Saturday, August 18, 2018

Is America Great... or Not?

The greatness of America is not defined by the multiple wars, both here and abroad, that it has survived in over 300 years.

Nor is it defined by the number of racial, religious, or political incidents, both good and bad, that have both improved or plagued it over that time.

Nor is it defined by its economic or financial prowess.  Nor by its military strength.  Nor by its willingness to assist others when asked - and sometimes when not asked.

The greatness of America is defined by its ability to recover from disasters both natural and man-made, recognize and reward those who have improved the American condition while ostracizing and punishing those who have reveled in hate, always working toward Constitutionally-based justice no matter the opposition, opposing those who would taint the American electoral process by attempts at falsifying votes, and by providing a legal basis for the core rights defined in the Declaration of Independence:

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

America is great when it provides the most amount of freedom to the greatest number of The People, where "freedom" is defined as "being allowed to do what you want to do as long as it does not directly interfere with what others want to do".

The greatness of America is its self-corrective nature: situations that cause inequality are always eliminated, even though it may take time to identify both the situation and the remedial action necessary.

The greatness of America is in its justice system, especially when the system acts only according to Constitutionally-defined "rules of the road" and not when any of the three branches exercises powers that are not in its provenance.

The greatness of America is in its use of time-limited democratically-elected representatives to the central government, and the ability of The People to either re-elect those representatives or elect different representatives as they so choose.

The greatness of America is that it allows anyone to achieve anything they wish to achieve on their own merit.  The only limits on your success in the American capitalist system are those limits you place on yourself.

The greatness of America is that it has and will continue to withstand attacks on its political system by those who would try to destroy that system and replace it with another by using the freedoms that America provides in an attempt to undermine those same freedoms... and who may not realize that they are attacking a system that allows such attacks *without revenge*.

America has been hurt in the past by those whose personal agendas did not overlap with American values as defined in both the Declaration of Independence, which delineates those values, and in the Constitution of the United States, which provides a legislative basis for those values.

America will survive as long as The People continue to refer back to the Founder's reasons for designing the only truly democratic form of government that has survived in the Modern Age.

The Founders gave us a Republic.  Our job, as defined by Ben Franklin, is to "keep it".

Thursday, August 16, 2018

What wins in the "style vs substance" debate?

If you listen closely, there's a meme forming: "I really don't like Trump the person, but I like a lot of what he's doing."

The Left loved Obama because he (seemingly) had style.  A smooth operator.  His oral delivery made everything sound like the truth.  Was thin and well-dressed.  Stayed on teleprompter and rarely went off-speech (when he did, he was a bit... lost).  Seemed sooooo sincere because he was sooooo smoooooooooth.  A polished politician, to be sure.

Trump, OTOH, is gruff and unkempt and a somewhat overweight.  He eats McDonalds.  He doesn't have "smooth moves": he jerks around and constantly uses a lot of hand gestures.  He tweets way too often, and his tweets are sometimes quite rude (and insulting).  He almost always wanders off-teleprompter and off-script, and sometimes blurts things out in a speech that would have been better left unsaid.  The least "polished" politician we've had since... well, since I've been alive anyway.

Style.

But as far as substance, Obama managed to do very little in office other than tread water.  I'll skip over the multiple foreign policy faux pas that occurred under his watch (Iraq, Iran, NORK, Russia, Benghazi, et al), the multiple political scandals and missteps (IRS, Fast and Furious, etc), his use of "czars" in an effort to rework the American ideal, and his "phone and pen" pseudo-royalty commands (some of which were denied by the SCOTUS - at least one unanimously).  Here at home, he supported the PPACA and drove millions off their health care plans while forcing them, and the rest of America, to pay for lavish plans for millions of others (many of whom were willingly unemployed).  He attacked the 1st and 2nd Amendments and implemented oppressive and impossibly complicated financial rules that constricted bank and corporation operations.  He supported an increase in taxes while also increasing the food stamp rolls and welfare payouts (aka "wealth redistribution").  Unemployment rose, manufacturers temporarily or permanently shuttered, and economic growth was stagnant.

