Carter cobbled community crumbles...

When will they accept that the road to hell, albeit one paved with good intentions, is still the road to hell?

The following excerpt is from an unintentionally allegorical story in The Sunday Times:

Fairway Oaks was built on northern Florida wasteland by 10,000 volunteers, including Carter, in a record 17-day “blitz” organised by the charity Habitat for Humanity.

Eight years later it is better known for cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes.

In case you're still not sure of the moral — it has to do with what to expect when you build on a foundation of garbage!

What's the attention span of a Googlebot?

It used to be that when you Googled "vantage hunt" you'd get both the blog and the latest post displayed; today it's only the blog. I've been gone for a week and it appears that the Googlebots got bored. I guess I'll have to start posting on a more regular basis again.

Some holiday warming.

Greetings from the Goracle!
ht: Right Wing News

Merry Christmas to all...

Or happy Hanukkah if you prefer. Even "Io Saturnalia" is preferable (considering that that was the origin of many of our Christmas customs) to the greeting "happy holidays". That generic greeting is just a bit too cold and impersonal for my liking.

There are many who assume that people opt for "happy holidays" from a malevolence toward all things Christian. I believe that it's more likely to be CYA — a symptom of the predatory nature of political correctness.

They don't want to risk expressing a personal sentiment from a fear that it could offend someone who just might be different. In the PC world this exposes you to suffer the wrath of the offended. I tend to pity anyone who is subjected to the paranoid existence of leftist codes of conduct.

So when someone greets you with "happy holidays" — I believe that it's kindest to respond with a warmer, more personal alternative.

...and to all a good night!

Santa's helpers v. Big Brother

Kudos to these guys for their Christmastime community service! After all, there's no reason for a truly free society to be under surveillance.

OTOH, the slogan "No controls on movement!" has obviously not been thought through. This would be suicidal to apply at the border until all aspects of the nanny state are repealed.

ht: Drudge Report

Day 15: another test

It's been confirmed. This blog is for those who are smarter than the average bear.

Meterse en Honduras

In what appears to be a misguided attempt to promote themselves as one of the most politically correct firms in Baltimore, Schochor, Federico and Staton, P.A. have portrayed themselves as one of the most patently offensive.

It's obvious that they're not overly concerned about those who believe that it's inappropriate to encourage illegal immigration. So what's so bad about this holiday display?

Lets start with the improper display of the Mexican flags. How much respect can you really have for the eagle when you put him on his back?

Next there's the "Season's Greetings" sign below the windows. In what appears to be a dismissal of Christianity, instead of wishing "¡Feliz Navid!", they opted to superimpose "Felizes Fiestas" on the pyramid at Chichén Itzá. It's as if they expect Mexicans to be more likely to celebrate Kukúlcan than Jesus and Mary.

And I'm not quite sure what to make of the fact that the display is exclusively Mexican. Is this a racist assumption that all Hispanics are Mexican, or are they just discriminating against those who are not?

At best this is a case of cultural negligence! But what makes this especially egregious is that the lion's share of their income comes from generating contempt for those that they accuse of negligence.

Holidays of future past...

Christmas present from 1907: Elisha Brown Bird's concept of "Santa in 2007". Girl Genius is offering this illustration in a free wallpaper for your desktop. According to Professora Kaja Foglio it's "from a children's book published in 1907."

A tale of two Georges

"I'm not gonna let this economy crater in order to preserve the free market system."

~ George W. Bush, Fox News, interview with Bret Baier

Can't shake that eerie feeling of déjà vu? There's probably a good reason.

In 1927, to help bolster Britain's return to the gold standard, the Federal Reserve decided to encourage gold to flow from the U.S. to England. They did this by cutting the discount rate by ¼ and injecting $200 million into the banking system. The easy-money policy did help western Europe's post-war recovery. But it also fed one helluva a bubble in the stock market.

The following year they decided to get market speculation under control by drastically increasing the discount rate; by August '29 it had been doubled! This triggered a monetary contraction of more than a third through 1933.

