Category Archives: Blogosphere

Catastrophist follies

Posted on February 4, 2013 | Comments Off on Catastrophist follies

It’s the disaster the catastrophists missed entirely. They’ve done population bombs—with attendant agricultural, pollution and war issues—to death in fiction and politics (which are closely-related, actually). First their end-of-oil-and-gas baloney was laughed out of real life by fracking. Now declining birth rates are kicking them when they’re down. Serves ’em right.

Meanwhile, the anti-plastic bag enviros (including our favorite progressive Mrs. Charm) are reaping unintended consequences, from bacteria-caused ER visits to actual deaths. Environmentalism is all about feelings not about facts.

Via Instapundit.

UPDATE:  Also from Insty, with a great title: What to Expect When No One’s Expecting.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Mrs. Charm, Scribbles

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Rule 5: Josephine Trott

Posted on February 3, 2013 | Comments Off on Rule 5: Josephine Trott

A different Rule 5, perhaps, but this was fashion in 1903, and Ms. Trott was to become famous as a composer of a book of exercises for fiddlers called Melodious Double-Stops. It makes learning a difficult technique at least, well, melodious.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Music, Rule 5

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Bad bosses: Texas Democrat Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee

Posted on January 31, 2013 | Comments Off on Bad bosses: Texas Democrat Rep. Shirley Jackson Lee

Lee has always been, as Amy Alkon puts it, a honking moron, but now we know the imperious Houston b***h is also a terror to her employees and the ranking congressional rep in terms of staff turnover.

“I’m a queen and I demand to be treated like one,” the Washington Times quotes one of her former congressional staffers quoting Lee in a characteristic hissyfit. Each year, the paper reports, “an average of [more than] half of Mrs. Jackson Lee’s staff quits, and one year, all but six of 23 staffers quit.”

Insufferable she may be but at least Barry has yet to nominate her for anything serious. The paper reports that his Secdef nominee Republican Chuck Hagel is described by some former Senate staffers as paranoid and abusive “who would rifle through staffers’ desks and berate them for imagined disloyalty.”

I do find it dismaying that third on the paper’s calculated congressional staff turnover list, at an average of 46 percent (well above Hagel’s 33 percent], is Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann. I expected more from her.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Texana

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Thank you, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz

Posted on January 30, 2013 | Comments Off on Thank you, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz

Texas senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn voted against John Kerry’s confirmation as secretary of state. Didn’t stop him from confirmation, of course, but it was nicely symbolic.

Any opposition to Lurch, the lying clown who slandered a generation of Vietnam veterans and caused us unending problems in the post-war job market, is a very good thing. Now we’ll watch to see how the pol who never met a dictator he didn’t like, gets his international comeuppance. I hope.

Although I would prefer he not get any ambassadors killed, like Clinton did.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Texana, Viet Nam

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Chest candy

Posted on January 30, 2013 | Comments Off on Chest candy

Probably a photoshop joke, although this is North Korea, and police states do tend to do power things like this to excess. But it’s one reason why I’m having trouble getting very exercised about Barry’s plan to downsize the Pentagon.

We haven’t seen anything quite this ludicrous by American military officers (altho we have plenty of sheriffs and police chiefs who seem to think they are four-star generals) but I do recall that General Petraeus’s chest candy climbed up to and almost over his shoulder. And most of his medals were for pencil-pushing, the kind that senior officers award each other. Now that old Betray Us has been retired, hopefully some of his pals will be downsized.

Via Simply Jews.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, The War, Troops

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Your House Is On Fire, Your Children All Gone

Posted on January 29, 2013 | Comments Off on Your House Is On Fire, Your Children All Gone

Scott at The Fat Guy recently asked me for some book recomendations. He was more interested in scifi than anything else, and I gave him a bunch of those, but this small-town horror tale by Stefan Kiesbye also is a winner.

I picked up on it from PJMedia’s Andrew Klaven and decided to give it a try through the Kindle sample at Amazon. I was immediately hooked by the seemingly-effortless writing style and the surprise of a character literally peeing on a grave after a funeral.

It’s a coming-of-age tale about a post-WWII German village’s adolescents whose parents and peers brutalize each other so casually that none of it rings false. Sounds awful? All of that sneaks up on you, actually, and by the time it makes its appearance you’re already invested in the story and the characters. It is far less violent than many other novels these days, thanks to Kiesbye’s clever choice of words.

It helps if you know German so you realize the English meaning of some of the place names, but it’s not strictly necessary. Haunting, Klaven calls it, and I agree. I’m still thinking about it, three books later.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Obsessions

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Barry kills more jobs

Posted on January 28, 2013 | Comments Off on Barry kills more jobs

This time it’s the loss of an estimated 3,900 direct and indirect jobs for construction of a new coal-fired electric power plant in Corpus Christi. Barry’s EPA doesn’t like coal, remember, so they killed the permit for the project, despite the fact that most 42 percent of American electricity is created by burning coal.

I suppose the EPA would rather folks in Corpus cut back on their use of electricity or else hook up to such intermittent (and very expensive) power sources as wind generators and inefficient solar cells. More likely, though, the bureaucrats simply don’t care. D.C. is enjoying an economic boom on our taxes, though it’s mainly the pols and the rest of the 1 percent who are rolling in the dough.

UPDATE:  This is only the latest Texas power plant to be closed by King Putz’s EPA. Five others also are on the block. One in Pasadena, one in Lone Star, two in Mount Pleasant and one in Pittsburg.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Obamalot, Science/Engineering, Texana, The Economy

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