Know No Net Neut

clipped from reason.com But the truth is that there are big corporations, and big corporate interests, on both sides. On the pro-neutrality side are the companies whose businesses operate at the edge of the web: Silicon Valley Web services like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Twitter. On the other side are the companies who manage the Internet's core: ISPs like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. Much of the debate comes down to a power struggle between these two interests: Will network owners and administrators be allowed to determine access rules, prices, and traffic-management mechanisms on the networks they control? Or will the government step in and regulate those networks, forcing them to operate more or less as dumb pipes, thus shielding the edge-network, web-service companies whose business models rely on those networks from  management practices that they don't like? With the installation of Julius Genachowski in the top spot at the FCC, it increasingly looks like the answer will be the latter.

Unnerved

clipped from www.commentarymagazine.com So when strong, female, and conservative women — with children no less, and lots of them! — come along, the dogma is unsettled and the stereotype is challenged. Feminism is not the province of the Left, these conservative women assert, if feminism is meant to be the empowerment of women and the opening of opportunities. And it certainly doesn’t require acceptance of a pastel agenda of nanny-state domestic policies and pacifism abroad. So Liz Cheney, just like Palin, unnerves and upsets the Left, not simply because she might run for something and win, and not only because she is one of the most effective conservative spokeswomen on national security. She threatens their claim to the moral high ground and their assertion that women voters belong to the Left. That’s reason enough to send them into fits of rage. And you can bet they’re only getting warmed up.

Smaller

clipped from reason.com Take taxation: Taxes simply transfer resources from consumers to government, displacing private spending and investment. There are high costs to the other options as well. If the government borrows money, that leaves less capital for the private sector to borrow for its own consumption. If the government prints new money, it will create inflation, which reduces the value of the money we own and decreases everyone’s purchasing power. Overall, government spending doesn’t boost national income or standard of living. It merely redistributes it—minus the share it spends on the bureaucracy that collects and spends our tax dollars. The pie is sliced differently, but it’s not any bigger. In fact, it’s smaller.

Hit The Road Jackasses

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have been pressing for an investigation of Countrywide Mortgage's "VIP Program," under which powerful Democrats like Kent Conrad and Chris Dodd received sweetheart mortgages, apparently as bribes. So what did the Democrats do? To a man (or woman), they hid. The Republicans made this entertaining video of the incident: That's not quite the end of the story. The Democrats, led by committee chairman Edolphus Towns, were stung by ridicule that resulted from Thursday's debacle. So now they've locked the committee room: Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren't present.

Don't Hold Your Breath

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The Iranian mullahs continue their crackdown on those who demonstrated against their fraudulent election. Today they announced that Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American scholar and an American citizen, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison: Iran ignored appeals by Hillary Rodham Clinton and even rock star Sting and sentenced an Iranian-American academic to 12 years in prison Tuesday for his alleged role in anti-government protests after the country's disputed presidential election. Even rock star Sting? Wow, that's amazing. Until now, has Mr. Sumner had great success in springing dissidents from Islamist prisons? Maybe I missed those news stories. Can the administration work up a similar level of concern for an apparently innocent American citizen who has been made a pawn by Iran's extremist leaders? We'll see. It would be a departure for Obama's administration to actually try to advance American interests or defend American citizens.

Atheism 3.0 II

clipped from www.usatoday.com Atheists are "God's whistle-blowers," who keep believers honest and focused on the here-and-now, Selmanovic said. "Atheism at its best grabs us by the collar and throws us to the ground, demanding to see lives well lived, forcing us to dig deeper and live up to the best of our own religions," he writes. While no one expects the God debate to end any time soon, in the meantime, perhaps people can agree to disagree a little more agreeably, the new New Atheists argue. "There was a moment when atheist books were selling," Dacey said. "But people like objectivity, they like the feeling of balance. So after this wave of atheist books and the criticism that they are extremist, people are trying to find a happy medium."

Atheism 3.0

clipped from www.usatoday.com Bruce Sheiman doesn't believe in God, but he does believe in religion. Setting aside the question of whether God exists, it's clear that the benefits of faith far outweigh its costs, he argues in his new book, An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off With Religion than Without It. The old atheists said there was no God. The so-called "New Atheists" said there was no God, and they were vocally vicious about it. Now, the new "New Atheists" — call it Atheism 3.0 — say there's still no God, but maybe religion isn't all that bad. Faith provides meaning and purpose for millions of believers, inspires people to tend to each other and build communities, gives them a sense of union with a transcendent force, and provides numerous health benefits, Sheiman says. Moreover, the galvanizing force behind many achievements in Western civilization has been faith, Sheiman argues, while conceding that he limits his analysis, for the most part, to modern Western religion.

