After a long hiatus, I have opened up the registration to Medary.com. Since I opened it up, I've been rejecting a lot of signup requests--e-mail addresses from China and the like. They don't get approved. They go to cyber-heaven.

If you want to make it through the signup process--to for instance comment on my self-evident wit and brilliance (well, it's evident to me, the self anyway), or to tell me--in the nicest possible way of course, that I'm full of it, it would be a good idea to ask for a user name and/or provide an e-mail address that makes some kind of sense, and won't set off all kinds of alarms when I type that stuff into various search engines to check you out.

It would also help a great deal if you e-mail me to tell me you're a real person, and not some robo-spammer (or a human spammer--hello to all you poor schmucks working in India and elsewhere!). My e-mail address starts with phil. (Don't put the period in the e-mail address. It won't work that way.)

Then you put the little ampersand curly-a at-sign that goes between a user name and a host name.

Then you put haskett.org at the end of it.

Then you can send me e-mail--assuming of course it makes it through the spam filter. If it doesn't, well then sorry about that. You probably should put a subject in the e-mail like "please let me have an account at medary.com." Saying "please" is important, you know. If I decide I like you, I'll let you have an account here, and will let you comment, at least until you get too obnoxiously annoying. If I don't, I won't. Simple.

Now that the Democrats have their claws firmly attached to the levers of Federal power, I have begun my traditional slide back from a reluctant Republican to a strident libertarian.

That's because while some Republicans have always bothered me a bit with their obsession on certain social issues, the Democrats simply scare the hell out of me. And while Republicans tend to get more moderate, or even start leaning leftward when they have control over everything, the Democrats get even more crazily out of control when they have all of the cards in the deck of political power.

The Republicans have the saving virtue of actually caring about national defense and promoting freedom, liberty, and the rule of law. The Democrats--and I'm talking about the national Democratic Party leadership here--demonstrate time and time again that they really don't care about defending the nation, are actively opposed to freedom and liberty, both at home and in places like Honduras, and they certainly have disdain if not contempt for the rule of law, not to mention the very people who voted to put them in office. The latter is the most important takeaway lesson from the August town hall meetings--at least, the ones that Democrats were willing to hold.

It's time to undo the New Deal and restore traditional American liberty and personal responsibility. I don't have a big problem with some kind of means-tested social safety net to cover those who are truly needy, but we simply can not afford to cast that social safety net over the entire country, and take over half of the gross domestic product of the country away from the productive private sector and spend it instead on government.

We can't afford it.

We can't afford it.

We can't afford it.

It will destroy this country, the exact same way that socialism destroyed Russia in the U.S.S.R. years, and the way it has corroded and corrupted the once-world-leading United Kingdom. We can't afford it.

Wired Science remembers the 1859 solar flare and subsequent magnetic storm:

On Sept. 2, 1859, at the telegraph office at No. 31 State Street in Boston at 9:30 a.m., the operators’ lines were overflowing with current, so they unplugged the batteries connected to their machines, and kept working using just the electricity coursing through the air.

In the wee hours of that night, the most brilliant auroras ever recorded had broken out across the skies of the Earth. People in Havana and Florida reported seeing them. The New York Times ran a 3,000 word feature recording the colorful event in purple prose.

“With this a beautiful tint of pink finally mingled. The clouds of this color were most abundant to the northeast and northwest of the zenith,” the Times wrote. “There they shot across one another, intermingling and deepening until the sky was painfully lurid. There was no figure the imagination could not find portrayed by these instantaneous flashes.”

As if what was happening in the heavens wasn’t enough, the communications infrastructure just beginning to stretch along the eastern seaboard was going haywire from all the electromagnetism.

If that same solar flare (or "coronal mass ejection") happened today, it would mess up modern civilization pretty seriously. Put it down on your list of things to worry about.

Via Instapundit

The gay Democrat guys from Chicago at Hillbuzz use those four words that nobody really wants to hear: We Told You So.

Well, just imagine our chagrin last year, when we tried to tell the whole Daily Kos crowd that Dr. Utopia and his wife are nothing more than con artists. Whatever “hope” and “change” mean to these Leftist Loons, that’s not how Dr. and Mrs. Utopia interpreted everything they said during the campaign. ”Hope” to them was “hope these fools don’t wake up before the election”. “Change” was “instead of farting through silk in Chicago, we’ll be doing that in Washington now, suckers”. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip!

Crass, true, but it’s fitting with the Utopias we know from Chicago. The ones we warned you about, but you didn’t listen, Kossacks, or whatever you call yourselves.

You are that girl in the dorm with Tang-orange hair cut around a bowl on your head…and you have no one to blame but yourselves. The interesting question in all of this is…just how low will Dr. Utopia’s numbers go, and just how bad will 2010 be for Democrats, if now Dr. Utopia’s base is starting to wake up and swear off the Kool-Aid too?

I don't think you want to get the Hillbuzz guys mad at you. Their snark is world-class.

They chose not to link to the Daily Kos web site. This is probably wise, unless you want to wallow in the fever swamp but I'll do it as a public service.

Two stories--first, from Reuters:

U.S. sheds 216,000 jobs in August, jobless rate hits 9.7 percent

Next, the Kansas City Star:

Canada adds 27,100 jobs in August

How's that stimulus working out for ya?

The phrase introduced by Sarah Palin was admittedly a bit hyperbolic. Nobody proposes a system that judges that old people have lived long enough and should go home and die. Nope, nobody would EVER propose such a thing.

It just kinda happens, when you have government-run health care.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air relates yet another horror story coming from the government-run NHS in the United Kingdom, as reported in the UK's Telegraph newspaper:

Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

Read that first sentence again. Read it very, very carefully. Understand what it says. Then, read the second sentence.

No, no, no, nobody EVER proposes anything like death panels. They are just a natural consequence of a "single-payer" system.

Oops. Sorry about that. But hey, health care is a RIGHT! Well, a right for some people, anyway.

It's Back!

Attentive folks may have heard of the Canadian Human Rights Commissions and their sordid campaign to shut down anyone who comes into their (naturally, left-leaning) crosshairs.

Well, it seems he's lost a case. A big one.

Today's shocking decision is a victory over Mr. Warman by Marc Lemire, webmaster of freedomsite.org and a prominent figure in the Canadian far right, who was supported in his constitutional challenge of Section 13 by the legal team defended Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel.

Mr. Warman alleged that postings on Mr. Lemire's website, written by others, contravened Section 13 in that they were "likely to expose" identifiable groups to "hatred or contempt."

Mr. Lemire responded by challenging the law itself, which was last upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in a 1990 split decision, before the Internet age.

Could the day be near when political speech is more free in Canada than in the USA?

At Classical Values:

According to most accounts, a MoveOn.org member punched an anti-Obamacare protester and the pro-Obamacare protester had a finger bitten off in the process. However, in these versions of the story, it was the older anti-Obamacare protester who had his finger bitten off. (An eyewitness account posted here claims that the biter was pro-Obama.)

Let's keep other people's fingers out of our mouths, m'kay?

Keith Olbermann. NBC Sports.

He's why I don't watch NFL football on Sunday nights. And I won't until he's gone. Actually, you know what? I might not watch NBC even after they axe Olbermann.

Simian-blogging comes as a welcome relief, doesn't it?

Science News: Chimpanzees develop 'specialized tool kits' to catch army ants:

Chimpanzees in the Congo have developed specialised 'tool kits' to forage for army ants, reveals new research published today in the American Journal of Primatology. This not only provides the first direct evidence of multiple tool use in this context, but suggests that chimpanzees have developed a 'sustainable' way of harvesting food.