#rsrh What? Of course Commies are unpatriotic…

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers: also, to quote a (Democratic) friend of mine, when it comes to whether it’s stupid-or-evil to quote Stalin… embrace the healing power of ‘and,’ my brothers and sisters.

…pretty much by definition.  Communism is by its nature an international movement that rejects the fostering and nurturing of individual national identities in favor of some nebulous transnational ‘class’ struggle: there is no place in the orthodox version of the faith for anything less than eventual world revolution.  Although I suppose that you could decide that only a particular racial/ethnic/political group deserved the dubious benefits of Marxism-Leninism: thus creating a sort of national socialism…

…Oh. Right.  Commies hate being reminded of that little detail of 20th Century history.  Anyway, here’s the video of the Russians looking at Communism in NYC; I admit some admiration at the sight (or more accurately, non-sound) of the cameramen not breaking down in helpless laughter throughout.

Moe Lane

PS: Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people – and, believe me: if you’ve got books by Stalin in your library and you’re using those books to look for ideas… yes, you are a stupid person.

#rsrh “Duck and cover.”

Glenn Reynolds has a very good, very timely article on the subject* that depresses me utterly.  Not just because of the subject matter, which is gruesome, but necessary to contemplate.  What’s depressing is that I grew up in the tail end of the Cold War, and I remember well drawing overlapping circles on a map of the tri-State area and concluding that there wasn’t a chance in Hell that I could get far enough from the primary blast zones if the balloon ever went up**.  I did not mind in the slightest when history appeared to end in 1991.

But history doesn’t end, dammit.  And we need to address our lack of a Civil Defense program.

Moe Lane

*The very short version?  Unless you’re in the “instant kill” zone of a nuke, if one goes off near you it is a very good idea to duck when you see the flash (thus making you less of a target for the wave of infrared radiation and blast wave of pulverized solid materials that will follow), find cover (thus increasing your changes of surviving the shock waves) and seek shelter-in-place (thus not only avoiding fallout, which is going be highly dangerous; it also will help minimize the confusion and panic that will come in the aftermath of a nuclear strike).  The Obama administration is not being goofy by drawing from the 1950s Civil Defense programs; those programs were based on examinations of the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and the conclusions make sense.

**Fort Monmouth.  Had the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade at the time.  Worth a bomb.  Ten miles from my house.

#rsrh QotD, That’s a Damn*d Lie edition.

From Joshua Green’s otherwise enjoyably-peeved article (“Strict Obstructionist*”) on Mitch McConnell:

Nobody anticipated the Republican swing only two years later…

That’s a damned lie.  The entire party has been planning a “Republican swing” since roughly two seconds after we heard the President tell us “I won.”  And Senator McConnell – who I still have some fondness for as a politician – had damned little to do with leading the charge.

I swear to God, these people are desperate to find a Republican leader to attack, once and for all.  Can they freaking wait until the primaries are over, at least?

Via Ben Smith.

Moe Lane

Heat balls!

Just what every European household needs: heat balls. A German businessman has decided to start marketing the items as ‘small heating devices’ for households requiring additional warmth.  Apparently, there’s a perceived need for that in Europe.

Anyway… very ingenious things, heat balls: they work by converting electricity into heat energy, with an impressive 95% efficiency, which makes them perfect for warming specific spots in the house.  They’re also absurdly simple to make: glass, tungsten, some argon to keep the device stable – it’s all very cheap to make, particularly since it’s all off-the-shelf technology.  Best of all: heat balls fit in a standard lamp socket, which means that you won’t need any kind of special equipment to use them!  They’re not perfect, though: the extremely small amount of energy wasted by a heat ball ends up generating photons, which means that you don’t want to look at a heat ball directly.  But even that can be mitigated by using exterior shades.  Really, on balance it’s a great little device: as Instapundit (H/T) notes, very green.

What’s that?  I’ve just described the incandescent light bulb?

Don’t be absurd: the European Union banned those, remember?  This is just a heat generator; that’s how it’s marketed, and that’s how it’s being sold.  If somebody plugs one in just to generate light, well, that’s hardly the seller’s fault, is it?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Californians, take note.  Heck, Americans in general after 2012.

