I guess I have to “say it louder:”
PLEASE click on the tiny “Read on blog” link or the post title itself in the email notifying you of a new post. Thanks.
Multiple serious family health crises may make posting sporadic for awhile. It’s not my place to share details, however.
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The high error rate in human judgment makes extremist views beyond imprudent to the point of being dangerous. Discuss among yourselves.
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A Free Press article from last week is titled, “Life’s Short. So Stop Trying To Perfect It.” (Kind of related to the previous point.)
“In 2021, Brooklyn-based Brit Oliver Burkeman published a book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which starts with a bleak but indisputable fact: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” (If you live to be 80, you’ll have about 4,000 weeks on Earth.) So, it might surprise you to learn that Four Thousand Weeks—which became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic—is not a depressing treatise about the meaninglessness of life; it’s actually a profoundly empowering guide to making the most of the time that you’ve got.
And—spoiler—it’s not about doing more with it.”
I wish I could embed a link to the Free Press piece so that those of you without a subscription could read it. Well, I wish for a lot of things that don’t exist and probably never will.
I think people should strive to improve, but must accept the fact that every human being is imperfect. In my opinion, that is not a license to act with malice or evil, but a reminder not to beat yourself up over every mistake. It’s also a reminder to admit your mistakes.
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From Elica Le Bon:
“Communism and Islamism, both in marriage and in isolation, have never produced a single system or regime under which people thrived.
Russia was communist under the Soviet regime. Did Russia thrive? No, authoritarianism created a repressive state and forced collectivism lead to mass famine and economic stagnation.
The Soviets also took control of North Korea and turned it into a communist state. Is North Korea thriving? No, there’s probably nowhere on earth that has suffered as much failure to thrive as North Korea.
Iran was taken over by Islamists in the 1979 coup. Is Iran thriving? No, it’s under hyper-militarized oppressive authoritarian rule marked by medieval style lynchings in public for dissent or insulting the supreme leader.
Afghanistan was overtaken by Islamists, is Afghanistan thriving? No. We are witnessing the worst global erasure of women into nobodyhood.
How many more examples do you need to see that this is not the “freedom” fight you think it is? It’s actually fighting freedom.
And yet people still support these suicidal ideologies because they think it’s a challenge to “western imperialism.” They don’t understand that if the west didn’t suppress the rise of communism, none of us would be thriving anywhere.
Suicidal ideologues – that’s what they are.”
EXTREMELY well expressed…
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I have written about the evil act of civil asset forfeiture before. Here is an excerpt from a relevant and recent Forbes article:
“On February 19, 2021, retired Marine Stephen Lara was making the 1,400 mile drive from Lubbock, Texas to Portola, a small California town near Reno, Nevada, where his teenage daughters lived with his ex-wife. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Lara, now 42, was laid off from his job in California and moved in with his parents in Lubbock to save money.
Lara had driven this four-day round trip dozens of times, but on this day he was pulled over by the Nevada Highway Patrol on I-80 about an hour outside of Reno, ostensibly for following and passing a tanker truck too closely. He wasn’t issued a traffic ticket or warning, let alone arrested or charged with a crime.
Yet the encounter ended with the officers seizing Lara’s life savings—some $86,900 in cash he had in a Ziploc bag—and sending the money to the DEA for potential “civil forfeiture.” What that means is that despite the fact Lara was not charged with a crime, the feds could legally keep his money, kicking back $69,520 of it to the Nevada Highway Patrol as a sort of finder’s fee.
More than six months later, Lara got his cash back—but only after The Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian not-for-profit law firm, sued the DEA on his behalf. Now, with IJ still representing him pro bono, he’s asking Nevada courts to rule that the state’s constitution, which protects property rights, bars the Nevada Highway Patrol from participating in the “equitable sharing” civil forfeiture program run by the feds—something almost all states now do.
Earlier this year, Lara won a preliminary round in his Nevada case when a trial judge rejected the highway patrol’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. A trial is scheduled for next June. If he ultimately wins, it could set an important precedent and inspire legal challenges in other states.”
Anyone who thinks that government is not big enough is not paying attention. Talk about being deprived of property without due process…
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Recently unearthed evidence strongly suggests that Leonardo da Vinci’s mother was Jewish, which under Jewish code makes him Jewish. As reported in this piece a new study finds that Christopher Columbus was Jewish as well. So, the silly song we used to sing as kids might have been based in truth:
♫
In 1492, Columbus was a Jew.
He captured the British,
And taught them the Kiddush.
In 1492.
♫
Long Live The Jews!
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From this Archon’s Den post; glad he is recovering from his own health scare.
I told people I wanted to be a comedian….
….but everyone just laughed at me.
(When people say I’m funny I usually answer, “I may be funny, but looks aren’t everything.”)
My entire life is out of whack….
….More whack have been ordered.
Words can’t express how much….
….I hate World Emoji Day.
Emotional baggage is….
….just a griefcase.
The opposite of formaldehyde….
….is casualdejekyll.
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This October piece from Hagerty is titled, “7 Cars That Prove Horsepower Doesn’t Influence Classic Car Values as Much as You Think.” Here is part of the article:
“There is no correlation between horsepower and value. To be clear, we’re not saying horsepower doesn’t matter. It often matters quite a lot—ask anyone who has paid seven figures for a Hemi Mopar—but there are lots of other factors that play into what a car is worth (rarity, historical significance, racing pedigree), and they tend to mix unpredictably. Which is why a 2004 Pontiac GTO, with 350 horsepower, is worth barely half as much as a 1964 Pontiac GTO rated at 325 horsepower—and why both put together amount to less than 1 percent of the value of a 300-hp 1964 Ferrari 250 GTO.”
One of the listed cars is an automobile about which I have written: the 1992-96 Corvette, specifically in coupe form. The last five model years of the C4 Corvette, starting with the introduction of the LT1 engine, are very interesting to me. While it is highly unlikely I will ever buy another Corvette (barring a huge and unexpected financial windfall), I think a C4 from these years would top the list. According to Hagerty, these cars have an average value of only $10,900. From the piece:
The C4 was a brand new car with a completely different chassis from the C3, which was really using the C2 chassis. At first, with government regulations in the way, the emphasis was on handling. However, with the introduction of the LT1 in 1992 the car had real performance. While a 0-60 time of 4.9-5.1 seconds doesn’t sound that fast today (the current generation Supra with a 6-cylinder engine has a 0-60 time under 4 seconds), it was not slow then and is really not slow now.
Hemmings currently has 23 C4 Corvettes from 1992 to 1996 listed with an asking price of less than $15,000. That’s less than a third of the current average transaction price for a new car in the US.
See ‘ya when I see ‘ya…
#HumanFragility
#C4Corvette