Self Immolation II

clipped from english.pravda.ru The unfortunate truth here is: the Republicans and Tories are the Mensheviks to the Democrat and Labour Bolsheviks. In other words, they are the slightly less radical fellow travellers who are to stupid to realize that once their usefulness is done, they will go the very camps they will help send the true opposition to. A more deserving lot was rarely born. One express idiocy of Cap and Trade in America will be the approximately additional $.19 per liter of gasoline, which is a rather very large increase in taxation, however indirectly. Of course this will not only hit the American working serfs in the pocket at fuel up, but will hit them in everything they buy and do, as America has almost no real rail to even partially off set the cost of transporting goods. he government, ever anxious not to take responsibility, will single out the petroleum factories and oil companies for gauging the people.

Self Immolation

clipped from english.pravda.ru As my readers know, I am a fan of economics and of history, as well as politics, a combination that forms some very interesting cycles to research, discuss and argue on. None is so interesting than the death of great nations, for here there is always the self destruction that comes before the final breakups and invasions. As they say: Rome did not fall to the barbarians, all they did was kick in the rotting gates. It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke

His Side Lost

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Chairman Zero will not be attending festivities in Berlin marking the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of Communism. And why should he celebrate? After all, his side lost.

Now Or Later

clipped from www.slate.com So backward has the theocracy made its wretched country that it is even vulnerable to sanctions on refined petroleum, for heaven's sake. But spastic missiles and low-yield nukes can still ruin the whole day of a neighboring state, as well as make a travesty of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and such international laws and treaties as are left to us. Thus, if it is true that Iran is not as close to "break-out" as we have sometimes feared, should that not make our deliberations more urgent rather than less? Might it not mean, in effect, that now is a better time to disarm the mullahs than later?

Why I Call Them Dumbos

clipped from www.weeklystandard.com Minutes later a police car drove into the parking lot with its lights flashing. Officer Grolman informed me that she was called because "there was a little bit of an uncomfortable situation" and then took down my name, date of birth, and address. "Maybe we do things a little differently here, but you know, persisistence in that area, you scared the candidate a little bit," Officer Grolman told me. "[Scozzafava] got startled, that's all," Officer Grolman added. "It's not like you're in any trouble." That was good to hear. But I do wonder if it’s the Scozzafava campaign that’s in trouble--with a candidate who supports card check, who is unwilling to say she’d oppose a health care bill that raises taxes or includes abortion coverage, and who is so reluctant to answer questions that she has someone with her campaign call the cops when she’s questioned by a reporter who is (if I may say so) polite--if a bit persistent.

Instapundit On A Roll #2: Object Lesson

clipped from pajamasmedia.com “SMART DIPLOMACY:” Iran Double-Crosses Obama. Boy, you couldn’t see that one coming . . . . UPDATE: A reader emails: Now we know why Obama turned his back on Iranian protesters. Note that the secret negotiations began in June. What else went on in June in Iran? Oh yeah… those pesky election results protests. Basically, he turned his back on the Iranian people because that whole free election fight of theirs wasn’t nearly as important as the nuclear deal he was working out with Iran’s regime. Too bad the regime couldn’t be trusted to actually live up to its end of the bargain. Big surprise there, that you can’t trust political leaders who believe in silencing their own people… Maybe that should serve as an object lesson to us about Obama… Ouch.

Instapundit On A Roll #1: Not Equally-Equally

clipped from pajamasmedia.com LIKE TAXES, NATIONAL HEALTH CARE IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Obamacare Is For the Peons… Congress to Keep Their Gold-Plated Health Care Plans. Related, from Britain: 3,000 NHS staff get private care. “THE National Health Service has spent £1.5m paying for hundreds of its staff to have private health treatment so they can leapfrog their own waiting lists. More than 3,000 staff, including doctors and nurses, have gone private at the taxpayers’ expense in the past three years because the queues at the clinics and hospitals where they work are too long.” When they said everyone would be treated equally, they didn’t mean equally-equally.

