Some Stikfas toys and a visitor on my monitor.

From left to right, they are the White Ninja, Pirate and Skeleton buddies, Archangel and Demoness, Master Assassin, Chinese Warrior Monk, Beefeater, Breezie, and Black Samurai.

Yes, that’s Breezie from the My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic television series who snuck in there. A certain someone in the home, who shall remain nameless but who is not a big fan of doing math homework, is a big fan of the show. And I’m man enough to admit that I like the show, too. But only in this hard to read font.

She also picked up Applejack, but she got placed on my monitor at home. And since I know you are dying to ask, I’ll tell you that my favorite My Little Ponies character is Big McIntosh.

“Eeyup.”

Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.

Apparently this recently appeared on Rush Limbaugh’s show, too. And Rush does a great job of showing the difference between capitalism and socialism. Quinn, after quoting Williams above, further explained on his show the difference of capitalism and socialism this way:

The problem is that pleasing your fellow man requires creativity and hard work. Looting and enslaving can be done by any thug with political connections. So what’s the purpose of Socialism then? Well, Socialism allows these same elites and losers to return us to the days of looting and enslaving, but while presenting it as a moral imperative sanctioned by the government. So I guess we can say that Socialism is a system of economics that allows men to loot and enslave other men while claiming the moral high-ground.

But not everyone likes and agrees with this quote by Williams. Case in point, Williams has an entry in the Daily Kos wiki that engages is some typical libtard bashing. It quotes Williams and then finishes off with “What Williams cannot say is that the African slave trade operated as a global capitalist market for centuries.”

Attention Daily Kos mind-numbed robots: the African slave trade was not capitalism. Capitalism is the free exchange of goods and services from one to another. The African slave trade was part of the “looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man” that was and is so common in mankind’s existence. And it is what Socialism will bring us back to if we allow it.

Williams finishes up his article with this very true statement:

Despite the miracles of capitalism, it doesn’t do well in popularity polls. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the non-existent utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system pales in comparison to utopias. But for the ordinary person, capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.

When it comes to economics, I’ll take reality over fantasy every day.

I’m also going thru and making sure that the internal links are working again. Since I am doing this manually, it will take a few more days to go thru the 800+ posts and make sure that all of them look good.

UPDATE (5/7/2013 3:09 PM): I think I have all the internal links fixes from pointing from the old format like /comments/804/ to /2013/updated-site/ that WordPress will be using on this site. Please let me know if you find any broken links in the comments to a captainscomments.com page.

Oh yeah, President Obama has been great about creating jobs. Here’s a graph from the government explaining how we needed to pass a huge stimulus to help America recover from high unemployment numbers. And tacked on the government chart are the actual unemployment numbers. Looks like the stimulus was a success!

But there’s a problem with the President saying he wants to create jobs: the government can only create government jobs. It is incapable of creating private-sector jobs. That is the responsibility of — hello! — the private sector. The force of government can best be compared to the brakes on a large truck. The brakes are incapable of making the truck go any faster, but they have a great deal of influence when it comes to slowing things down. Likewise, government isn’t designed to create jobs, but through its actions, laws, and regulations, government can exert a great deal of influence in slowing down the economy, which leads to job scarcity. The uncertainty of Obamacare, the way government has blocked the building of the XL Pipeline, and regulations by the EPA that are causing coal-fired power plants to shut down are three examples of government slamming down the brakes on the American economy.

Back in November 2011, DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the following to Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, with regard to the American Jobs Act:

“Well, we’re not focused on polls. I mean, we’re a year away from an election. The president is focused like a laser on passing the American Jobs Act, on making sure that we can put people back to work.”

Like a laser, huh?

I can’t answer for you, but I do. The phrase, “a man’s home is his castle” certainly applies to me, and I rule here as a benevolent monarch, just as long as my wife allows me. I don’t lock up my house because I hate people, but because I want to know who is in my home. People have no right to enter my home without permission to do so.

“You’re just one of those weird types who hates people!” Ah, no, I just said I don’t. I just simply believe in boundaries, and no one should enter my home without being invited in first. Just like vampires. But if you’re invited, then you’re more than welcome in my home. Several years ago, I received a request from a friend passing through town. She wanted to know if she could crash for the night. I happily told her that she should consider herself at home, but she’d have to let herself in since we were out of the state at the time. I trusted her to be a good guest in our home and to make sure it was properly locked up once she left. She didn’t disappoint.

