Medary.com

How many Americans living today have never had the opportunity to watch a man walk on the Moon?

Investor's Business Daily

It doesn't say much for a "reform" plan when the example used to promote it explicitly warns against it. But that's what happened when the Mayo Clinic on Tuesday refuted the Obama administration's sales pitch for a 1,018-page health care reform bill, promising everyone a Mayo-like program.

The clinic warned the proposed reforms won't create anything like the low-cost system for which Mayo is envied worldwide.

"The proposed legislation," Mayo says on its policy blog, "misses the opportunity to help create higher-quality, more affordable health care for patients. In fact, it will do the opposite.

Here's the link direct from the Mayo Clinic.

Obamacare. Do Not Want.

I love Japan and the Japanese. They are truly a "silly little people," at least when they're not plotting to take over the world.

Do you think I exaggerate? That perhaps I'm just a gaijin big white barbarian?

Oh, no, my friends, oh, no.

Via Fark.com and, apparently, the Russians at Fishki.net, I present this gallery of epic strangeness from the Land of the Rising Sun. Keep scrolling, it gets weirder and weirder. OK, it just gets weird fast and stays there. A few of the pictures are NSFW and might be offensive if you're really tightly wound.

Like I said, I love Japan.

Public money drives out private money.

That's my only quibble with this: Global Warming: Scientists' Best Predictions May Be Wrong:

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models." . . . The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of the heating during the PETM (the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum--an unusually warm period, much warmer than present day, about 55 million years ago). "Some feedback loop or other processes that aren't accounted for in these models -- the same ones used by the IPCC for current best estimates of 21st Century warming -- caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM."

The models are broken. They can't explain known conditions in the past. This makes their predictive "skill" regarding future climatic conditions utterly nonexistent.

Why then are we betting the entire world economy on bad computer models?

. . . I was going to say "seen but not heard" but I think I'll amend that to "neither seen nor heard."

And I suspect at this point, that given the behavior of not only the current incumbent but several of the previous occupiers of that position, that this proposition would receive widespread, bi-partisan support.

Did it really pass?

I posted previously on this here.

In the Boston Globe, law professor Jonathan Adler confirms what we already knew about the Waxman-Markley climate change/economy destruction bill:

“When Waxman-Markey finally hit the floor, there was no actual bill. Not one single copy of the full legislation that would, hours later, be subject to a final vote was available to members of the House. The text made available to some members of Congress still had ‘placeholders’ - blank provisions to be filled in by subsequent language.’’

Malfeasance in office:

Nevertheless a few "elements" can be distilled from those cases. First, malfeasance in office requires an affirmative act or omission. Second, the act must have been done in an official capacity—under the color of office. Finally, that that act somehow interferes with the performance of official duties—though some debate remains about "whose official" duties.

I think that any lawmaker (not his or her staff, but the lawmaker in his own person, who has been duly elected to office) who fails to read the content of the bill they are voting for has satisfied all three of these criteria. Therefore, I hold that every single Representative who voted for this non-bill has committed malfeasance in office and should be immediately removed from office by the most direct lawful means necessary.

Oh, and no, I wouldn't lose any sleep over those Congresscritters losing their office who voted through the rammed-through Patriot Act, either. Once is a mistake, twice is policy.

From Visual Economics comes this interesting chart depicting where the average American family spends its money: A larger version is viewable at the above link.

Being a semi-loyal Dave Ramsey listener, I had one immediate observation: Where is "debt service" on the chart? I don't see it.

Still, here's how it breaks down, in chart form, from largest to smallest percentage:

20.2% Shelter
17.6% Gasoline, motor oil
10.1% Pensions, Social Security
7.0% Food at home
7.0% Utilities, fuels, public services
6.5% Vehicle purchases ("net outlay")
6.3% Transportation expenses-"other transportation"
5.7% Health care
5.4% Entertainment
5.4% Food away from home
3.8% Apparel and services
3.7% Cash contributions
3.6% Household furnishings, equipment
2.0% Household operations
1.9% Education
1.6% Miscellaneous
1.3% Housekeeping supplies
1.2% Personal care (products & services)
0.9% Alcoholic beverages
0.7% Tobacco and supplies
0.6% Life, other personal insurance
0.2% Reading

Another odd omission is . . . taxes. Apparently, to the Visual Economics people, taxes and debt service (i.e. interest) aren't household expenses. Well, isn't that nice to know? Also, going to the source--the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the data are from 2007, NOT April, 2009. And, while debt service isn't broken out in the BLS data, taxes paid are, which makes it a fairly egregious omission from the chart, in my humble opinion.

Burrowing further into the BLS stats, here's where the average family's money comes from:

All Income $63,091
79.76% Wages and Salaries
10.11% Social Security, private and government retirement
5.46% Self-employment income
2.77% Interest, dividends, rental income, other property income
0.34% Unemployment and worker's compensation, veteran's benefits
0.53% Public assistance, supplemental security income, food stamps
0.73% Regular contributions for support
0.30% Other income

And, finally, how much of that $63,000 goes to taxes?

