought of another civil war." I may disagree with him about the usefulness of the Window War (and about God and the Constitution at root), but I do have respect for him as a principled individual, unlike those who cut propane lines, make death threats against legislators' family members, etc..

Silencing the Opposition

MSNBC radio talk show host Ed Schultz, who boasts that he would cheat on elections to keep his party in power, calls for using the Fairness Doctrine to steal the resources that other people pay for to "equalize" radio talk show audience. As he put it: "If we're going to be socialist, lets be socialist across the board." (h/t Drudge)

I don't expect a cretin like him to understand the simple concept of private property--he is so far beyond the reach of reason. Why are the "right-wing" talk show hosts far more successful than "left-wing" hotheads like him or Air America? Because the audience, the consumers, freely choose to listen to what they like, which means most of them don't like his ilk. Imagine Shasta demanding to get an equal share of the cola market, by fiat. You want Coke or Pepsi? Too bad.

Of all the times I've heard assholes like Shultz, Pelosi, Durbin, Harkin, Bill Clinton, et al. (D) call for reinstating talk radio socialism, I've never heard a one of them call for applying the same rules to TV. None of them want to force CBS, MSNBC, CNN, and ABC to run stories about Tea Party protesters and all the nasty negative aspects of the bills (as opposed to the bland reporting they did on the run-up to the House vote). Though, considering how much Fox News blows them away in the ratings, I'm sure they might be willing to force Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow on millions of people who don't want them.

Beyond the issues of private property and individual choice, I want to know why "equal time" only extends to Democrats and Republicans. Why not libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, Tea Party independents, Naderites, or Bernie Sanders? Hell, what about the Nation of Islam, the Aryan Nation, or al Qaeda? Who decides which voices are valid? Who decides what proportion and why?

I guess if they can't get their socialism across the board, they can knock down radio towers. If that fails, they can pull a Hugo Chavez and just declare the stations illegal.

Social Security Bankrupt

Jacob Sullum at Reason gives us the bad news: Social Security will go negative this year, six years earlier than predicted.

Meanwhile, we start to see the really bad news regarding the consequences of Health Care Deform:

Deere & Co and Caterpillar Inc said they are expecting a combined $250 million in charges this year as a result of changes to the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system that President Barack Obama signed into law this week.

Why do these Democrats act so surprised when the victims start reacting in anger, either symbolically or worse? And, is it any more surprising that the vandalism is directed at both parties?

Now, they're getting warmed up over Cap-and-Trade (i.e., Kneecap Business and Undermine Free Trade). While they're scaling back the House version, they're getting the camel's nose under the tent. In order to force Americans to limit carbon emissions, it has to hurt, and hurt bad, or people will keep doing what they're doing. All of this, of course, is based upon bad science. (If James Cameron wants to call anyone "out into the street at high noon and shoot it out", I'd suggest the weapon to be used be the scientific method of inquiry, which for centuries has necessarily included healthy skepticism in order to move beyond the flat-earth stagnation of "settled" diktats. Mr. Cameron, without any Hollywood glitz, explain feedback and runaway processes in the context of historical data.)

My daughter rolls her eyes when I say, "Want to hear something really scary?" and then proceed to tell her how Social Security will be gone when she retires. She's not interested now, but this fiscal house of cards that's starting to teeter is worse than any R-rated slasher movie I won't let her get at the video store.

Vanderboegh on Colmes

Go listen.

Castro Applauds Obamacare

Oh joy!

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Thursday declared passage of American health care reform "a miracle" and a major victory for Obama's presidency, but couldn't help chide the United States for taking so long to enact what communist Cuba achieved decades ago.

That Glenn Beck sure is craaaazy! All his talk of Socialism. Where does he get that stuff?

P.S.: Some unusual news: Hollywood actors and musicians actually denounce political tyranny going on today in Cuba. Unlike other apologists for mass murder and tyranny.

Escalation at Republican Office

From Fox News:

Republican Rep. Eric Cantor's Richmond campaign office was shot at Wednesday night, Fox News has learned, the latest in a rash of apparent threats and acts of intimidation against members of Congress.

Which brings to mind:

"Hold onto your butts!" -- Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) in Jurassic Park (1993)