Moe Lane

Oops.  In its way, it’s very much a baby step, but it’s beginning to dawn on Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz that 2014 is getting closer and closer – and with it comes a regulatory regime that includes health care mandates that are going to put “too great” a pressure on small businesses.  This might even be a principled position of Schultz: I assumed at first that he’s worried about how Starbucks franchises would get hammered by increased health care costs, but it turns out that Starbucks doesn’t actually have franchises*.  Which means that Schultz could solve the whole problem personally by having Starbucks apply for a waiver.

I mean, why not?  Everybody else is.

(via @amandacarpenter)

Moe Lane

PS: I still don’t like their coffee, but that’s probably not their fault.

*They admittedly have a franchise system for Seattle’s Best Coffee, but Starbucks is the primary earner here.

You want to know why?  It’s because I don’t know what the heck it is that we’re doing in Libya right now.  Are we toppling the government? Are we setting up an effective partition of the country?  Are we acting? Reacting?  Is there an actual plan, or are we just making this up as we go along?  And not only do I not know: neither does anybody else.  Including, apparently, the President’s own party leadership, which is just as much in the dark as the rest of us.  It’s not helpful that there isn’t a consistent message coming out from the administration, either.  The President is playing soccer in Brazil; the Secretary of Defense is being embarrassed by the Russians; and the Secretary of State is… making surreptitious calls to her old leadership PAC, probably.  You tell me who’s minding the store right now.

I admit it: I was spoiled by the previous administration… actually, no.  I was spoiled by the previous four administrations.  Whether I agreed with the various military interventions or not of those administrations, at least we were told about them ahead of time.  We had a basic idea of what the goal was, who was in charge, and what we were going to be doing.  The plan didn’t always work, but there was a plan.  If there’s a plan now, it’d be great if more than three people know what it is.

‘Three’ is me being optimistic, by the way.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Leaving, On A Jet Plane, John Denver

There’s a reason for the double category.

Moore’s Law is, of course, the famous dictum that computing power can be expected to double roughly every two years or so*.  Funny thing about that: turns out that this applies to cheap electronics, too.  Also turns out that putting a cheap video camera in an equally cheap cell phone turns it into an impromptu, yet serviceable guerrilla video device – which last fact is seriously disconcerting a lot of repressive regimes out there who are not accustomed to having their antics being recorded and disseminated in real time.  Or for having their domestic opponents plugged into a robust telecommunications grid, for that matter.

The response by said repressive regimes is therefore to shut down the aforementioned grid at the first sign of serious trouble, of course; which has in itself sparked an interesting sort of do-it-yourself telecommunications arms race between the regimes and the people protesting them. Do-it-yourself directional antennas, mini-local wireless networks uploading to a central location with reliable outside access, roving satellite uplinks – they’re even going back to using analogue by translating digital information into a format that can be broadcast over ham radios.

Interesting stuff: read the whole thing.

(pause)

Sorry: I was going to finish up with something else, but I forgot what it was.

Moe Lane

(more…)

Five exclamation points, so that you know that it’s important.

Yes, yes, I know: who?  I invite the reader to go back to an understated post of mine from September 2010 entitled “Elizabeth Warren will rise from the sea to destroy us all!“: essentially, it was being argued by the Left that appointing this woman to be the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) would save the House of Representatives for the Democratic party.  Apparently, putting her in charge of yet another new regulatory agency (this one mandated by Dodd-Frank) would be the killer app, the silver bullet, the Secret Sauce that would get progressives out of their seats and simply flood all those Blue-in-Red polling stations in a cerulean tide of majority-retention.  Really.  Elizabeth Warren would save the House.

And lo, the mocking stretched to the heavens.  Even in what was turning out to be an excellent campaign season for stupid political brainstorming by the Democrats, this one was pretty prime*. (more…)

…I can’t begin to imagine what it could possibly be.

Seriously, at this point in the game Governor Pawlenty’s my first choice: he’s got the right credentials (two-term Republican governor in a Blue State), there’s no scandal attached to him, his major problem policy-wise (cap-and-trade) is not really a game-breaker for me*, and he lacks drama.  I am done with drama, thank you.  I’m putting this in RedState’s diary section because the site itself is not endorsing a Tim Pawlenty run, of course; it’s far too early for that and we haven’t really made up our own minds, yet.

At any rate, the announcement will be at 3 PM EST, on Facebook.  Friend Tim Pawlenty to see it.  And I suspect that this site will be getting a major update soon.