Then, after steering the country in the wrong direction because he had no effective understanding of economics, he claimed that the economic doldrums he presided over were the "new normal".

Trump has managed, in just under 2 years, to do what Obama said was undoable: improve the economy, decrease unemployment, reduce regulations, and pass a tax cut/reform bill.  Unemployment is dropping, manufacturers are moving money back onshore (something the revered Thomas Friedman said wouldn't happen) and using it to build new facilities and hire American workers, and regulation reform is allowing construction to move forward at speeds not seen in decades.  By opening ANWR and the two pipelines, he has made the US a net exporter of oil - something that the "experts" said could not happen (remember "peak oil"?)  He hasn't been able to repeal the PPACA but he has changed its regulations ("The Secretary shall determine") to permit new plans to be put in place, some of which will allow health insurance purchase across state lines.

This might be because Trump is a graduate of the Wharton School of Business, so he has a deep understanding of business economics (“The chief business of the American people is business.” - Coolidge).  And because Trump understands how deal making is done (he wrote the book on it), he's using those same techniques to show other countries that "doing business with the US is better than doing business against the US".

The left believes that Friedman, a columnist for the NYT, is wiser than Trump when it comes to economics.  But it was Friedman who claimed that Trump's election would almost immediately "tank" the market and drive the economy into the dirt.  He still writes that it's "about to happen".  Any. Day. Now.

Yes, the economy will eventually cool off again.  Economies are cyclical.  But it was Friedman who agreed with Obama about the "new normal".  It seems that he was wrong - for now.

The fact that Trump has managed to disprove Obama's "new normal" is at the heart of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Obama was style over substance.

Trump is substance over style (heck, Trump has very little style at all).

And it's making the left crazy.

Thursday, August 9, 2018

A Proposal for Reduction of Sinusoidal Depleneration

The Turboencabulator

Bernard Salwen

For a number of years now, work has been proceeding to bring perfection to the crudely conceived idea of a machine that would not only supply inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors, but would also be capable of automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Such a machine is the "Turboencabulator."

Basically, the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the medial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive directance.

The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing.

That way the 2 spurving bearings were in direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of 6 hydrocoptic marzel vanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbling was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-0-delta type, placed in panendermic semiboloid slots in the stator, every 7th conductor being connected by a non-reversible tremie pipe to the differential gridle-spring on the "up" end of the grammeters.

41 manestically spaced grouting brushes were arranged to feed into the rotor slipstream a mixture of high S-value phenyl-hydro-benzamine and 5% remanative tetryl-iodo-hexamine.

Both of these liquids have specific pericosities given by P = 2.5Cn6.7, where n is the diathetical evolute of retrograde temperature phase disposition, and C is Cholmondeley's annular grillage coefficient.

Initially, n was measured with the aid of a metapolar refractive pilfrometer, but up to the present, nothing has been found to equal the transcendental hopper dadoscope.

Electrical engineers will appreciate the difficulty of nubing together a regurgitative purwell and a supramitive wennel-sprock. Indeed, this proved to be a stumbling block until it was found that the use of anhydrous nangling pins enabled a kryptonastic boiling shim to be tankered.

The early attempts to construct a sufficiently robust spiral decommutator failed, largely because of a lack of appreciation of the large quasipiestic stresses in the gremlin studs.

The latter were specially designed to hold the roffit bars to the spam-shaft.

When, however, it was discovered that wending could be prevented by a simple addition to the living sockets, almost perfect running was secured.

The operating point is maintained as near as possible to the HF rem peak by constantly fromaging the bitumogenous spandrels.

This is a distinct advance on the standard nivel-sheave.

No dramcock oil is required after the phase detractors have been remissed.

Undoubtedly, the Turboencabulator has now reached a very high level of technical development.

It has been successfully used for operating nofer trunnions. In addition, whenever a barescent skor motion is required, it may be employed in conjunction with a drawn reciprocating dingle arm to reduce sinusoidal depleneration.

Reprinted from:
©The Journal of Irreproducible Results, v9 #2 p20, December 1960