It’s a Blogiversary!

Mine. Five years. Yes, five years.

Blogging hasn’t been real consistent lately, but Lent is almost over and I’ll be able to go back to being internet obsessed again….so we’ll see. It definitely crosses my mind now and then to let this baby go.

But then, then, stories like these come out that need just a little bit of common sense added to them.
1. From the Washington post on how efficiency isn’t a good thing when you want more hires:

On Friday, the Labor Department will release a closely watched March employment report expected to show the strongest job growth in three years, driven by stabilization in the economy and a rebound from February snowstorms.

2. From the Wall Street Journal on payroll numbers.

Private-sector jobs in the U.S. dropped by 23,000 this month, according to a national employment report published Wednesday by payroll giant Automatic Data Processing Inc. and consultancy firm Macroeconomic Advisers.

Which means, oh joy, either someone’s numbers are wrong, or the “strongest job grown in three years” is a product of the government payroll.

Or then there is this gem from a supportive blog brother, JK

Non-James-Lovelock humans are ” too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades.” Thank Zeus that the 90-year-old super genius is willing to step into the breach and run the world for awhile.

Go, read the comment from Johngalt.

Read Ralph Peters today too. He’s got some scoop on who’s shooting who and who’s disappointed with who and who is being called a big ol terrorist weenie.

Blog buddy Scott has been super busy lately, but I need to shout out to him on such a versary. So Heh!. I think he was the first to ever link to me and he’s been a support ever since. His views are worth a read.

I traditionally put up a photo of me every year. Here is the latest that I have (me and my sister’s horse Poco). I’m off camping tomorrow though for my birthday so maybe we’ll get a more recent one this weekend.

Take care – I look forward to 5 more years of at least continuing to read blogs!

Nannystatism

David Brooks, the conservative at the New York Times has a column out today about happiness.

Does money buy happiness….not really.
So his solution?

The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.

The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions.

Yes, lets let schools and colleges who don’t exactly prepare students for careers either, teach us about interpersonal relationships.

I’m an old crab, but it seems to me that an institution of higher learning who’s job it is, is to teach higher learning should stick with it, vs branching out into relationships. That’s what parents, marriage encounters, therapists, friends and your local bar are for….isn’t it?

Or maybe, while we add the calorie counts onto menus, we can also require that supermarkets get out of the ‘check your own self out’ so that we are forced to interact with people no matter what.

Shareholders

Apparently if it affects shareholders, there is a law that says you have to disclose.

Apparently if you disclose and it affects your employees impression of the goodness of government you have to testify.

Last week, AT&T announced it will take an immediate $1 billion write-down thanks to a new tax in the health bill that will cause Caterpillar ($100 million) and Deere & Co. ($150 million), among other large employers, to do the same. The benefits consultancy Towers Watson estimates that the change may reduce corporate profits by as much as $14 billion over time.
………Not to fear. Waxman, the liberal lion who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is on the case. No, he doesn’t want to change the tax provision — he wants to browbeat the affected corporations. He has called the CEOs of AT&T, Caterpillar and Deere to testify before his committee, accompanying his summons with a far-reaching document request lest the corporations miss the point: This is naked political harassment.

Moscow

Take care. Thoughts are with you.

Unintended Consequences

Ed Morrissey is doing his bit to document the unintended consequences of government action.

ie like requiring the posting of calorie counts.

Will it cost money? Sure. If you have 21-25 restaurants and you wouldn’t be required to spend all this money, or basically keep your menu pretty static if you only had 19 restaurants what would you do?

Yep, me too.

If you were a business that got a tax break for offering prescription drug coverage to retirees, but then that tax cut expired and yet you knew the retirees would still get coverage elsewhere, what would you do?
Yep, me too.

Honduras

Apparently the US is still throwing their weight around in Honduras. Via Mary O’Grady (no subscription required)

Last year, the U.S. tried to force the reinstatement of deposed president Manuel Zelaya. When that failed and Team Obama was looking like the Keystone Cops, it sent a delegation to Tegucigalpa to negotiate a compromise.

Participants in those talks say Dan Restrepo, senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council, let slip that the U.S. interest had to do with American politics. The Republicans, he said, were using the administration’s support for Mr. Zelaya, an ally of Venezuelan Hugo Chávez, against the Democrats. It’s not going to work, Mr. Restrepo is said to have informed the other negotiators, because “we have the power” and would be keeping it for a long time.

It can’t have been comforting for Hondurans to learn that while their country was living a monumental crisis, fueled by U.S. policy, Mr. Restrepo’s concern was his party’s power. For the record, an NSC spokesman says “Mr. Restrepo didn’t say that.” But my sources are more plausible considering what has transpired since.

She let’s you know some of the intimidation that’s gone on since. Power!

Quote of the Day

Not because it’s interesting, but because the person who said it is the most unlikely person to have said it.

Barack Obama: (regarding Afghanistan)

“the US doesn’t quit and will prevail.”

Um – wasn’t he ready to go home from Iraq before it was won?

Aw yes, the intellectuals

This cracked me up over at Maggie’s Farm. Not sure why bird dog linked to it, (I didn’t read the whole article) but read the quote.

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy.

This same Ivy League intellectual who can not speak with the local plumber would probably (based on my experience) but can talk with persons from a foreign country-in their own language no less – go on and on and on and on about the beauty of the local peasant culture in whatever 3rd world land they visit. You know, the peasants who know how to fix things and plant things and gather water.
Kind of like the local plumber.

So 11 prostitutes walk into a bar……

You all know the joke:

An older man with a prosperous look about him sat at a bar. After eyeing a striking young woman, he approached her. Wasting little time with small talk, the man propositioned the woman. “If I were to give you $5 million dollars would you sleep with me?”
The woman paused for a moment while looking at the man, surprised at the question. When she answered, she answered yes.
“Would you sleep with me for $50 bucks,” the man followed up.
“What do you think I am, a prostitute?”
“We’ve already established that,” the man said. “Now we’re simply negotiating on the price.”

………………
An articulate, handsome man walks into a bar. After eyeing 11 prolife Democrats he asked if they would change their morals for $4.7 billion and a piece of paper?
The men didn’t pause. And answered yes.
“Would you change your morals and be prochoice for healthcare legislation alone?”
“What do you think I am, a valueless Judas?”
“Um, yes…..here’s your $4.7 billion, and your piece of paper with my signature….hasta!”

I am prochoice and yet I am astounded by someone – 11 someone’s willing to sell their soul for such pieces of silver.

It’s good to be King

The Obama administration plans to overhaul how it is tackling the foreclosure crisis, in part by requiring lenders to temporarily slash or eliminate monthly mortgage payments for many borrowers who are unemployed, senior officials said Thursday.

That’s sure to help the bankers start loaning more!!