Monday, October 27, 2014

A Linguistic Laugh

I saw this somewhere a week or so ago. I don't remember where, so I can't credit that site. But when I did a Google search, it came up with this location.

An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

Current Concerns

One really big concern — possibly the biggest — has to be "What kind of extra-constitutional (if not flatly unconstitutional) actions will President Obama take after the election and before the new Congress is sworn in?" Highly likely, especially since it has been promised repeatedly, is an executive amnesty to "legalize" the illegal aliens living here.

Of course, we're also now aware that President Obama has delayed the release of information on next year's large Obamacare premium increases till after the election, too. We also learned in the last week or so that the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) diverted appropriations from development contracts for Ebola vaccines to contracts for unrelated things placed with Democrats' political friends. Was that corruption? Maybe, but based on other things we're seeing, it may have been simple incompetence.

Of longer-term concern are recently released figures showing where our government's budget dollars are going. It's notable that almost two-thirds go to income transfers — money taken from taxpayers who produce and given to non-taxpayers who don't. And that's the part of the budget that's exploding. Only about 6% of the budgeted money is spent on actually governing.

And then there's the issue of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). We were told for a decade that no WMDs were found in Iraq. The New York Times and every Lefty in the country endlessly repeated the Democrats' mantra: "Bush Lied, People Died" or sometimes "Bush Lied, Thousands Died". (In making these statements, they all ignored the fact that Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government used chemical weapons against Iraqi minorities and in the Iran-Iraq War.) Now, the New York Times has apparently, and belatedly, discovered that lots of WMDs — specifically, chemical weapons — were found all along. And they were found all over the place, not just in one location. Here's the map and notations from the New York Times article.

Perhaps the New York Times decided to make these admissions because some of the bases with stockpiles of chemical weapons have now been taken over by the so-called "Islamic State" in Iraq, as Bashar al-Assad's equivalents have been in Syria. These weapons have been banned by every civilized country on the planet, but ISIS has already been happily using them against their enemies — as did both Saddam Hussein (Iraq) and Hafez al-Assad (Syria) before them, and probably Bashar al-Assad more recently.

So how do we tell the difference between the "moderate muslims" and "peaceful muslims" on the one hand, and the uncivilized barbarians like ISIS on the other? I don't know of a way to make that distinction. Indeed, there may not be a way. I come to that conclusion because it appears the muslims can't determine who is peaceful and who is not, either. In fact, anyone (particularly any imam) who speaks out for moderate positions and against the barbarians is very soon killed. I suspect that's the reason for this:
Because you never know when some muslim barbarian will take offense to something you said or to something you did or to your existence, and decides to do something about it.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Voter ID is a Fake Controversy

The Left tells us that a voter ID requirement — especially a requirement for a photo ID — will make it impossible for large numbers of people who don't have IDs to vote. Based on voting results in states that have voter ID requirements, that is a lie.

The Left also tells us that voter ID laws are a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise poor and minority voters. That is a damned lie promulgated for political purposes.

Both of these assertions rest to a substantial degree on the Left's assertion that voter ID processes are unworkable. They claim, in effect, that the people they claim to be protecting are too stupid or uneducated to know how to get an ID and/or too poor to afford one. Even with the Lefties' help.

I'm sorry, but that assertion is just plain stupid! You want proof? Look at India, whose poor and uneducated make the poorest and least educated people in the United States look very rich people with advanced degrees by comparison. And every voter in India has a photo ID. So much for unworkable.

The Left also claims that vote fraud occurs rarely if at all, and that such allegations are made for political purposes. The former claim is disproved by the news headlines. The latter is pure projection.

The purpose of voter registration is allow states and subordinate entities to verify individuals' eligibility to vote in that jurisdiction. The purpose of voter ID is ensure the person showing up to vote is the same person who registered.

This leads to two inescapable conclusions:

  1. The controversy over voter ID is a phony one — perhaps the ultimate fake controversy, unsupported by evidence or experience.
  2. Anyone who opposes voter ID requirements is objectively supporting vote fraud.

The Davis-Bacon Act

Clearing my desk (which has been needed for a long time), I came across a letter to the editor I had saved from the Albuquerque Journal some time ago. It provides an historical tidbit in a response to an earlier letter.

Roxanne Rivera-Wiest tiptoes around the racist oritins of the Davis-Bacon law.

She writes, "The initial reason for these depression-era prevailing wage laws was to prevent government contractors from undermining local wage rates by importing workers from low-wage areas."

More succinctly, the northern all-white labor unions wanted to prevent southern blacks — "workers from low-wage areas" — from competing in the construction labor market.

Davis-Bacon is one of the last remnants of Jim Crow and ought to be abolished.

Isn't it ironic that the party of Jim Crow, the Democrats, still supports this remnant of segregation?

Dave Thomson
Los Alamos

The paper headlined the letter Davis-Bacon has racist origin. And it's right.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Today's Truth

It hasn't always been the case, but this is today's truth.

See here, too.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

When ISIS Attacks

This is an example of why watching the news lately is so frustrating.

From a Kurdish Twitter account yesterday, reposted at The Gateway Pundit today.

That, and stuff like this.

Friday, October 10, 2014

Obama Intruder

An intruder got over the fence, across the lawn, and into the White House. We learned later that the intruder got a lot farther than that. How did he do it? Where did he hide? I saw two possibilities worth remembering.

I also saw one comment worth remembering about the resignation of Eric Holder as Attorney General.

"All good!"