Other Explosions

clipped from pajamasmedia.com The bombing was a very big deal.  It was indeed a suicide bombing, the man’s name was Abdul Rahed Mohammadi Sarabani, who was associated with the military wing of Jundullah, headed by Abdulmalik Khan Rigi.  The IRGC had killed two of his brothers, and this was an act of vengeance, carried out to inflict maximum damage on the RGs.  The target was a large theater, which holds up to two thousand people.  It is part of a large military complex, one of the most important in the country. The real casualty figures are impossible to obtain, but they are considerably higher than the ones officially announced.  At a minimum, 108 were killed, including 57 members of the Revolutionary Guards.  Some of the names have already been announced, but so far Jaafari’s name has not been mentioned. Meanwhile, there are other explosions.  The most famous tea factory in the country, the Golestan Tea Factory, has been burned to the ground.  There were reports of an explosion near the Oil Ministry in downtown Tehran

Plug Pulled On Pulled Plugs

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com Remember the whole controversy over "death panels"-the idea, as President Obama dismissively put it, that greater government control over medicine would cause bureaucrats to "pull the plug on grandma"? Well, for weeks now Britain's newspapers have been filled with articles about the National Health Service pulling the plug on grandma. The latest is the story of a woman who had to fight her doctors for weeks after they withdrew care from her 80-year-old mother. According to the London Times: Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics, and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.

They Think You're Stupid

clipped from www.qando.net Because the former porkladen spending bill filled to the rafters with earmarks has given “stimulus” a bad name. However there’s another reason which is much more political. If they call the second raft of spending “stimulus” it is tantamount to admitting the first “stimulus” didn’t work. And the polls tell them that a second stimulus would be deeply unpopular. So how will this work? [T]he new stimulus efforts, which are still under discussion, are unlikely to be packaged into a single bill, which would be politically unpopular. An August Gallup poll, for instance, found that 65% of Americans opposed a “second stimulus” and 51% thought that the Federal Government “should spend less” than it is currently spending on stimulus. And that opposition is likely to grow after the announcement on Oct. 16 that the federal deficit for the fiscal year that just ended hit $1.4 trillion, which, at almost 10% of the total economy, represents the largest share since the end of World War II.

"Climate Debt" And The Communist World Government

clipped from ace.mu.nu Monckton spoke about the proposed treaty at a speech in St. Paul last week, and gave some insights into just how awful this stupid thing will be. LauraW tipped me to the video over the weekend:

Ayn In India

clipped from www.foreignpolicy.com Mitra is the founder and director of the Liberty Institute, which hopes to be India's equivalent of the United States' libertarian Cato Institute and has recently received a grant from an American foundation to launch a Web initiative promoting "Ayn Rand in India." He has been a Rand devotee since the early 1980s and even met his wife through a Rand discussion group. To Mitra, Rand offers a blueprint for India to develop as a democratic and capitalist society at the same time. He hopes that Rand and her libertarian doctrines can enable India to provide a counterexample to the so-called "Asian model" of economic development, which holds that a certain level of authoritarian government and stifled liberty is a prerequisite for a surging economy. If India can achieve double-digit growth while remaining democratic, Mitra thinks, it could become a model for the rest of the world. Rand's philosophy, Mitra says, can help Indians "moor ourselves to fundamental economic and moral principles."

Slow Joe Blows O's Mojo

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com What a shame. The state-run media was trying so hard to lift this buffoon up… Then he drops the d-word: “The US is in a depression. The US is in a depression.” You go, Joe:

Dumb Like Mao -- But Without The Intelligence

clipped from www.riehlworldview.com Think about how tragically misguided and dumb this is, though it is only a reflection of the administration's thoughts about the population as a whole. The media networks are simply not smart enough to get it for themselves. They should listen to an administration that allegedly knows better and cut off Fox News. Are they crazy? What country have they been living in, or do they want to create might be the better question. Talking down to the entire media like this is not going to win them any friends. They are laying the ground work for their own utter collapse by taking this approach. Talk about not being ready for prime time. It looks as if they aren't ready for Sunday morning, either. The White House is calling on other news organizations to isolate and alienate Fox News as it sends out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece. Top political strategists question the decision by the Obama administration to escalate its offensive against Fox

Freedom Is Slavery

clipped from mises.org One of the most remarkable features of our age is the propensity toward changing the meaning of political terms. A semantic revolution converts the sense traditionally attached to words into its opposite. George Orwell has ingeniously described this tendency in his 1984. The second of the three slogans of Oceania's party says, "Freedom Is Slavery."In the opinion of the "progressive" intellectuals, Orwell's dictum is the talk of a hysteric; nobody, they shout, has ever ventured to utter such a nonsensical proposition. Unfortunately the facts belie their denial. There prevails in the writings of many contemporary authors the disposition to represent every extension of governmental power and every restriction of the individual's discretion as a measure of liberation, as a step forward on the road to liberty.