So you need to be invited to enter my home. I don’t care whether you come in to steal my stuff or just to clean things up, like Sue Warren.

Police in Westlake say Sue Warren of Elyria broke into a home last week and began tidying up, but she didn’t take anything. They say she then wrote out a bill for $75 on a napkin and included her name and address.

One officer says Warren told him she does it all the time. Only now, she’s in jail on a burglary charge.

Wow. Imagine being arrested for burglary, just for doing jobs that people don’t want to do. OK, that’s a little snarky, but I think you can see where I’m going. Just as my home is my castle, and I reserve the right to admit only the people I choose, this same principle extends to the borders of the United States. We have rules in place to determine who may enter and who may stay. We may choose to amend these rules, but if we simply ignore them and turn a blind eye to those who break them, it sends a clear message to scofflaws and squatters that they can trespass with impunity. If this goes on, eventually certain parts of our nation may become too dangerous for law-abiding citizens to inhabit.

Let me be clear about this: I don’t care where you came from. American citizens came from all over the world. We’re proud mutts, and most of us can trace our ancestry to half a dozen nations or more. Since America has always selected its citizens for excellence, the result has been astounding diversity, and we’re better and stronger for it. But would-be citizens have always had to go through the process of naturalization. We want more Americans, but we want them to be here legally. We welcome visitors from other nations, but they must maintain valid visas to stay here.

This Thursday will be our second Soup Night of the year. The last time we made three soups and had about ten people to gobble them up. So far we’re on track to entertain many more this time. We supply the soup at these gatherings, but people are responsible for bringing their own bowls and spoons, and maybe some bread, too. Since it was well received last time, we’ll probably continue Soup Night every month or two just because it’s fun. My wife reminds me it’s also delicious. But if we ever reach a point where total strangers start walking into my house, picking up bowls and scarfing down food like Goldilocks, we’ll stop having Soup Night.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I love guests, whether in my home or in my nation. But people who break in, regardless of their motive, get my dander up. It’s nice that some of them are cleaning up and doing chores around the place, but that doesn’t change the fact that they broke the law to get in. Such “guests” need to be shown the door. And if we lock our door at home, it makes sense to lock the nation’s door as well.

Cross-posted at Rotten Chestnuts.

Demonstrate. This is the liberal cry of “I (don’t) want” as expressed by the masses of sign-holders or Occupy Wall Street squatters. In the first case, the union didn’t want non-union workers at the port, and in the second case the Occupy crowd wanted other people’s money. The tactic is pretty simple: browbeat verbally (or physically beat) your opposition into doing whatever you want.

Legislate. Liberals love democracy — as long as the vote goes their way. When the vote doesn’t go their way, they will bring the issue up again and again, but once it passes, however narrowly, the liberals will declare that the people have spoken and there should never be another vote on the matter ever again. To be fair, conservatives will bring an issue up for a vote multiple times, too. But conservatives usually understand that an issue voted on and passed one year can be voted on and repealed another. Once passed, laws are not set in stone for conservatives the way they are for liberals. Well, assuming that the liberal was pushing for the law in the first place.

Adjudicate. A common next step for liberals, after failing to get an issue passed by the people or representatives, is to go to the courts and force it through there. Since proponents of gay marriage were having problems getting the majority of voters to agree with them, their alternative tactic was to make it legal through judicial fiat. That’s how it worked in California, Connecticut, and Iowa. So if you can’t get 50% + 1 vote from the people or the legislature to pass what you want, then there’s always the option of having someone in black robes do the heavy lifting for you.

Steamroll. If all else fails, Liberals simply try doing what they want anyway, ignoring both votes and courts to proceed in their desired direction. Recently, Pres. Obama appointed three members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), doing so by exercising his ability to appoint people to positions that require Senate ratification when the Senate isn’t in session. But the Senate considered itself to still be meeting in “pro forma” meetings. Senator Harry Reid started the process in 2007 of holding “pro forma” sessions to prevent then-President Bush from making these recess appointments. In January 2012, Pres. Obama used the “steamroll” tactic to recess-appoint four nominees, as the New York Times put it, “effectively calling the pro forma Senate session illegitimate.” A year later, the D.C. court of appeals ruled that Pres. Obama was wrong to do so. In response to this ruling, the NLRB chairman, Mark Pearce said that the NLRB “respectfully disagrees with today’s decision and believes that the president’s position in the matter will ultimately be upheld.” That’s a classic “steamroll” response. “Courts? Pfft. I’m gonna roll on. After all, who’s gonna stop me?”