(more…)

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: the iPad 2 is a temptation.

It’s one that I’ve been resisting, because up until quite recently it was a tempting toy to me.  Toys are nice; toys are fun; and toys are luxuries.  And with the economic situation the way it is, luxuries take a backseat to building up financial reserves and not going nuts with purchases of highly expensive toys.  Which was fine.  But then Charlie Stross had to write this, damn his eyes: (more…)

Bless their hearts, who cares?

Below I’m going to answer some questions asked by the Brittanica Blog (via Instapundit), in the order that they were given at the end of a blog post.  To give the background, the author of said blog post has noticed something that the rest of you knew already: based on recent events, the Democratic party never really gave a tinker’s dam about the Iraq War except insomuch as it allowed them to scream about the Republican party.  And, even though that party’s leadership has by now pretty much contradicted everything that they have ever said on the subject of going to war, there seems to be a certain… passivity… thus far in the progressive antiwar movement’s response to the Libya situation, too.

Fools, dupes, and knaves, in other words.

Anyway, on to the questions! (more…)

The one worrying about her eighteen-month-old’s private school interviews.

1. The author would have a heart palpitation at the thought that her kid should go to a NYC public school.
2. She would probably be able to rattle off statistics about the NYC public school system that would fully justify said heart palpitation.
3. Despite her admittedly above-average self-awareness at the essential shallowness and absurd materialism that her social class is displaying with regard to their kids’ education, the author will do nothing to alleviate the conditions that lead to #1 & #2.

I don’t know.  It’s a trivial article and a bit of a passive-aggressive whine, but it annoyed me sufficiently to be rude about it.  Maybe because I suspect that the author thinks that she’s being enlightened by telling us that rich people worry about their kids’ education, too.  Which is… nice, I guess: but given that even the merely well-to-do are saddled with the consequences of the choices made by the rich on educational and other policies, put me down as being unimpressed by her problems…

Or perhaps just ones with functional consciences.  Short version: not only did NPR apparently confuse Michelle Malkin with Eric Holder (I guess that all non-whites look alike to them) when it came to Birtherism and secret Muslims; they expanded the bit to make fun of her extended family, at a time when her family is a little busy right now trying to locate a family member who has been missing for several weeks*.  The first bit is ‘merely’ one more sloppy bit of research and execution, researched and executed by people who are neither as intelligent nor creative as they think that they are.  But the second bit?  That’s just trash behavior.

I don’t like funding trash behavior.

Moe Lane

*For those trying to play the “They didn’t know!” card: two minutes of research on the Internet would have revealed this, given that Michelle has been burning up the Internet trying to find her cousin.  Although I suppose that it might make people feel better if it turns out that NPR is merely incompetent, not cruelly callous to other people’s suffering.

Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner, Warren Zevon

Fun to sing the chorus, drunk, with about three or four other people who are also drunk.

But that’s true about many songs, to be sure.

And the Democrats are going to – very entertainingly – try to put the best face on that particular electoral disaster that they possibly can: they have a week’s worth of events planned, apparently in the hope that the only thing wrong with their party’s messaging thus far was that they did not speak loudly enough, or slowly enough, or use small enough words, or any combination thereof. They also plan to “shine a spotlight on Republicans who have opposed the law at every turn” – which, the last time that I checked, included not only every Republican sitting in Congress now, but the net +6 Senators and +63 Representatives who were not in their current Congressional seats in March 2010.  Put another way, Republicans do not so much worry that their opposition to Obamacare be highlighted as they demand that it be.

Seriously, when you have people like notorious pro-union violence columnist Greg Sargent saying things like “…hope for the best,” you have a serious problem.  It wasn’t the messaging that’s the problem here for Democrats.  It was the slipshod crafting of Obamacare, the blatant attempts to provoke a violent response to Obamacare, the numerous payoffs and corrupt deals used to bring Obamacare to fruition, the cowardice displayed by numerous Democratic politicians (many of whom are now suddenly private lobbyists) in their ‘defense’ of Obamacare, the arrogance displayed by other Democratic politicians (typically from districts where God couldn’t win as a Republican) ditto, the wholesale lying, libeling, and slandering of Obamacare’s opponents, the ongoing payoffs and corrupt deals being made for Obamacare after the fact, and – most importantly – the ongoing demonstration that not only is Obamacare dysfunctional: it’s probably unconstitutional as well. (more…)