Keep Your Crises Small

See some of why Ed Catmull is one of my heroes.

Also available here in higher resolution than I can embed.

Dear Leader’s Green Thumb

One thing about The Messiah: He never seems to run out of plants.

Before and After

How to turn a beautiful, charming city into one noticeably less beautiful and decidedly less charming.

Unlike their Asian, Latin American or Eastern European counterparts, modern Western socialist governments aren’t going to round us up and shoot us.  Instead, they’re going to love us to death.  They’ll control what we buy, what we eat, how we get our health care, how we educate our children, what we watch on TV, what light bulbs we screw in, what cars we drive, what phones we use, what shopping bags we use, etc., all with the most beneficent of intentions.  We won’t be murdered by gun toting government-funded thugs in concentration camps.  Instead, we’ll just be infantilized to the point where we’re incapable of functioning without a Nanny state at our backs — and our fronts and our sides, and wherever else the State can insert itself into a citizen’s life.  (By the way, if you want to know what that will look like, just cast your mind back to images of Hurricane Katrina.  The self-reliant middle class sat on their porches with shotguns, protecting their families and homes.  The welfare classes, destroyed not by their race but by their decades-long dependence on government handouts, were incapable of even moving off the side of the road.)

The one thing that Jonah Goldberg’s book misses is the fact that the New Age, crystal-gazing American socialist utopia does not allow itself to control all people within its political borders.  Instead, in the name of political correctness, American socialist cities have a two-tiered system:  law-abiding citizens are on the receiving end of heavy-handed government control, while politically correct protected victim classes are removed from any controls whatsoever.  The result is the worst of all possible worlds, with law abiding citizens beaten down both by their own government and by those whom the government allows to roam free.  San Francisco provides a perfect example of this Western socialist dynamic.

Watch the video in that first link. If nothing else, you’ll learn how to pronounce Kearny correctly. Something I’ll wager most current San Franciscans can’t do.

Read the entire second link, even though it’s long.

Shooting the Messenger

I’m on record as not being a big fan of polls. I think most of them don’t qualify as even borderline scientific. There’s a story on Politico about how the Left is all in a dither about this Rasmussen result, which seems to show that America is waking up to what it did:

The Dems claim that Rasmussen polls 5 points to their detriment. You could shift that whole graph up by five points and it still tells the same story. To me the interesting tidbit is here:

In August, for example, Rasmussen asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “It’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.”

“Why stop there, Rasmussen? Why not add a parenthetical phrase about how tax cuts regrow hair, whiten teeth, and ensure that your favorite team will win the Super Bowl this year?” responded Daily Kos blogger Steve Singiser, who frequently writes about polls.

Get that? To this kossack the very idea that taxpayers might know better what to do with their own money than government drones is as risible as the claims of a snake oil salesman. Behold the intellectual vacuity of the Left.

But the question does point out the problem with how polls can be shaped by how you ask the question. Rasmussen’s question is really two. The more neutral way would be to ask if you agree that:

It’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending.

and, separately,

Taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

But, even then, half the time you’d have to ask these instead:

It’s always better to increase government spending than to cut taxes.

and

The government, not taxpayers, is the best judge of how to spend money.

A few moments thought will reveal problems even with that approach. Which is a big part of why I don’t trust polls much.

Head-Scratcher OTD

Tigerhawk:

So, let me get this straight: The ax-prone Islamist lunatic trying to destroy freedom of speech is in Denmark because he was being persecuted?

I think this calls for a cartoon.