Liberals seem to believe they should use any tactic necessary to get what they want. As Nancy Pelosi put it, “We’ll go through the gate. If the gate is closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in, but we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.” And if they can’t get it to work with Demonstrate, Legislate, Adjudicate, and Steamroll, liberals will just pick one of the four tactics and try again.

Cross-posted at Rotten Chestnuts.

That’s not how liberals see it, however. They believe diversity should be an end in itself. A hoary old chestnut of American liberalism is “Diversity is our strength.” Is that so? In my experience, it works the opposite way. When we look primarily for strength — the will and ability to accomplish the task at hand — diversity will be a natural side benefit. But when diversity is championed as the primary goal, it’s strength that suffers.

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s see what happens when filling quotas becomes more important than seeking out excellence. Let’s look at the police force of Dayton, Ohio.

The city’s Civil Service Board and the U.S. Department of Justice have agreed on a lower passing score for the police recruit exam after it was rejected because not enough blacks passed the exam.

Dayton has decided it is no longer seeking the best recruits for its police force; it’s more important for the police to look racially diverse. To fulfill this mandate, it decided to lower its standards, which means that less-qualified people are getting police jobs in Dayton. The quest for diversity for its own sake has resulted in lower-quality police officers. Diversity is our strength? Not in Dayton’s police force, it’s not.

This brings me to the main thrust of my article: the recent decision by the U.S. military to allow women into combat roles. I see this as another quest for diversity for its own sake, at the cost of getting the best soldiers for combat situations.

It’s often said that the primary purpose of the military is to kill people and break things. As a former military brat, I’d expand that saying: everything the military does should
fall under the rubric of its primary purpose. Whenever the military is asked to do something that reduces its ability to fulfill its primary purpose, the military should turn down that task. But since the American military is under the control of elected officials, it can easily fall prey to social experimentation and liberal do-goodery, such as putting women into combat.

In a scene from the cult film Joe vs. the Volcano, Joe’s boss Mr. Waturi asks repeatedly in a phone conversation, “I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?” Replace “he” with “she” and you have the key question to ask about placing women in combat roles. For the most part, women are neither as big nor as muscular as men. This means that women wanting to fill combat positions, where strength and endurance are key to survival, will be at a marked disadvantage from the beginning. If I were an army private wounded in combat, I would want my squad mate to be strong enough to toss me over one shoulder and run me out of danger. I wouldn’t care whether my mate’s first name were Sam or Samantha; I’m focused solely on the end result. But the likelihood of a Samantha being able to execute that life-saving task is far less than it is for a Sam.

“But Captain, there are strong women who can pass the physical requirements.” Sure, there are some very fit women who can pass the requirements, but they are the exception, not the rule. And I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that when the desired number of women fail to meet the physical requirements for military service, the number-crunchers’ first instinct will be to lower the requirements, just the way it was done in Dayton. End result: fewer prepared combat troops and more casualties in battle. How is this a good thing again?

There is also the question of unit cohesion and behavior of the troops during combat. John Luddy wrote the following for the Heritage Foundation back in July 27, 1994:

History shows that the presence of women has had a devastating impact on the effectiveness of men in battle. For example, it is a common misperception that Israel allows women in combat units. In fact, women have been barred from combat in Israel since 1950, when a review of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War showed how harmful their presence could be. The study revealed that men tried to protect and assist women rather than continue their attack. As a result, they not only put their own lives in greater danger, but also jeopardized the survival of the entire unit. The study further revealed that unit morale was damaged when men saw women killed and maimed on the battlefield.

Ignoring the lessons learned from 1948, Israel decided in 2000 to put women back into active combat roles. My response echoes that of Mr. Waturi: I know she can get the job, but can she do the job? Time will tell, but hopefully not at a high cost in blood and lives.

“Diversity is our strength,” liberals like to claim. But when they value diversity more than strength — more than human life — the end result is often weakness, and it can have a terrible cost. That’s what happened to the police force in Dayton, Ohio, and it’s what happens each time liberals push for diversity for its own sake. In the end, liberals prove Quinn’s First Law to be in full effect: Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.

Cross-posted at Rotten Chestnuts.

Yeah, you can get into all the nitty-gritty of the actual numbers of murder weapons, or what an “assault rifle” is versus an “assault weapon”, and even dance about the “why would a person need [some evil gun] to go hunting?” until the cows come home. Very little of what you say will affect their anti-gun emotions, but here’s an interesting way to give them an emotional moment of clarity:

Ask them to post a sign in their yard proudly proclaiming that theirs is a gun-free home.

