Posts have been sparse around here, with the advent of Deer Hunt ‘09 upon us. Hopefully, I’ll be updating this place a bit more after next week, after the end of the season.
Good luck hunters, may the deer and the beer be plentiful. Each at their own respective times, of course.
W00t. Thanks to the old man, we now have an awesome modified header image for the blog. I think it took him maybe 4 minutes, over 2 sessions for something I could never have done.
Now I just have to modify the section “buttons” above, to change their color.
Thanks again Mike!
I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. After the town of New London, CT summarily decided that it knew how to use land better than the current owners, and the resulting court case going all the way to the supreme court, where 5 justices caused our Founding Fathers to roll over in their graves in agreeing that local governments can utilize such a heinous tactic to deprive one set of property owners in order to give said property to someone else, it’s fitting.
Pfizer has decided to abandon the land forcibly turned over to them. So after all the absolute BS those poor people in New London had to endure over the last 10 years, what are we left with? A group of homeowners forcibly removed from their homes, and a city with nothing to show for it.
A quick rundown of what this saga DID manage to tell us:
A greek tragedy could be made from this episode. Horrible, just horrible.
Hat Tip: Ed Morrisey @ HotAir
Fourty-five years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave his magnificient speech “A Time for Choosing”, as part of a pre-recorded TV program. It was also then used as Goldwater’s nomination speech.
It was an awesome speech. It’s even better when you make a few changes:
Do these things, and 99% of that speech can be directly applied today, and the points Reagan made are still valid. We’re still fighting the devaluation of our dollar. The problems and government waste and fraud potential he laid out about the then-nascent welfare state are still in effect. Government meddling in the farming sector of our economy is still a massive problem. The absurdity and fiscal debtedness of Social Security is even more evident today than it was in 1964, when it was still in debt to the tune of approximately 230 billion dollars (As an aside, the facts he lays out about how the governemnt during a supreme court case admitted that that the SS funds were in fact just general government revenue, to be used as they decided, lays bare the entire structure of the Social Security program)
There’s more, but I wouldn’t want to ruin it. I will say that there is an oblique reference to the system of negative rights in the constitution, when he’s describing how some socialists were aggreived at the constitution because it limited what they could do “to the masses” (a term of great derision for Reagan, for good reason)
I’ve noticed, in reading many political posts on blogs over the years, that there is much confusion on the meaning of rights. To set the table, I’ll define a right as something that can be assumed naturally. As the Declaration of Independence says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
One primary feature of a right, as it were, is that it is something you have and can exercise without imposing upon anyone else. Notice a right to liberty causes no imposition upon anyone else. Same with a right to life, freedom of speech, etc. In fact, when reading the Declaration, and the Constitution, certain rights (the famous ones) are expressly mentioned, in order to state that the government being described therein can NOT infringe upon these rights. It is from here that the idea of negative rights comes in. The government CAN NOT do certain things to us, no matter what.
Now, when talking to certain people, or following certain political debates, you might hear things like “we have a right to affordable health care”, or “we have a right to a living wage”, or “we have a right to affordable housing”. In all of these cases, these are considered positive rights, or in other words, these are things the government can (should?) do for you or to you.
The problem with the innocuous sounding “positive rights”, is that in every instance that I have ever come across them, they always imply an imposition upon someone. Take the examples above: a right to affordable health care, in the current environment, implies at the basest level: forcing a doctor to see you, and if you can’t afford it, forcing someone else to pay for it. In both cases, it’s a loss of freedom. Two people should be able to freely enter into a contract over the health care, and upon agreement, services rendered and paid for. Why a third party (the government) would have to get involved in that process, distorting it beyond all recognition, I’ve no idea. (Well, I do: a certain mindset craves power, and don’t for one minute think that all these governmental power grabs are about anything else).
One problem with thinking positive rights are a good thing is that in allowing the government to grant you these “rights”, you also allow the government to remove them. What government giveth, government can taketh away. A bigger problem is this: how is government paying for these “rights”? Taxes. And what are those? Institutionalized, sanctioned (by those in power) theft. Morally, it can be nothing else. If by the fruits of my labor, giving of my time and energy, I earn $100, by what right can anyone claim 10% of that income? 20%? 45%? By no right. And for those who feel that taxes are necessary, well, says who? Who are you to determine for me what I should pay for? Not only that, I would deem those people cowards who hide behind the state (who has a monopoly of force) to collect this money. I guarantee they would never have the courage to go door to door to collect this money.
So, to wrap this all up, those who believe in what is termed “positive rights” would use the force of the state to steal your property (money), in order to fund the control of false “rights”, which can be granted and taken away at a whim. All of which exerts a certain control over your life, and how you live it. Would you ever let someone come up to you and say “Give me $30, so I can pay this guy with a gun to order you around.” ? No? Well, that describes the current process of government to a tee, if a bit crudely. The end result is the same.
Just got done spending 10 minutes adding twitter and bit.ly support to the wordpress engine. This should probably quadruple my twitter output, which has, shall we say, been languishing. So now I guess all my twits can get tweets when I blog. Ain’t the internet grand?
Though, thinking about it, conceptually, it’s rather similar to tech I was using in 1994: basic email, newsgroups, basic web, and gopher. People posting info somewhere, making it available to anyone they wish, over a network. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.
… are now splittsville. From a coolness factor, this sucks, I guess. But, even though I use OS X as a workstation at work, it’s not like I’d ever be using ZFS there. I do use it heavily on my servers though. And this does explain the weirdness of less support in snow leopard (10.6) than leopard (10.5).
Oh well. in FreeBSD-land, it’s still full steam ahead. As of course with (open)solaris.
Cool. Just got done with a little email exchange with our resident graphics guru. Should have a new logo in the next few days, as time allows for him. Having seen his work and PS skills over the last 12 years, I’m certain it’ll be awesome. Thanks old man!
Oh hell, call it climate change, AGW or whatever you want. Ryan Young at globalwarming.org produced this bit:
This new religion is a piece of work. It comes complete with a deity (Gaia), clergy (activists), indulgences (carbon credits), and now, dietary restrictions.
Heh. Too true. Standard caveats apply (doesn’t apply to all activists, etc). On the other (crass) hand, Al Gore can go suck a glacier.
HT: McQ @ QandO