Applied Indifference

The food police MUST BE STOPPED.  Arrogant cunt Meme Roth of Action Against Obesity (munge it all together and throw a .com on the end of it if you want to see their self-righteous web site) has declared a boycott against Girl Scout Cookies on the basis that the Girl Scouts, being a “civic organization” (whatever that is) ought not be selling Americans food that might potentially make them fat.

She keeps blathering about how some “we” has to get a handle on obesity and diabetes.  And so her response is to use the might of the government to dictate what we ought to eat.

She also uses her typical liberal lack of knowledge of economics to suggest that a  10-15% margin (the girls get somewhere between 40 and 60 cents for every $3.50 box of cookies) is somehow a bad thing.  And tries to use that as part of her argument against the cookies.

Oh, and it should go without saying that this arrogant cunt is so scrawny she’d probably snap in half if anyone ever tried to have sex with her.  So I guess  I won’t say “Fuck her”, because I wouldn’t want the poor dear to get hurt.

Tags: Politics, Society by Brian Corbino
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You might have heard about Obama’s $10 billion plan to bail out people with bad mortgages. I’m not even going to go into the details of it to explain why it’s a colossally bad idea.

Quite simply, it is a tax on those of us who were prudent and bought houses within our means.  I’ll grant that the present situation of multiple defaults is not good for banks and other prospective buyers.  The panic it has created has made it much more difficult for anyone to get a loan to buy a house.  It’s translated into a general pull-back in lending overall.

A lesson needs to be learned by a great many people.  And a government bailout is NOT going to teach that lesson.  It will instead reinforce the bad behavior, guaranteeing more of it in the future.

I maintain that this all started with government pressure to increase home ownership of certain politically-preferred identity groups, regardless of qualification.  The only proper way out of this situation is for people to lose their homes, banks to lose money to defaults, mortgage brokers to lose money to lawsuits from the banks to which they sold mortgages they knew were bad, and congresscritters to lose their seats when the depth of their perfidy is revealed.

I hold out no hope of any of this happening.  Instead, I will be told, at virtual gunpoint, that I am expected to pick up some part of the slack for some idiot that makes less money than I do to help him pay a mortgage on a house four times larger than the one I bought.

I am to be punished for daring to live within my means.

You figure out the lesson that teaches.

Tags: Politics, Society by Brian Corbino
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What the fuck do you mean “thought it would be funny“??? If your friend was the trigger man, you’d better start naming names, motherfucker. Someone’s gonna fry for this shit, and as far as I’m concerned you’ll do.

Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with people? What would possess someone to take out a classified ad, and kill the first respondent to the ad?

There’s a bad kind of crazy tearing through civilization. And it doesn’t stop with Moonbattus Americanus, either. We’ve got motherfuckers starting fires in southern California. We’ve got this loser killing a girl for no particular reason at all in Minnesota. We’ve got an organization of people convinced that 9/11 was an inside job.  We’ve got a pair of shit-piles that murdered most of a family in the process of a robbery in Connecticut.

This all has to be related somehow. How else can you explain this major chunk of civilization having gone completely bonkers?

Sometimes I look out at the world around me, and I feel sane.

Tags: Society by Brian Corbino
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OK, Time to pay up, bitches. You knew this was coming. Because I told you about it.

Lowest Tropical Cyclone activity on record in thirty years! You don’t even have to google it.

So, then. Which is it: are hurricanes utterly and completely divorced from global warming, or is global warming bullshit? DON’T WAIT FOR THE TRANSLATION! ANSWER THE QUESTION!

What’s that? Fires in California? Human caused? Yep. Global warming?

Not a chance.

(h/t Instapundit for the link, Limbaugh for mentioning the story)

Tags: News, Politics, Society by Brian Corbino
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Updated 11/25/07.  See below.

This book, written by so-called historians Stephen Walt and John Mearshimer, has been called little more than a thinly-veiled anti-Israel screed.

They’ve proven it in a public appearance dated 9/5/07 that I happened across while channel surfing.

First - Mearshimer makes the irrational claim that Israel is creating an apartheid state by taking more and more of the West Bank - which is not happening. In fact, Israel gave control of the West Bank back to the Palestinian Authority this year, and it was promptly taken over by Hamas, which uses it to launch daily rocket attacks into Israel. UPDATE: I am, in fact, quite wrong about this - Israel forcibly removed settlements from, and ceded control of Gaza.  It is, in fact, Gaza that has been taken over by Hamas and used as a launching pad for rocket attacks.  The settlements in the West Bank remain.  But if the US is so compromised by the Israel Lobby, then why are we pressuring Israel to cease settlement activity prior to yet another joke of a “peace” conference?  I stand by my characterization of his claim as irrational, unless he also accuses Israel of acting in bad faith (which he may, I’ve not read the book) by not disbanding all settlements, whose existence still doesn’t prove an apartheid state.