No Thinking!

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

Craptacular

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Liberal Democrats champion public schools, while denying poorer, browner people the chance to access them. Liberal Democrats insist on a public option for Peasant Health Care, but make sure they will not have to use it, and will keep their gold-plated health care system instead. But that hypocrisy is not nearly so rich as the fact that Airstrip One's socialized National Health Service buys private insurance for 3,000 members of its staff, including doctors, nurses, paramedics and ambulance drivers... to any sane person, this is a de facto admission that socialized health care sucks. And wait until you read how NHS rationalizes the practice: The health department defended the practice and said sending doctors, nurses and other key staff for private treatment helped to get them back to work. “If trusts want to get their staff back to work more quickly they can’t jump NHS waiting lists, so going private is an option,” said the spokesman.

Screwed Cubed

clipped from www.qando.net Now one can only hope they’ll take as close a look at cap-and-trade. Anyway, FireDogLake discovers the following: An excise tax on high-end health insurance benefits is an extremely regressive tax on the middle class. Even though Ezra Klein claims this tax is progressive, it is not. It would raise relatively little money from the wealthy. It is true that the bottom 30% is unlikely to pay very much of the new excise tax, but ,by the same token, the top 0.1% will pay almost none of it either. This is the middle class tax of all middle class taxes. Many, many middle class people work for companies and corporations which offer health care plans that are above and beyond the average for such plans the Baucus bill has set. The so-called “Cadillac” policies are nothing more than those whose cost is above that average. In every way the middle class gets screwed.

Dropped Out

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Ditto music. I don’t know the name of a single rapper. Don’t follow rock anymore. Don’t want to. I like a Mark Knopfler or Coldplay, but mostly missed music’s 21st century. I’m so lost that I think a Bob Seeger and Bruce Hornsby are contemporary mega-stars, though I couldn’t identify a recent hit of either. I haven’t seen any of the kids write as well as Springsteen or Van Morrison. One Otis Redding had more talent than the entire hip-hop industry. Obama is perfect for the age. Like Bush, he had the Ivy-League degrees; unlike Bush he had the pretension that they meant something, even though in his mind the Berlin Airlift, the German language, Auschwitz, World War II, Cordoba, the geography of the U.S., almost anything dealing with history, geography, literature, or well, knowledge in general—well all that is stuff that others less relevant than he learned in college.

No Net Neut

clipped from politics.slashdot.org "A group of 72 Democratic lawmakers is the latest to question the US Federal Communications Commission's move to create new net neutrality regulations. Democrats, including US President Barack Obama, have generally supported new rules that would prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content, but the group of 72 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter Thursday to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, saying they're concerned that new regulations would slow down investment in broadband networks. A coalition of minority groups made their objections known as well, saying, 'We are concerned that some of the proposed regulations on the Internet could, as applied, inhibit the goal of universal access and leave disenfranchised communities further behind.' This follows news from earlier in the week that similar letters were sent by a group of 44 tech companies and a group of 18 Republican senators."

Brain Drain

clipped from slashdot.org We may have to rethink the assumption that Silicon Valley is the hotbed of innovation in which all the world's best and brightest want to work and live. TechCrunch has a piece by an invited expert on the reverse brain drain already evident and growing in the US as Indian, Chinese, and European students and workers in the US plan to return home, or already have. From an extensive interview with Chinese and Indian workers who had already left: "We learned that these workers returned in their prime: the average age of the Indian returnees was 30 and the Chinese was 33. They were really well educated: 51% of the Chinese held masters degrees and 41% had PhDs. Among Indians, 66% held a masters and 12% had PhDs. These degrees were mostly in management, technology, and science. ... What propelled them to return home? Some 84% of the Chinese and 69% of the Indians cited professional opportunities.

The Pinch

clipped from focusfusion.org The baby is born!  After seven years of theoretical work and raising money, five months of design, five months of construction and assembly, and a week of testing, LPP now has a functioning dense plasma focus, Focus-Fusion-1. The first shot, using helium as the fill gas, was achieved at 5:29 PM today, Oct.15, and the first pinch was achieved at 6:04 PM on the second shot. The fact that a pinch was achieved so soon was evidence of the soundness of the design.  The pinch is clearly evident in the voltage probe curve, below, of the sixth shot. The first peak is when the machine turns on, while the second, higher, peak in voltage is from the energy transfer into the pinch region and the plasmoid.

