Ball Diamond Ball

We will now be bombarded with messages of hatred and bile, condescension and clucking by our betters in the beltway media. “How can X candidate even consider running? Why, she’s never even been a Senator/Professor/Community Organizer!?”
The way for any Tea Party candidate to run in 2016 is to absolutely own the experience argument. Experience in DC is bad. People who have experience are bad. DC is bad.
“I am not going to Washington, D.C. because I like the smell,” said presidential hopeful T. P. Victory, holding a toilet plunger aloft like a saber and rattling it menacingly toward the east coast. “I am going there to do a job that we’re all familiar with, and none of us particularly wants to do. But of the … Continue reading →

I am a big fan of Mark Levin, and in particular of his The Liberty Amendments. I don’t suppose I’m one to do better than he has, so I should refresh myself as to what is in the set he proposes and what is not. Just the same, I would like very much to see some limitations imposed from the Constitution side against the American voters. not because I like this idea very much, but because when push comes to shove, I must not let perfect be the enemy of good. This is how we get Fausted, yes, but there are principles and then there are Principles.
[mantra-pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”33%”]excludes any current … Continue reading →

In the face of amazing prosperity, we hear that minorities and such are worse off than ever before. Since the professional worriers cannot stand on absolutes, they retreat to the relative differences of “inequality”. But what if the typical measurements of inequality are also caught up in prosperity? As even the poorest of American poor tend to live better than the middle class of a hundred years ago or even in the majority of the world today, it seems incongruous that American poor have it so bad. Is inequality really so out of hand that this is unbearable? Perhaps the problem is one of measurement.
[mantra-pullquote align=”left|center|right” textalign=”left|center|right” width=”33%”]Are current measures of inequality based on things which mask the effects of prosperity?[/mantra-pullquote] Are current measures of inequality … Continue reading →

PARADISE – TOP 50 PROGRESSIVE TRANCE 2014 by Paradise on Mixcloud

I just cannot say enough good about this monster track. I can’t do anything about the girly pictures (nothing too bad, but not really family friendly), but that’s not the point.

I have a utility database  that tells me what my inbox looks like.  You see many people asking how to get a count of mails BY SENDER.  It’s the ultimate spam-whacking tool.  This is why places like Gmail don’t support it and never will. They want that spam sitting right where it is, spilling metadata.  The more junk mail sits on your Gmail account, the more they know about you.

Well, long story short, here’s a pivot table of the whole thing.  This is mail received by week, but with an important caveat — this is only what remains after some mail is moved, and some is deleted.  The dip at the end of 2014 is not a reduction in inbound mail, but the result of a cleanup … Continue reading →

A colleague of mine fisked a recent Reuters piece, focusing on their peculiar, consistent word choices.  I think he is right on the money on two scores:  First, that organizations have style guides, and you can judge the guidance by closely reading the results, such as the article below.  Second, Reuters has a Jew problem.

The Reuters piece is reproduced below in order to support an inline critique.  I assert that this is Fair Use.

The bracketed annotations are my colleague’s.  Everything below is either from the original article or those notes in brackets.

Ancient tablets reveal life of Jews in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon

By Luke Baker

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A new exhibition of ancient clay tablets discovered in modern-day Iraq is shedding light for the … Continue reading →

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Today is a beautiful day.

It’s cold and overcast, with a wind that is not actually hostile, although doesn’t seem to like any of us very much. But in my aimless pre-dawn wandering, I crested an overpass on the way to Manassas and was struck by a flare of gaudy salmon pink lancing the cloud cover somewhere over the Atlantic, flooding inland and suffusing a million miles of sky with a fiery underlight. By the time I found a place to take a picture, the world had turned, the glow was gone, and an unknown night had become a tentative day.

I had spent the day before with friends and coworkers at Arlington to pay respects. We took some natural fiber sponges and bottled water to do any … Continue reading →