The above sign comes from a Project Veritas effort to have people put signs in their yards declaring that theirs is a gun-free zone. You can watch the video here. Bottom line is nobody accepted the free, pre-printed signs they offered. One person said (at about the 2:30 mark), “I agree with you, and I am on your side on this, but I’m just wondering if that’s not an invitation to someone with a gun!”

Exactly.

I won’t put up a gun-free zone sign on my property — partially because my property isn’t gun-free, and partially because I don’t want to invite thugs to invade my home by advertising my defenselessness. Instead, any sign I’d put on my property would look something like this:

I keep hitting just a little bit high and to the left. Need to work on that.

Police in Georgia have shut down a lemonade stand run by three girls trying to save up for a trip to a water park, saying they didn’t have a business license or the required permits.

Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar says police also didn’t know how the lemonade was made, who made it or what was in it….

The girls needed a business license, peddler’s permit and food permit to operate, even on residential property. The permits cost $50 a day or $180 per year.

This is not an isolated event. Reason.TV awarded lemonade stand crackdowns the Nanny of the Month for June 2011.

And did you hear about 13-year-old Nathan Duszynski’s entrepreneurial efforts?

This summer, 13-year-old Nathan Duszynski wanted to make some money to help out his disabled parents—his mom has epilepsy and his dad has multiple sclerosis. So he decided to open a hot dog stand. He saved $1,200, mostly money made by mowing lawns and shoveling snow. He checked with the city to make sure he didn’t need any licenses or permits, even going to city hall in person with his mom. And then he bought a cart….

He arrived to set up shop on his first day and 10 minutes later, a zoning official arrived to shut him down. The problem: The cart, which is in the parking lot of a sporting goods store, is on the edge of official downtown commercial district of Holland, Michigan. The city bans food carts in that area in order to minimize competition for the eight tax-paying restaurants a couple of blocks away.

The Mackinac Center produced the following 4 minute video about this story.

Which brings me to the garbage strike. My garbage didn’t get picked up this week, thanks to a strike in my area:

Garbage, recycling and yard-waste pickup for most of Waste Management’s 220,000 customers in King and South Snohomish counties stopped Wednesday when Teamsters went on strike against the region’s largest refuse service over wage and benefits issues.

Teamsters Local 117, which represents 153 recycling-route drivers, walked off the job at 10 a.m. and was joined by Local 174, the garbage-truck drivers, who signed a contract with Waste Management a few months ago.

So 153 pissed-off drivers have affected hundreds of thousands of people, and our trash now sits, uncollected, in the hot Northwest sun. Thankfully, the Northwest sun isn’t all that hot, even in July. We’re barely hitting the low 70s, so it’s not as bad as it could be, but given an extra week, local trash is going to start smelling really special.

A lot of people are complaining about the strike, but think about it: this could be a prime opportunity for an entrepreneur. Once I realized that trash wasn’t going to be picked up, I could have printed up some flyers and hit all the houses in the neighborhood. The local dump charges $20 for a car to drop off garbage, so that would be the price I’d set per can for my trash-removal service. If my neighbors don’t want to wait for the striking collectors to pick up the trash next week (or possibly the week after that, depending on how long this strike drags on), I’d be there to do it for them at the same price it would cost them to do it themselves. But they’d get to skip the bother of carting it to the dump, and I would add the additional service of power spraying out their garbage cans to sweeten the deal. That’s a service Waste Management doesn’t offer.

I’m guessing a friend and I could do a good Saturday’s worth of work helping out the neighborhood, and I could pay a local kid to do the power spraying. But I’m not going to do this. First, I don’t have a truck, nor do I know someone who has one. But even if I did have a truck, I’d not do this because I know local government would try to stop me at every turn. I’d probably make multiple trips to the local dump, and that many visits would most certainly attract the attention of the “helpful” people at city hall. They’d want to see my business license, and who knows what else. I’ve dealt with the joys of obtaining a local business license before, and I have no desire to repeat the process. I might discover that there’s a local ordinance against individuals collecting other people’s garbage and taking it to the dump. Government will make sure that this attempt to make a little money becomes a huge headache, a bother, and more trouble than it’s worth. Consequently, this potential service will die before it even gets off the ground.