Did I Forget To Mention Goldman Blows Bubbles?

clipped from www.rollingstone.com Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. It's not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there's a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can't really register the fact that you're no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you're no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there. It's a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can't be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay.

Comatose (Continued)

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Perhaps it will help put things in context by looking at the supreme leader’s recent movements.  On October 5th he went from Tehran to Now Shar, where he visited a naval base and academy.  Later that day he went to the city of Chaloos, preached a sermon, delivered a speech and returned to Now Shar.  On the 6th he traveled by automobile to Ramsar,  a very beautiful resort city, and which is graced by a palace of the late shah.  Khamenei was supposed to spend three days there, but he wasn’t feeling well, and complained of difficulty in breathing.  He was therefore flown from Ramsar airport to Tehran. I am told  he was still in a coma late Friday afternoon, Tehran time. And he is still very sick. Finally, the most impressive evidence of the real condition of the Supreme Leader is that he did not appear in public after the terrible bombing today (Sunday).  It would have been normal for him to go on television and address the Iranian people.

Shift Happens

clipped from www.youtube.com

The Immediate mOrOn

clipped from www.americanthinker.com No, this is not satire from The Onion. If only it were, we could laugh instead of cry. Laura Rozen reports in Politico: The U.S. has condemned a suicide attack that killed five Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps members today. Five commanders of Iran's Revolutionary Guards were killed in suicide attacks in Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province bordering Pakistan, according to reports. The Baluch group Jundullah claimed responsibility for the attack, that killed some 30 people. "We condemn this act of terrorism and mourn the loss of innocent lives," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. "Reports of alleged U.S. involvement are completely false." Richard Baehr notes that it took days for the Obama administration to condemn the brutalization of democracy demonstrators in Iran, but that condemnation of attacks on the brutalizers was nearly immediate. So whose side is Obama on?

The Gift Of Twaddle And Ignorance

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Is Obama a gifted writer? Draper claims to find evidence of Obama's literary gifts throughout Obama's adult life. Draper's article to the contrary notwithstanding, the evidence of Obama's literary gifts is limited to Dreams. Whether or not Bill Ayers collaborated with Obama on Dreams -- a proposition about which I am agnostic -- the lack of such evidence elsewhere seems to me to raise a legitimate question about the authorship of Dreams. JOHN adds: So Obama thinks the conflict between the West and Islam is "rooted in colonialism." Do you think he means Islam's efforts--quite successful efforts--to colonize Europe that lasted from the seventh through the seventeenth centuries? No, I don't think so either. When it comes to history, Obama is an idiot. In a different context, Victor Davis Hanson writes, "There seems to be neither a moral compass nor even a casual knowledge of history in this administration."

Repeat After Me: CO2 And ONLY CO2 Can Possibly Drive The Climate...

clipped from science.nasa.gov October 15, 2009: For years, researchers have known that the solar system is surrounded by a vast bubble of magnetism. Called the "heliosphere," it springs from the sun and extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto, providing a first line of defense against cosmic rays and interstellar clouds that try to enter our local space. Although the heliosphere is huge and literally fills the sky, it emits no light and no one has actually seen it. Until now. NASA's IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) spacecraft has made the first all-sky maps of the heliosphere and the results have taken researchers by surprise. The maps are bisected by a bright, winding ribbon of unknown origin: "This is a shocking new result," says IBEX principal investigator Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute. "We had no idea this ribbon existed--or what has created it. Our previous ideas about the outer heliosphere are going to have to be revised."

yeah, riiiight.

The Great O Satan Strikes ... Yeah, Riiiiight...

clipped from www.breitbart.com A suicide bomber blew himself up at a meeting of the elite Revolutionary Guards in southeastern Iran Sunday, killing at least 30 people including top commanders and tribal leaders, a senior official said. The attack took place in the city of Pisheen near the border with Pakistan in restive Sistan-Baluchestan province, which hosts a substantial Sunni population, local news agencies said. Iran's parliament speaker said the United States was behind the attack while the Guards accused Western powers of carrying out the assault, the deadliest against them since a bombing in February 2007 in the same province killed 13 people.

Oh, Wait...

clipped from pajamasmedia.com WALL STREETER POSTS $100 MILLION BOND. Thank goodness Obama is standing up to those crooks! Oh, wait: “He was a big donor to Barack Obama — and a charity linked to Tamil terrorists.”