From a new group blog at the PJ Tatler: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule it.”
On balance I'd tend to agree, but there are new thought leaders like William Easterly and others who are pushing for change from the ground up and recognizing the power of commerce over subsidies and entitlements in the developing world and for those who seek a better life.
A reminder courtesy of Thomas Thwaites of the manufacturing technology and ideas that go into producing simple as "simple" as a toaster - from scratch:
Yeah, yeah, I'll get to more substantive posts soon enough. Quips are so easy to post though (Clayton Cramer via The Thinker):
“The problem with Internet quotations is that many are not genuine.” - Abraham Lincoln
Instapundit on the hunting and eating of invasive species:
I think when we message space aliens, the first question we should ask is, “Do you taste like chicken?”
Found by a friend, Zoe L on Facebook:
Success at writing comes from 3% effort and 97% avoiding the internet.
It it stupefying how out of touch some politicians and their constituents are when it comes to believing that jobs can be created by governments buying and regulating them into existence. Victor Davis Hanson captures this frustration perfectly (Pajamasmedia via Instapundit):
Oz is over with and the Greeks are furious at “them.” Furious in the sense that everyone must be blamed except themselves. So they protest and demonstrate that they do not wish to stop borrowing money to sustain a lifestyle that they have not earned—but do not wish to cut ties either with their EU beneficiaries and go it alone as in the 1970s. So they rage against reality.Read the whole thing.
The same is true of California. Our elites liked the idea of stopping new gas and oil extraction, shutting down the nuclear power industry, freezing state east-west freeways, strangling the mining and timber industries, cutting off water to agriculture in the Central Valley, diverting revenues from fixing roads and bridges to redistributive entitlements, and praising the new multicultural state that would welcome in half the nation’s 11-15 million illegal aliens. Better yet, the red-state-minded “they” (the nasty upper one-percent who stole from the rest of us due to their grasping but superfluous businesses) began to leave at the rate of 3,000 a week, ensuring the state a Senator Barbara Boxer into her nineties.
The last few months have been transitional. I'd apologize for taking an unannounced break from blogging, but it happens. There's a lot of pent up blogging that I want to do time permitting but I've also taken on a few new large projects as I pivot with changing responsibilities at the company that I have been building over the past several years.
As I continue to get my bearings, check out think tank/marketing firm JWT's 100 Things to Watch in 2011 (Slidewatch via Paul Kedrosky):