And that’s the point. Our local, state, and federal governments have gone from encouraging small businesses to actively discouraging them with punitive regulations and fees. It’s not because the government doesn’t want people to make money. After all, people who make money pay taxes. The government specifically discourages entrepreneurship and subtly encourages working for big business, partially because of the way governments collect taxes. When you start working for someone else, you sign a W-4 form stating that your boss will withhold taxes from every one of your paychecks and duly send it off to Uncle Sam. You cannot opt out of this automatic taxation, even if you would be scrupulous in paying all your taxes every April 15. The government wants a steady influx of tax money. But if you opt to start a small business, you get the thrill of paying your own income tax four times a year, plus the increased likelihood of an IRS proctology exam. Bureaucrats aren’t stupid. They’d rather receive sure, steady tax revenues, collected automatically and painlessly from docile workers who aren’t even sure how much they’re being milked, than wrestle with uppity entrepreneurs who know exactly how much they’re being taxed, who hate punitive taxation and who will fight to keep more of the money they make.

President Obama has no personal experience starting a small business or reaping the rewards of his efforts. In fact, throughout his life he’s been surrounded and supported by people who helped “make it happen” for him, so perhaps his outlook is understandable. But those of us who have always had to work for a living, who pay taxes to support the very infrastructure that gives us a measure of success, may be excused for questioning the President’s judgment. And those of us who have struggled to start a small business and grow it to any measure of success recognize President Obama’s speech for what it really is: a load of garbage.

* I find it strange that the title of the document is “Certificate of Live Birth” instead of the “Birth Certificate” that I have on mine. But apparently that’s a Hawaii thing, based on another certificate signed on the same day as Pres. Obama’s.

* Why release it now? People have called to see the certificate for more than three years, so what is so special about Wednesday, April 27th, 2011, that merits releasing it now? Pres. Obama explained the reason this way:

“We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers,” Mr. Obama said. “We’ve got some enormous challenges out there. There are a lot of folks out there still looking for work… We do not have time for this kind of silliness.”

Later that day, Pres. Obama took advantage of having put this kind of silliness behind him and appeared on the Oprah show and attended three fundraisers. Serious presidential stuff, that. I’m glad it’s now behind him.

I can find only one reason why the certificate was released: instead of being a fringe subject for “birthers,” more and more mainstream people have been paying attention to this issue, thanks mostly to the way presidential-hopeful Donald Trump has talked about it. It had gotten to the point that a poll showed only 38% of Americans believed Pres. Obama was definitely born in the U.S. Pres. Obama can lay the the blame for those poor numbers at his own feet. He could have resolved this issue years ago, if he had wanted to.

* Since Pres. Obama only had to ask to get the birth certificate, why release it now when it could have been really useful at Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin’s court martial? When he was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, Lakin refused to comply, reasoning that if Pres. Obama were not legally the Commander in Chief due to his citizenship doubts, he couldn’t legally issue orders to the military. Col. Lakin was convicted in his court martial and is currently serving his six month confinement in addition to being dismissed from the U.S. Army. His military career would not be in shambles if Pres. Obama had seen fit to release his birth certificate earlier.

* Why spend over a million dollars to the Perkins Coie law firm to squelch lawsuits asking for Pres. Obama to confirm his natural-born U.S. citizenship status? Why spend gobs of cash to hide something if there is nothing there to hide? Sure, it could be a rope-a-dope to tar people as loonies for bringing up the subject, but is that really worth the money?

* For an administration committed to being “the most open and transparent in history,” the Obama White House has been mighty closed. It took years to get this certificate released; now people will continue to ask about Pres. Obama’s school records and other records that haven’t yet been released to the public. Donald Trump is calling for them, and since he was successful in getting the birth certificate, will he also be successful in freeing up Pres. Obama’s school records from “the most open and transparent” administration in history? Time will tell.

* Will this convince all the people who believe Pres. Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.? Of course not. Some people will never accept any level of proof. Looking at the PDF file the White House released, I have to wonder why they monkeyed with the document before sending it out. The funky green and white background can’t be on the original document. I took the PDF file that the White House released, zoomed in to 600% on the top-left of the document, and added blinking lines to show the way the horizontal lines don’t curve on the image as you’d expect if they were part of the original document.

So someone edited the document before it was officially posted. I have to wonder why. And others have pointed at oddities of the image, too. Since the White House knew that people would be scrutinizing this document, why has it so obviously been doctored?

What we do have is Pres. Obama telling us that we should trust him. I am left to wonder what it is about Pres. Obama, his current actions, and his past that would engender such trust.