December 21, 2006 by mr_flood.

One of the biggest topics of controversy over this past year has been about immigration and it’s effects on employment and wages. Do illegals depress wages or take jobs that legals wont?

Well, after the recent high profile illegal immigrant raids on Swift meat packing plants the AP decided to assign Oskar Garcia to cover the story of how Swift is going about refilling those positions. It would be reasonable for one to expect that the story would be covered from the angle of who came to fill these positions and how it affected wages.

One would be wrong.

In the world of Oskar Garcia the main story is how many more white people are being hired. Oh the travesty.

And for those interested in whether the raids had a negative or positive effect on wages/hiring here is this quote:

“They’re trying to staff up their plants and they’ve been raising their wages the past few weeks,” said United Food and Commercial Workers spokeswoman Jill Cashen. “To me, it’s an example that when you make the job more attractive you get a different kind of applicant.”

Of course, if you have any common sense whatsoever you already knew this would be the case.

Via The Corner

Posted in Current Events | 2 Comments »

December 20, 2006 by mr_flood.

Via Instapundit, here’s an article from The Reference Frame:

According to the most recent data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the year 2006 is set to be

• colder than 2005
• colder than 2004
• colder than 2003
• colder than 2002
• … and, most obviously, …
• colder than 1998,

despite the new El Nino that has been warming the Earth again for a couple of months at the end of 2006 and that will probably continue in 2007. Yes, right now it seems that 2006 will become the coldest year among the most recent five years, and it will belong to the colder half of the years in the last decade.

Read the whole thing, it’s a good one.  Maybe I should file this under a new category: Inconvenient Truths.

Posted in Climate | 2 Comments »

December 20, 2006 by mr_flood.

From The Corner today, Mario Loyola believes that the President is on the verge of making a mistake in ‘politicizing’ war making by advocating an increase of troops, he says:

President Bush is in danger of committing the one mistake of the Vietnam era that he vowed never to commit—to allow military decisions to become politicized.

But what if the generals are wrong? The current plan has produced nothing but a stalemate. Would Mario insist that we continue on with it? I wrote an article the other day questioning how it came about that generals became unassailable in regards to war. Are they always right? If not, who gets to question them or order a change of direction if not the commander in chief? The framers put a politician in charge of the military for a reason.

He goes on:

There is no reason to believe that an increase in force levels will have any effect at all on the levels of violence in Baghdad.

Really? No reason at all? What about all the generals calling for such an increase? They can’t all be without justification.

Generalized beliefs that the Commander in Chief shouldn’t become involved in military decisions are just bunk. There are instances throughout our history where they have become involved and to our benefit. I would state that if the war isn’t being won then who better to jump in and make corrections than the CIC?

Posted in Current Events | 2 Comments »

December 20, 2006 by mr_flood.

Typical of most extremists, Mark Raven accuses his philosophical opponents of getting personal while doing it himself.

On his blog he says of Jonah Goldberg:

Mr. Goldberg, of course, predictably employed the old Conservative and Neoconservative standby of attacking the personal background of his critic.

But earlier in the same article he says:

Do you actually believe that Mr. Goldberg’s wife, Jessica Gavora, former speech writer for one-time U.S. Attorney General John “Where’d-He-Go?” Ashcroft and one-half of the D.C. cocktail couple best known as Saddam and Gavora, spends six and a half hours in one sitting (sleep - as respite - does not count) with Mr. Goldberg?

Lol. Do these people even read what they write?

Via Althouse

Posted in Current Events | 1 Comment »

December 15, 2006 by mr_flood.

Tell me, when was it, exactly, when Generals became infallible? From Kos:

Bush is completely and hopelessly lost.

Why? Because

The military chiefs do not favor a troop buildup in Iraq but see supporting and strengthening the Iraqi army as pivotal to stabilization, the Post said, citing sources familiar with the officials’ thinking.

In other words, staying the course. But wait, I thought they all wanted us to change course? But I digress.

We all know that in previous wars generals have been fired/hired with regularity. They are no more prescient than the next guy. The current plan was made by the generals so they have a vested interest in keeping it intact. They are also political creatures and know their careers would be greatly affected if there was a change of plan that turned out to be more effective than their own. Calling Bush out for going against the vision of the generals is just so much nonsense. Who knows if adding more troops will work or not but we all know, including the Dem leadership, that staying the course, as Kos advises here, isn’t working.

Posted in Current Events | 1 Comment »

December 14, 2006 by mr_flood.

I suppose the vast majority of Americans would describe the amount of money the ultra-wealthy make compared to them isn’t ‘fair’. Guaranteed all of those interested in wealth redistribution would characterize it as such. I certainly do not describe it as such. But let’s go from here with the given that having that much wealth is somehow unfair. If it is unfair, how do we go about making it fair? For those that believe it is unfair it seems their only solution is higher taxes, and this is the point I want to address.

