(second block, fourth letter of the prisoners' quadratic tap code...)

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...am here to tap through the walls.



Wed Aug, 22 2007

"The Woman" Is A Ditz

Andrew Sullivan swoons over Megan McArdle, who for years has had the colossal cheek to call herself "Jane Galt". Her effervescent mediocrity has now been elevated to the Atlantic.com blog-mast.

Go read what he calls the "money quote" concerning "The Morality of Single-Payer Healthcare". These bloody creeps are happy to sit around prattling about "morality" in this matter and who "deserves" "care", all without the least care in the world that the values necessary to their schemes must be summarily stolen from people who produced them. So much for "care". It's just a given: if you have something of value necessary to the Plan, then you don't count. You get to just hand it over to the force of government, and then you get to go sit in the corner while others arrange for the consumption of your production.

McArdle:

"There is indeed a very compelling moral argument to be made in favor of some sort of government sponsored health care finance, which is simply this: no one should die, or suffer unduly, because they don't have the money to pay for treatment. Some of my libertarian readers will say that this still doesn't give the government the right to take the fruits of our labor by force, but in fact, I find this argument fairly convincing.

However, that doesn't mean that I should therefore be in favor of a single payer system. The fact that some people cannot afford some good, even a really important and valuable good like food or healthcare, is not a good reason to nationalise the production of that good. We do not collectivise the farms in order to ensure that everyone will have food; we give those who cannot afford food the money (or food stamps) with which to buy it. Section Eight vouchers are generally regarded as a much more successful system than housing projects (though arguably they could be better funded and structured.) If we are worried that some people cannot afford healthcare, there is a much simpler solution than constructing a giant government-run system; we could just give them the money to buy it."
This is a person who knows nothing about what money is and means in human affairs -- except, of course, when it comes to smooshing it around on her little social Candyland game board -- and you must understand this:

If it fell upon her to go about stealing this money herself, she would soon be dead at the hands of some authentic human being concerned with genuine probities of human life, or back at running a blog where she could spout dangerously corrosive bullshit to anyone interested to drop in. As things are now, however, she's got fan-boys like Sullivan cheering her along in a political climate full of stark imbeciles just aching for the whip.
"...there is fairly compelling evidence that government purchases of goods and services do a better job of serving the poor than government provision of same..."
Anyone who takes that sort of thing seriously really deserves what they're going to get.

Are you one of them?

AxeBites

Various guitars I see floating by, mostly Gibson and mostly eBay.


Early Norlin ES-335 -- 1970, in Walnut ("ES-335TDW"). This is a period-piece look and feel, and arguably the sound as well but that's to cut things very finely. A "classic" 335 would be the original of 1958 in the Sunburst or Natural finish, or the Cherry Red of 1959; the Walnut of 1970 (second year of that finish offering) is not really a "classic" 335. In the history of the Gibson aesthetic, this is analogous to, say, vertically-striped polyester bell-bottoms or Bahama Blue shag carpeting. None of this is to say that they're not cool guitars, and this is a nice one. Excellent photographs.

Chrome hardware, featuring the trapeze tailpiece (like my L-47 and I've always liked it) and ABR-1 bridge with period-typical nylon saddles. Bound rosewood fretboard, with small block markers, and then the crown inlay at the machine head. These would be the T-top Humbuckers. Vintage Nazis would moan that the upper bouts are pointy (the body templates were wearing-out in the factory) and the fourteen-degree machine head with the volute signals a sometimes not-fun era of the line, but these things really do rock or moan or whatever you want a 335-type semi-hollow to do. ...which, of course, is because it really is a 335.


In the months since I've let AxeBites languish all to bleedin' hell, Gibson's Robot Guitar technology has sifted out to other models than the original Les Paul application. I don't know how it's going: I still haven't even seen one of these self-tuners. I don't see piles of them burning on the sides of the highway, nor reverent hangings in display cases over bars, so who knows? This 2008 Robot SG is ready to rock in the Metallic Red. Nickel hardware; it's the stoptail wired for data to send to the tuners, with dual Humbuckers. It's a bound rosewood fretboard, but I really like the single-bound machine head with the crown inlay. That's a real cool old-school look, right there, to set off that crazy-ass color. {nod}