QFTD

What is it in the American psyche that we pay so handsomely to get hectored by these vermin?

TFG

was waitin for it, it was only a matter of time

 . . . until someone with national reach made the observation. 

Chicago alone is giving us a big enough body count every month to match the Newtown shooting.  But Chicago's death toll is not as shocking to the MSM because---wait for it---

"Obama Only Cares When “Vanilla” Children Get Shot"

a whole boatload of racism is implicit in that view. When will that racism be challenged? 

'cuz they want your stuff, man

The belief that wealth consists not of ideas, attitudes, moral codes, and mental disciplines but of definable and static things that can be seized and redistributed is the materialist superstition.

Tom Bethell paraphrasing George Gilder

Many of us free-marketers have unconsciously understood this.  The left disparages the notion of physical property as crass materialism not because they disdain material goods, rather they want us to loosen our grip on them, so they can seize those goods for themselves.  They confuse material things with wealth, they confuse money with value and love with sex, and are eager to equate spending with revenue, just as they wouldn't understand the difference between blood and saline if they were colored the same. 

Roissy done it again

"big revolutions are seeded with the polite vengeances of individuals"

Another QFTD from Roissy. 

Why do feminists assert nonsense that intimacy is terrifying to men?

When all you have is a lack of options, the world looks like a mandate.

Roissy

They are average—that’s why they’re so deadly

Stock up on flashlight batteries and canned peaches, Citizens.

Roissy is a regular read.  Time to start reading what Roissy reads.  

Quote from the recent past

The village may have replaced "the state," and it in turn may have replaced the fist with the hug, but an unwanted embrace from which you cannot escape is just a nicer form of tyranny.

Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism

Bacchus nails

When you catch me doing journalist-like things, it’s because the lazy fuckers who claim to be journalists aren’t doing their fucking jobs.

Over here.

QFTD

In comments on Reason.tv's coverage of Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor event, M. said:

Jefferson and Washington would never [have] confused the public sphere with the machinery of government.

Pop quiz: which would our Founders have thought the smaller of the two entities?

'nother: how much smaller would it have been, say as a measure of how many persons were employed by, or paid by, one entity versus the other. Or say as a measure of how much spending is done by one versus the other.

I caught some of Beck's radio program last week, as he and his staff were discussing Brian Williams's appearance on Letterman. Letterman was asking Williams, as if asking Beck and the Tea Partiers through him: "taking our country back from whom?"

At the time I couldn't answer concisely, and in a way that wouldn't spawn countless challenges. Maybe the answer is concisely right there.

An exposure to 60Co

Still catching up on back issues of Liberty, which yields another QFTD, May '07 in fact:

. . . only about 1% of our meat and produce is irradiated. The FDA has dragged its feet, considering irradiation some kind of food additive. They allow irradiation of meat, but with a warning label about possible risks! No such label is required for untreated meat that is laden with microbes . . if Public Citizen, food activists, and the FDA had been around in Pasteur's time, we wouldn't have pasteurization today.

Gary Jason in Bug Out, Reflections

Jason's post was inspired by discovery of salmonella contaminating peanut butter.

Would irradiation have worked on eggs?

Contaminated food scares seem to be more common now than when I was a kid. I don't know whether it's true or just more noticeable. It it's true, I'd like to know whether it's because food processors (or regulators) are just more careless, or we're just producing so much more, or exchanging foods more widely across the planet, or perhaps the contaminating organisms are just tougher now and breaking through the formerly adequate measures that processors have deployed against them.

Regardless, a few more scares like this one and maybe more Americans will be open to a broad use of irradiation, and vigorous tracking of which foods, and handling methods, yield better safety.

QFTD

The right to honestly acquired private property does not depend on people's deserving their property. People do not deserve their livers or good looks, either; yet they have a right to them.

Leland Yeager paraphrasing Tibor Machan in Liberty, July 2007; sorry, article itself not online