Where does one get the idea that fairness in the distribution of wealth can only be achieved by lowering the wealth of one group of people and increasing the tax revenue brought in by the government? Notice the bait and switch. The problem that is described to us begins with an unfairness in the level of wealth between the ultra-rich and the middle to lower classes but their solution doesn’t involve one half of that equation. What they want you to assume is that the giving of the money to government is the same as giving it to the less wealthy, something akin to Robin Hood. This assumption is completely bogus. The money that is taken from the wealthy is not redistributed to the rest of us. As a matter of fact, it is oftentimes given right back to the wealthy in the form of government pork projects. But most of it, of course, goes to funding the bureaucracy.

And this is the true nature of the problem. The first priority of government, like any entity, is to reproduce, and the first priority of those who believe in so-called income redistribution is to feed government because they are socialists at heart. Getting the money into the hands of the less-wealthy isn’t really a concern of theirs. If it was, their solution wouldn’t involve taking from the rich to balance things out but rather increasing the wealth generation of the less rich.

Don’t believe me? Ask them if they would be in favor of implementing their redistribution plan but in a different way, doing it by bypassing government altogether. Instead of the government collecting a percentage as taxes, rather take a percentage of their wealth and just split it up into direct checks to people. They’ll hem and haw and claim that would never work.

Posted in Philosophical Musings | 2 Comments »

December 12, 2006 by mr_flood.

Wow, what a match.  Honestly Chelsea played the better game with longer possession and more quality shots on goal but Arsenal showed real strength.  They were without 4 of their starters and still played defiantly.  Great job boys.

Posted in English Premier League | 1 Comment »

December 12, 2006 by mr_flood.

So Kofi’s speech dovetails nicely with what I wrote earlier, an example:

“Against such threats as nuclear proliferation, climate change, global pandemics or terrorists operating from safe havens in failed states, no nation can make itself secure by seeking supremacy over all others.”

You see, The Community is a collection of nincompoops so you too must be a nincompoop or you upset us. We live to the lowest common denominator. Trying to be exceptional is just poor form.

Not only that, but we’re a paranoid lot so we see you trying to protect yourself not as a nation acting in self defense but rather as a Hitler wannabe seeking the Fatherland Uber Alles. And since we are completely powerless we can only hope to mock and shame you into joining The Community of nincompoops.

Oh, and please ignore the elephant in the room. We criticize you, you do not criticize us because, after all, we mean well.

Posted in Current Events | 2 Comments »

December 12, 2006 by mr_flood.

I almost never agree with Bill Kristol, but here he is on The Corner with a spot-on comment:

And if we lose in Iraq, it will be a national . . . disgrace. It will be a disgrace. It will be our failure. It won’t be the failure of Maliki. It will be our failure to have the patience and the ability to do what it takes to win this war.

No sh!@. I wonder, do the folks who think we should just leave now believe that it would be a national disgrace or do they honestly believe it would just be a disgrace to Bush? I suppose we’ll never really know. I’m thinking perhaps it doesn’t even matter to them; disgracing either would be o.k. How strange. I cannot relate to that thinking in the vaguest of ways. What causes a through-and-through American to not want their nation to succeed in all it’s endeavors?

I’m thinking it comes down to their priorities. They have a completely different set. The highest priority for our nation, in their minds, is for us to belong to the international ‘community’, on equal terms, no matter how barbaric, backwards or corrupt the other members of that community may be. In perfect harmony. But not real harmony, the illusion of harmony maintained by endless ‘talks’.

They have a vision of the future detached from reality where all people sit as equals at the great Table of the Earth and talk their problems out, coming to perfect answers through open dialog and compromise. This has to be it. The thing that lobotomizes national pride from their psyche. There are no nations in their future, there is only community.

It’s an admirable goal, but like I said, completely detached from reality. Because human nature is what it is ‘community’ must be enforced upon those for whom other people exist solely to be taken advantage of. And so we come to the crux of the problem: they don’t believe bad people exist, only misunderstandings.

Posted in Current Events | 2 Comments »

December 11, 2006 by mr_flood.

“I am here to defend the right to offend” - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Of course there’s no ‘right to offend’ in the constitution but it doesn’t take much to equate the right to free speech to mean the right to say that which offends. Is the converse also true? Is there a right not to be offended? In short, no. One sure-fire way to determine if you live in a truly free society is whether or or not you can be offended without recourse.

We all know that free speech is under attack, the examples are legion. There are facists among us and when they are given power they are quick to impose their version of Big Brother upon us. Group-think is their friend, hyperbole their weapon of choice and facts are the unspeakable enemy.

And we submit.

It makes me angry to no end that loud-mouthed Brown Shirts so easily impose their facist agenda on huge swaths of the country under the approving eyes of the similarly minded media with not a peep from the elected ‘protectors’ of such rights. If anything, the so-called defenders of the Constitution applause as the Brown Shirts go marching by.

The famous quote says “This is how the Republic dies, to thundering applause.” Wrong. It dies the death of a million cuts under the indifferent gaze of the contented masses.

Posted in Philosophical Musings | 1 Comment »