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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“I married myself a quiet man. He told me so himself, many times. When he was drunk, he’d shout it to the world.”

Mary Canary said that. She says stuff like that just to make sure no one’s listening. And no one on the bus was, no one except me.

And Mary Canary is not her real name. It’s Maria Carnase, and I had to work on her quite a while to get that out of her. She’s not quite homeless, not quite penniless, not quite elderly and only mildly odorous. She’s bone thin and desiccated, and her flowered tent dress fit her like a tent. Her hair is not quite white and she wears it under a net. She had on cheap sneakers and compression hose bunched up at the ankles; seemingly, there was no flesh on her legs for the hose to compress. She has a bus pass and a mission. The bus pass is paid for by the taxpayers, but the mission is all her own.

“I like the sound of a pedal steel guitar. It makes me think of a cat curling up for an ear-scratching.”

A college girl with a black ponytail stared hard at her (more…)

John Stossel on the phractured physics of “green” energy:

Maybe the electric car is the next big thing?

“Electric cars are the next big thing, and they always will be.”

There have been impressive headlines about electric cars from my brilliant colleagues in the media. The Washington Post said, “Prices on electric cars will continue to drop until they’re within reach of the average family.”

That was in 1915.

In 1959, The New York Times said, “Electric is the car of the tomorrow.”

In 1979, The Washington Post said, “GM has an electric car breakthrough in batteries, now makes them commercially practical.”

I’m still waiting.

“The problem is very simple,” Bryce said. “It’s not political will. It’s simple physics. Gasoline has 80 times the energy density of the best lithium ion batteries. There’s no conspiracy here of big oil or big auto. It’s a conspiracy of physics.”

Yes, Stossel is pop-science. You can only go so far with him. But this may be the only article you will see that explains why so many of the highly-touted environmentaloid “solutions” are pipe-dreams, based in wishful thinking and a math education that foundered on the shoals of Algebra. Read the whole thing.

This is from today’s Arizona Republic:

Businesses that send employees door to door through Phoenix neighborhoods have jumped into the discussion over whether the city should require peddlers to be licensed before ringing doorbells.

Phoenix is the only major city in the Valley that does not require some sort of business license for door-to-door solicitors. In the past year, council members have been getting complaints about bad behavior by people who sell door to door.

On Tuesday, about 25 residents and business representatives gathered at the Phoenix Public Library’s main branch for the first of seven public hearings the city will hold on the issue.

Of course we need a new law. Why should fully-grown adults be expected to confront and respond to “bad behavior” without Big Brother to scare away the bad guys and Big Mother to kiss their boo-boos?

But wait. There’s more.

About half of those attending represented areas that are fed up with solicitors. The rest represented businesses that had a range of opinions on regulation.

This is a fact: Business “regulations” are written by and for the businesses putatively being “regulated.” They put the Rotarian in Rotarian Socialism. Hide and watch:

“We are in favor of regulation and monitoring of door-to-door solicitors,” said Magnolia (more…)

Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute in The Washington Post:

The new statism in America, made possible by years of drift and accelerated by the panic over the economic crisis, threatens to make us permanently poorer. But that is not the greatest danger. The real risk is that in the new culture war, we will forsake the third unalienable right set out in our Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness.

Free enterprise brings happiness; redistribution does not. The reason is that only free enterprise brings earned success.

Earned success involves the ability to create value honestly — not by inheriting a fortune, not by picking up a welfare check. It doesn’t mean making money in and of itself. Earned success is the creation of value in our lives or in the lives of others. Earned success is the stuff of entrepreneurs who seek value through innovation, hard work and passion. Earned success is what parents feel when their children do wonderful things, what social innovators feel when they change lives, what artists feel when they create something of beauty.

Money is not the same as earned success but is rather a symbol, important not for what it can buy but for what (more…)

Mark Steyn in Macleans:

Traditionally, a bank is a means by which old people with capital lend to young people with ideas. But the advanced democracies with their mountains of sovereign debt are in effect old people who’ve blown through their capital and are all out of ideas looking for young people flush enough to bail them out. And the idea that it might be time for the spendthrift geezers to change their ways butts up against their indestructible moral vanity. Last year, President Sarkozy said that the G20 summit provided “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience.” European capitalism may have a conscience. It’s not clear it has a pulse. And, actually, when you’re burning Greek bank clerks to death in defence of your benefits, your “conscience” isn’t much in evidence, either.

Let us take it as read that Greece is an outlier. As waggish officials in Brussels and Strasbourg will tell you, it only snuck into the EU due to some sort of clerical error. It’s a cesspit of sloth and corruption even by Mediterranean standards. On my last brief visit, Athens was a visibly decrepit dump: a town with a handful of splendid ancient ruins surrounded by a multitude (more…)

Well.

I’m thinking that “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” has brought us a nearly universal display of cowardice from the RE.net. If I am mistaken in this, I will happily amend my error with a link and a courtly bow. But I expect there is even more room for quivering, quibbling, cowering, caviling cowardice on this fine and perfect day.

Like this: The position Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul took on property rights yesterday is correct — not just as regards property rights, but as an expression of the errors we need to correct in the body politic if we are to reemerge, eventually, as something resembling a civilized society.

The left is attempting to smear Paul as a racist for insisting that private property owners themselves have the moral authority to be racists, even if Paul and virtually everyone else find that position to be morally-repugnant. This Two-Minutes-Hate campaign doesn’t seem like a winning strategy to me, in the age of the internet. The left will have no trouble finding reasons to hate Rand Paul, but his own tea party admirers may find in his principled arguments even more cause to admire him.

But mainstream Republicans are in full-reverse mode, backing away from Paul as (more…)