QOTD

From the friend of a friend on the Book of Faces:

When they said 'anybody can be President in this country', we should have taken that as a warning.

QOTD

From Michael Z. Williamson on the Book of Faces:

They're called the "left" because they are never right.

QOTD

From a /. article on the latest git release:

I'd rather remove my testicles with a rusty hacksaw than ever use CVS again.

Not quite sure I'm at quite that level of loathing for CVS, but I do see where he's coming from.

QOTD

Eh, rather, blog post of the day.  I've posted pointers to articles by Sarah Hoyt before, but this bit of snark from her latest really resonated with me:

... in the rest of the world, if things get unbearable, you can always go to America. But we don’t have an America to go to. Which will only make us more determined to “ignore the order, buck the directive, roll up our sleeves and do for ourselves.” 

This is why statists of any stripe so often throw their hands up and call us ungovernable. Not that this gives them the idea they shouldn’t try. No. Instead, they try to devise more cunning ways of governing us. You have them to give credit for dreaming the impossible dream. It’s the one proof we have that the sons of beetles are Americans.

QOTD

From Moe Lane at RedState, on Hillary's latest foot-in-mouth incident:

... no, actually I’m not particularly angry that Hillary Clinton called me a terrorist.  After all, I know that it’s not true.  On the other hand, I suspect that some of her partisans will be rather upset to find out that I called Hillary Clinton a joyless, incompetent hollow woman of a candidate with no greater accomplishments than existing. Largely because they know that it is true.

Ouch.  That's gotta sting.

Personally, I think that describing her as a "joyless, incompetent hollow woman of a candidate with no greater accomplishments than existing" is overly generous.  "Deperate, incompetent, dishonest, ineffectual joke of a candidate" is more accurate, but even that still doesn't quite capture the je ne sais quoi that is Hillary.

Attribution

Inspired by a friend during the discussion of the origin of a particular quote:

"You can always attribute a quote to Churchill or Twain. Everyone else does."

 – Abraham Lincoln

QOTD

Gevlon, quoting a discussion he heard:

"No means no. Always. The choice of the woman must be respected."

[few seconds silence + angelic smile]

"except if she says no to Feminism, when she is an uneducated, brainwashed victim who doesn't know what's good for her."

Lacking context, I have no idea if the speaker was being serious, or sarcastic.

Sadly, it works either way.

QOTD

From Don Surber's Daily Scoreboard:

8. President Obama gave a speech on the National Security Agency today: If you like your privacy, you can keep it. Period. 

We're screwed.

QOTD

From Jeff M. on Facebook, commenting on the increasing evidence that what we are looking at in the coming decades is global cooling, not global warming:

The Paul Ehrlich types moved seamlessly from global cooling to global warming. I'm sure they can move back again, as long as the solution is massive suffering and poverty. Cause history begins this morning.

QOTD

On a FB comment thread about the shutdown, one David Burkhead provides a succinct answer to the accusation that the efforts of the Republican House to avoid funding the ACA are "unconstitutional":

Let me be perfectly clear. When the House of Representative says "this is what we will fund and this is what we won't" they are not engaging in dirty tricks. They are not trying to do an end-run around the Constitution. They are _using_ the authority given to them _by_ the Constitution to do. their. job. 

Their ability to say "no, we won't fund that" is a feature, not a bug. It's one of the "checks and balances" built into the Constitution.

Quotes, Glorious Quotes!

At the suggestion of a friend, I have collected and created a page consisting of quotes that I have highlighted on my Facebook wall and elsewhere.  Some of them are cute, wome are snarky, some still make me chuckle.  YMMV, but I think there is enough there that you will probably find something you can appreciate.

There is a new Blogger widget over at the top of the right-hand sidebar that lists the blog pages that includes a link to the new "Quotes" page, which I will endeavor to update roughly whenever I can get a round tuit.

QOTD

Again, from Don Surber in his role as the Scorekeeper:

12. From the Washington Post: "The Syrian crisis over the past few weeks has thrust President Obama into a role in which at times he has seemed uneasy: that of commander in chief." 