He follows this up by saying that Israel “is going to end up looking a lot like South Africa”, and that “many Israelis and many American Jews are deeply concerned about the direction that Israel is headed, just like Jimmy Carter was.” Remember that the head of Jimmy’s own “think” tank resigned over the number of false statements contained in Jimmy’s own book on Israel.

Then a question from the audience - should Israel attack Iran to prevent them becoming a nuclear power. Walt replies that even if Iran were to attack Israel, they’d be wiped out, and maybe Iran is just getting nukes to counter Israel’s nukes. Apparently he missed the memo - Iran’s official policy is that “one or two nuclear weapons would completely destroy Israel, but even if they destroy Iran, most of the Muslims would survive.” In other words, Iran doesn’t care if they get wiped out, so long as the Jews take it in the ass.

So, either these guys are apologists for the Islamists, or they just don’t have a clue.

Tags: Politics, Society by Brian Corbino
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Inspired by a Rush monologue, and by the site cheatneutral.com.

All this kvetching about “Global Warming”  would tend to indicate that there is some ‘ideal’ global mean temperature, and through man’s emissions of carbon dioxide we have caused the temperature to rise above that ideal.   Is this ideal temperature knowable?

The concern over the so-called Greenhouse Effect seems predicated upon the belief that the global mean temperature can and will increase without bound.  Is this possible within the confines of a closed, self-correcting system?  If not, then what is the maximum attainable temperature before the system self-corrects.  Is life sustainable at that temperature?

The talk of ‘carbon credits’ implies that creating a mechanism for removing CO2 from the air will somehow nullify its effect.  Will the increased water vapor output of new forests outweigh the impact of the removed CO2?

I do not think it wise to begin talking of policy prescriptions to ’solve’ global warming before we know what the real impact is, if there is a real impact, or if that impact is worse than the proposed lifestyle changes that would be imposed upon us to possibly stave off such an impact.

Because if the answer to stopping global warming from killing a million people is to kill a billion instead, I’m not so sure that global warming is a bad thing.

Tags: Politics, Society by Brian Corbino
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Berkeley Breathed alerts his readers that the 8/26 and 9/2 Opus strips won’t be appearing in many papers.  Because Steve’s nutty girlfriend Lola Granola is going through phases of trying out different religions.  And she’s picked, you guessed it, the ROP(MA).

Of course, we get the standard excuses about not wanting to offend. But the money quote (concerning the 8/19 strip) tells us all we need to hear:

As far as whether the Post and the Post Writers Group syndicate treated content about conservative Christians differently than it did content about conservative Muslims, it certainly could be taken that way.

“It appears on the surface to be a double standard,” Burford said, “but at the same time, the climate of the world probably informs their decision with how to go forward with it.”

Translation: “Well, the Christians won’t try to blow us up.”

Tags: Politics, Society by Brian Corbino
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Two morons siphoning gas at night. Hell, it’s dark in this shed, why don’t you light a match?

The entirely predictable outcome ensues.

I thought only cartoon characters were stupid enough to pull this stunt.

(h/t lileks at buzz.mn)

Tags: Society by Brian Corbino
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AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming). Or, as I prefer to call it, The Single Greatest Hoax Ever Perpetrated on Mankind, is bullshit.

Either that, or the people who like to blame everything on AGW are full of shit.

Take hurricanes. After Katrina had her way with the gulf coast (Hey Gulfport - we haven’t forgotten you here at Applied Indifference), we were told by every green moron with a mouth that we should get used to this kind of destruction, because global warming was going to make hurricanes more frequent and more intense.

Accordingly, the National Hurricane Center predicted a slobberknocker of a season for 2006 - one that never materialized. Failing that, they did the same for 2007. So far, it’s failed to impress. Second week of August, no hurricanes, no landfalls, THREE (that’s one more than two) named storms. Ironically, that’s the same position in the alphabet (they added one after the season was over last year) as 2006 for this time. We’re more in line with 1997 than with 2005 this year.

So, all you AGW fanatics, I’ve got a deal for ya. If we fail to have another spectacular hurricane season, will you please shut the fuck up about global warming causing hurricanes?

Of course, we could take your connection of hurricanes and AGW (MIT scientists notwithstanding) and say that it’s proof that global warming is just another attempt by the socialists to get everyone to voluntarily destroy their way of life, but that wouldn’t be fair would it? Nah, we’ll just wait for the sunspot cycle to recede and watch the temperature drop ever so slightly.

Tags: Politics, Society by Brian Corbino
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No, I don’t know any more than you. I just have a random thought that popped into my head. Looking at the failure, and listening to what some people on scene have reported to hear and feel, there were only two words that came into my mind.

Tacoma Narrows.

And looking at it and listening to an engineer on TV now, there’s another two words.

Mianus River.

If it was structural, that second one is more apropos.

My condolences to anyone who lost a loved one in the collapse.

Tags: Society by Brian Corbino
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