3.54% Personal taxes
2.49% Federal only
1.05% State, local, and other

Of course, if you're actually making $63,000, you're paying a LOT more than 3.54% of your gross income ($1,569 a year) in Federal taxes, aren't you? I seem to recall my federal tax, back in the day when I was in that approximate income class, was closer to $5k a year. Ah, the wonder of averaging the tax bill over the entire population--where nearly half of everyone doesn't pay a single cent. So, one way to think of it is, if you're that $63,000 person, any Federal tax over $1,569 that you're paying, is pulling the load for someone else who isn't. And, the beauty of a "progressive" income tax is, the more you make, the more freeloaders--oops--unfortunate poor people--oops--your saintly fellow citizens you get to subsidize. This is called "fair." Parenthetically, I'm not sure how this figure of 3.54% squares with the proposals to replace the Federal income tax with an 18% "flat" tax--the so-called "Fair Tax." Something is seriously screwy with this number, I think, but I might just not quite comprehend what I'm looking at. Wouldn't be the first time.

Anyway, while I don't think this graphics rates a full FAIL, it is not completely chock-full of WIN either.

In my last post, I let loose a rant about Who We Are. Well, if that's who we are (and yeah, I know that what I wrote is a bit of a stereotype, but aren't all such descriptions, really?) then who are they who are not us.

They're Control Freaks, basically. They aren't all on the Left, either. The right-wing Control Freaks, for the most part, wave a book around and demand that everybody live their lives by their own particular interpretation of what the words in that book means. As such, right wing Control Freaks are usually fairly easy to identify and, if necessary, avoid.

Leftie control freaks are more subtle. (Subtlety is bad here, by the way. Substitute sneaky or disingenuous.) Control freaks on the left want to control your entire life too, but they hide their core desire behind high-minded words and causes--"War on Poverty," "Fight climate change," "universal health care." The list is long and ignominious. But boil it all down, and all Leftist causes reduce do "I know better than you do how you should live your life, and I'm willing to use the force of government to make you behave."

If you have ever said "you need to . . ." then you are a Control Freak, a danger to others, and should be opposed by all people of good will. Nobody likes a busybody. If you have ever said "we need to . . . " then you're showing your inner Control Freak, and need to think long and hard about your deep psychological need to control the actions (and money) of others. If your thoughts tend to run to "I need to do . . ." then you're probably a normal, sane person, who people tend to like, or at least not dislike too intensely.

I'm not sure, but it looks to me that most colleges, but Ivy League schools especially, have remedial classes in How To Be A Control Freak For Fun And Profit. The major national media is almost completely infested with Control Freaks--people who went to Journalism School to "make a difference." The phrase "make a difference" is another code word for "make you behave the way I want you to." It is a marker to indicate that the person using that phrase may be a Control Freak.

Everybody has their Control Freak moments, of course. Truly mature people learn to control themselves first, however, and curb their juvenile impulses to control everybody else. The Founding Fathers were mature and rational people. Our political leadership today--not so much.

Politicians are, by their very nature, Control Freaks. That's why the Constitution was set up the way it was--to throw obstacles in front of the Control Freaks to make it more difficult for Them to control Us. That's why Control Freaks want to ignore the plain words of the Constitution at every turn.

The current group of politicians in Washington are an extreme example of Control Freaks. (Yes, I know, it's tempting to drop the word "Control" when referring to Congress, especially." President Obama is nothing more or less than a particularly extreme example of a Control Freak--and the warning signs were there for all to see during the 2008 campaign.

I'm about to post this over on Free Republic, in response to yet another Sarah Palin thread:

Sarah Palin doesn't need to take over the Republican Party. We do.

We, the people. The real majority of this country. The people who didn't go to Ivy League schools, the people who had better things to do than get a law degree. The people who didn't drink the Marxist cool-aid at Berkeley or the post-modernist crap at Duke, the people who just want to live their lives and love their families and be left alone to do that. The people who aren't invited onto CNN or Fox News to give their opinions. The people who don't even know what Current TV is, let alone have so much time on their hands as to make a show for Al Gore's network.

We're the people who sit around a fire in the woods or the back yard, drinking beer and making s'mores, not the people who dress up and go to swanky dinner parties where they sip white wine and nibble on exotic cheese. We like cheese, too, but prefer cheddar to gouda, and if we're feeling a bit rambunctious, some pepper jack.

In fact, most of us don't like ties at all (if we're male). Give us a t-shirt, or a polo, if we want to dress up.

We believe that hard work is a virtue, and getting benefits from the government is not--regardless of any other consideration.

We think that Congress should actually read the bills they pass into law.

We think that Congress, for that matter, should actually read and comprehend the Constitution that they swear to uphold.

When we think of our history, and the Boston Tea Party, the first thing that comes to mind is NOT a homosexual sex act.

We understand "Take this job and shove it." We occasionally sing it loudly and off-key, when we're having a bit too much fun at the local watering hole.

We understand charity. We are willing to give to those who need it. We are not willing to do that at gunpoint, however.

We understand stewardship. We expect it from our elected officials. We do not often see it from them, however.

What we want more than anything else is to leave our fellow citizens alone, and be left alone to live our own lives without bowing down to some Ivy League lawyer who says he or she knows better than we do how to spend our money.

The Democratic Party elites don't speak for us. The Republican Party elites don't speak for us. The media doesn't speak for us.

Nobody speaks for us, in fact. Nobody with any kind of power, that is. So we talk amongst ourselves, after church, at happy hour, at Free Republic and some other places on the Internet.

We are Flyover Country. We are the Little People. We are Americans.

And we're getting very angry.