He's also uncomfortable with his role of running the government. 

Working with Congress.

Leading the nation. 

But he does like the golf. 

And he's not good at that, either. 

QOTD

From Don Surber, in his Daily Scoreboard:

Fort Hood, Aurora, Newtown, Navy Yard -- the only thing up in this presidency is the number of mass murders.

QOTD

Listening to Jim Quinn on the way in to work today, he had a couple of choice quotes.  From memory (at least until I can find a transcript of this morning's show):

"A day without a Harry Reid soundbite is like an elevator without a fart in it."

"I've carried concealed and not concealed in Starbucks for years, and so far, I've killed less people than Ted Kennedy's car."

QOTD

From Radley Balko, in a comment on one of his Facebook posts:

But the most important battle today isn't between right and left, but between those who question and fear established power and those who embrace it, are indifferent to it, or who hope to someday wield it.

QOTD

Spotted on Facebook, as a friend of a friend commented on the Kermit Gosnell verdict:

I don't find the argument that this is a one-off case or that there aren't other Gosnells out there very convincing. My professional life has taught me that the legal and economic conditions that allow something to happen once will allow it to happen multiple times in multiple places. Evil occurs with actuarial predictability under the conditions that allow it to exist.

Absolutely, chillingly true.

QOTD

View From The Porch: What gun for hippo?

Note to self: Avoid applying for jobs where "Hippo Mauling" is considered an occupational hazard.

I have to say that this sounds like excellent advice. 

Some Quotes

Posting has been very light lately, as work and home have conspired to keep me hopping.  I have come across several good quotes in my brief stints of wading through the intarwebs, however...

Technology won’t solve all problems but proper application of technology will reduce many problems to soluble multiple problems.

-- Jerry Pournelle

... cheap energy solves most problems; and if your philosophy is one of distribution of resources, then it helps to have a large pie to distribute.

-- Jerry Pournelle

... the law isn’t able to prevent all bad things from happening. It can only try to punish the perpetrator after the fact, and that doesn’t mend a broken life or repair a deep trauma.

-- Neo-neocon

Then we start doing mash-ups and before too long, you're celebrating Canada Day by eating bratwurst tacos in a pita-bread shell at a faux-English pub in Nebraska.  You want culture?  We're a heated cabinet fulla Petrie dishes and they're all kinda porous!

-- Roberta X

If you catch up to society as it’s pushing leftward and say “Hey guys, I think we should go leftward even faster! Two times faster! No, fifty times faster!”, society will call you a bold revolutionary iconoclast and give you a professorship.

-- Slate Star Codex

Oh, one final thing.  We've apparently got mandarins, now, as well as praetorians.  Both of which would very much like us peons to just stay in our assigned roles.  Which is kind of bogus, since what we really need are more free men and women.  We're not going to get off of this mud ball if the primary output of our society are "leaders" who get all starry eyed about the failed social models of long-gone empires.

QOTD

Catching up on my blog reading (it's been a busy couple of weeks), I came across this comment by the always eloquent Sarah Hoyt:

Any gate leftists get hold of starts being kept for ideology, not competence. Which means the field tends to go downhill FAST.

Indeed.

QOTD

Via Sarah Hoyt, Bill Reader comments on the strange phenomenon of progressives pickling their leaders:

Well, see, communists can’t stand for things to change or be unpredictable.  You’re not supposed to decay and disappear.  It’s funny because they talk about wanting change, and they talk about being progressive, but really all they want is to return to a time when the world made sense to them – which is the thirties – and when people could be sorted into the classical Marxist classes.  In the same way, people are supposed to stay in the class they were born to.  They’re supposed to act in perfectly predictable ways according to that class.  No one is supposed to change, and tech is not supposed to upend all their categories.  Communism (and its weaker sister, socialism) is a form of OCD.  They want everything separate and put away neatly in categories, even when the “things” are people.  And dear Leaders are supposed to be the same forever.

A very succinct and honest explanation, I think.

Progressives are only "progressive" if you happen to think that an "advance to the rear" is somehow  entirely different from a "retreat".