PPS: Here’s the English-language site.  Note that the EU is being called out for its anti-environmental stance on the Heat Ball, by the way.

#rsrh Playing Chicken with the Debt Ceiling.

I think that Daniel Foster over at NRO has a good point, here: a credible threat along those lines is going to force the Democrats to make a lot of concessions.  I also think that the tenor of his comments section suggest that ‘credible threat’ is the compromise solution: there is a definite movement out there that embraces a point-blank opposition*.  So, Democrats: you can deal with Senator Lindsey Graham; or you can deal with the people who think that Senator Graham is too squishy for words.

Which do you prefer?

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Playing Chicken with the Debt Ceiling.

#rsrh Revisiting the filibuster.

Over at RedState, Erick Erickson’s written a post calling for people to flood the zone in opposition to changing the filibuster rules.  I share that sentiment, and approve of it: and I agree with hogan (also at RedState) that the filibuster situation as currently designed has inherent merit.  However, I am also prepared to take advantage of the new rules, should the fools in the Democratic Senate caucus actually implement them.

I spelled it out here: to summarize, if the filibuster is eliminated then the Republican Senate abruptly goes from needing thirteen Democrats in order to pass the House’s legislation to only needing four.  Thirteen is hard – doable, if you’re willing to give things up to get it – but hard.  Four?  Four is easy.  We’ve got seven Democrats seriously worried about keeping their jobs after 2012, which even gives the GOP a buffer for its Northeastern contingent.  Senators Udall and Harkin apparently either can’t count, or they don’t quite realize that it’s no longer 2009.

Really.  It’s no longer 2009.  In 2009 the GOP had to play defense in the Senate, because we had a nineteen-to-twenty vote gap that had to be surmounted in order to put any of our policy positions on the board.  Which we couldn’t do.  And now the Democrats want to make it easier for the GOP to make the twenty-three Democratic Senators up for reelection next year squirm in their seats over difficult votes?  Is this a trick question?

Moe Lane

#rsrh The Chicago Way.

OK, let me see if I have this straight: Rahm Emanuel quits being White House Chief of Staff and runs for mayor of Chicago.  The retiring mayor of Chicago is Richard Daley, whose brother William Daley is reportedly being considered for the position of… White House Chief of Staff.  Presumably this would be followed with Richard Daley endorsing Emanuel.

(pause)

Brilliant – in its way.  But why the [expletive deleted] couldn’t they have shown this kind of ingenuity when it came to fixing the unemployment rate?

Democrats start clearing out OfA deadwood.

Well, that didn’t take long.  I mean, when I wrote this post indicating that Tim Kaine’s retention as DNC chair meant that the Democratic leadership had decided to concentrate solely on the President’s re-election*, I did not expect that I would receive some sort of confirmation of this within minutes.  But, thanks to Doug Heye, I see this report that the DNC is laying off… selected… Organizing for America staffers.  Which ones?  Well, Roll Call didn’t give specifics, but it’s fairly clear that the firings reflect the final abandonment of Howard Dean’s Fifty-State Strategy: they’re removing field staffers, which means that the leadership is writing off entire states.  Smart move for a Presidential campaign that’s starting kinda-sorta on the rocks; dumb move for a political party that wants to avoid regional status.

Organizing for America has, of course, always been a tool for the President.  It was clear even before the 2010 election that it was permitted to persist after the 2008 election in order to further the President’s chances in the 2012 election, and not to further the interests of the national Democratic party  – a charge angrily denied by the same press hack who is now gamely trying to explain away the layoffs – and it should be noted that the Roll Call article is noting that this was only the ‘first wave’ of layoffs.  Which means: expect more people getting fired, and expect non-Presidential Democratic resources be reserved for Democratic candidates running for office in states that Obama did win in 2008 but might lose in 2010.  Everybody else in the Democratic party is simply going to have to make do with less.

For the sake of the Lightworker.

Continue reading Democrats start clearing out OfA deadwood.

Wait… what?

I got sent this with a cheerful invite to read the subtitles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNAh35ChqcM&feature=player_embedded

My brain cannot wrap itself around the concepts: I try to understand, but sense eludes me. Meaning skitters across my mind like a asymmetric crustacean skittering across an acid-etched rock under alien skies…