As if to add insult to injury, this was followed by an even more activist administration whose "New Deal" actually suppressed a recovery and dealt the country the depression of 1938.

I believe that we'd be better off if Mr. Bush (and his successor) were to heed the words of another George:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

~ George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense

pa rum pum pum pum

Sketch by Earl Rumsey Durand
You always wanted drums for Christmas. Go on; click the pic!

ht: WEBUPON

Not a pretty picture

Cartoon by Nate Beeler

First step into the matrix?

According to Pink Tentacle:

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor...
<snip>
Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.
full article

This sort of "mind reading" technology has fantastic potential for fields ranging from neurology to psychiatry. However, there are dour implications for its use in the hands of the irresponsibly wealthy e.g. governments.

ht: boingboing

Addendum: Ill AG v. Gov.

I thought that the following item from Rasmussen Reports might have some bearing on the soap opera that's developing in Illinois.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has surged to the lead among Democrats on the list of favorites to take Barack Obama’s place in the U.S. Senate at the expense of Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., whose image clearly has suffered in the growing Blagojevich scandal.

Thirty-two percent (32%) of Illinois Democrats now say Madigan should be named to the seat vacated by Obama, the state’s junior Democratic senator, according to a Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Illinois voters taken Wednesday night.

I don't know if Lisa Madigan aspires to become the junior senator from Illinois. But given the animosity between Blagojevich and the Madigans, it's not very likely that he would appoint her to replace Obama. She would have a much better chance of getting that seat with Lt. Governor Quinn or via a special election.

Connect the dots as you see them.

Testing... testing... 1-2-3 testing...

This blog's been around for more than a week, so I decided to subject it to the The Blog Readability Test. You can see the results to the right. Apparently this blog is oriented toward a much more intelligent reader than ones like the Dullards Kus or Puff Ho. I don't know the algorithm that the tester uses, but I won't dispute the results.

Sentence first - verdict afterwards.

The Illinois AG, Lisa Madigan, wants to fire her boss. In an unprecedented move she filed a motion for a Temporary Restraining Order against Gov. Blagojevich in the Supreme Court of Illinois. She asserts that the Governor should be effectively removed from office because he was "charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery." In doing this she is attempting to get the court to pass sentence on a man who has not yet been convicted while suborning the executive branch to the judicial!

I have to wonder how much of this Red Queen style display of juris-hubris is influenced by the on-going feud between her father and Blagojevich.

Blago may be a total sleaze-bag who should be removed from office, but the court is not the appropriate venue for remedy! Only the people (via recall) or their elected representatives (via impeachment) have that authority in a democratic republic. To have those in elective office serve at the pleasure of the unelected would set an horrific precedent likely to be the death knell for democracy.

Barak Schultz?

I don't believe that Obama expressly condoned Gov. Blagojevich (D - IL) trying to sell his Senate seat. At the end of ¶104 FBI Agent Daniel Cain's affidavit states: "ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that he knows that the President-elect wants Senate Candidate 1 [Valerie Jarrett] for the Senate seat 'but they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation...'".

However, I am bothered by Obama's claim that he "had no contact with the governor" and "was not aware of what was happening".

This is not the first time that he's adopted a Sergeant Schultz-like posture regarding his associates. For instance, he claimed not to know about his aunt's immigration status, Bill Ayers' history, Reverend Wright's sermons, or even that "Tony" Rezko was a slumlord.

Is this what we're getting in the oval office — a man whose instincts have him turn a blind eye to things he didn't want seen?

Did you notice anyone missing?

There are some who believe that throwing a national hissy-fit about California's proposition 8 is a good idea. They seem to believe that if there's a "Day Without a Gay" that commerce will be so hindered that America will be coerced into accepting same-sex marriage.

It wasn't a very impressive protest when it was tried on behalf of illegal aliens. As I recall, that protest actually reduced their influence by demonstrating that the ones who stayed home were really not needed!

If tomorrow's protest has any effect, it's not likely to be the one that its organizers intend.