Damn Photo Competitions!

I compare the winning shot and runner up shot in last week's Daily Telegraph photo competition, theme 'Bridges',  with images found by a quick search on Flickr to show that the winning shots are familiar treatments of famous scenes:

My shot of London Bridge that should have won!

I did win a couple of weeks ago to my surprise with the theme 'Tall'.

Dissing Las Vegas

The remarks of the Las Vegas Mayor, Oscar Goodman, should be heeded. He's a defense lawyer who represented the most notorious mobsters in Vegas and appeared as himself in Casino. I've just ordered his biography, Of Rats And Men. If he says "You're a real slow learner", a wise man will take notes:

The Reality Distortion Field

Fly me to the moon

The moon from our garden in NJ a couple of days ago:

JFK told Congress in 1961:

Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.

Toby Young writes:

A couple of years ago, my best friend Sean Langan was kidnapped by the Taliban while making a documentary for Channel 4 in Pakistan. During his three-month ordeal he was interrogated by his captors many times and he was often surprised by what they wanted him to confess to. One subject they kept returning to were the moon landings. They refused to believe that America had put men on the moon and, again and again, they tried to browbeat him into admitting that NASA’s programme of manned space flight had been an elaborate hoax.
Why did this matter to them? Sean’s theory is that the moon landings are clear evidence of the superiority of everything the Taliban are opposed to — of reason over revelation, of democracy over theocracy, of science over superstition. In its original conception, NASA’s Apollo Programme was supposed to be an advertisement for the superiority of America to the Soviet Union — a Cold War propaganda exercise — but in the eyes of these Islamist terrorists it also served to discredit America’s current enemies. Their response was to insist the moon landings hadn’t happened.
...
The Constellation Programme could have been all that and more. Yet Obama, in his wisdom, doesn’t see the point of it. To me, this encapsulates the difference between JFK and Obama. When it comes to putting men on the moon, JFK said, “Yes we can.” Obama, in yesterday’s budget proposal, said, “No we can’t.”

The Business of America is Government

h/t Powerline.

Another chart:

Postgraduate men and women are Obama's greatest supporters among gender and educational groups. Obama fares especially well among women with postgraduate education (64%). Whereas postgraduates are the only educational group among men that shows at least 50% approval for Obama, all four educational groups among women do. Also, there are essentially no gender differences among those with a high school education or less, but notable gender gaps at higher education levels.

So after 1 year's experience of Obama, almost 2/3 of post-graduate women approve.

The news from London

I'm not in London but I'll post this clip because:

• When I see this face on a Guardian columnist, I recoil a little, so I'd never before read or watched anything by Charlie Brooker, hence I was curious to see the clip via Hot Air.
• 

•  The clip has some nice shots of my part of London.
•  It's struck a chord in the US, tho British in sensibility.

It's not about me

Obama is a joke. I would say that, wouldn't I? I've always thought him ludicrous. But even the hyenas are getting the joke:

Stewart:



Dowd on The One:

Someone who’s always game for a game of pickup basketball, loves talking sports and even boasts beefcake photos. A pro-choice phenom propelled into higher office by conservatives, independents and Democrats, a surprise winner with a magical aura.

The New One is the shimmering vessel that we are pouring all our hopes and dreams into after the grave disappointment of the Last One, Barack Obama.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union? He’s the Epic One we want to hear from. All that inexperience can really be put to good use here.

Trouble is, truth trumps satire:

And now for something completely different

There are certain phrases that once heard compel one to commit them to memory. One such is "the transformation of 2 stellated rhombic dodecahedrons from a cube":

The road to serfdom

The squillion dollar stimulus is Obama's sophomoric tribute to Keynes. The Obamans are so incompetent that much of it won't get spent, yet much will get squandered on Democrat-friendly bullshit. When you think that 40% of the Federal budget is borrowed money, it's like watching the biggest binge in history....big government, big wages, big pensions, big public employee voting bloc, big vampire squid on the face of America, big hangover; same in Britain. Keynes was a great thinker.....he was also wrong as this video proves:


Oh well, I may as well add a clip of one of Hayek's followers. This is from her last speech in the House of Commons. She'd been betrayed by her own party after leading it to 3 successive General Election victories and turning Britain from a dosshouse into a powerhouse. But in defeat she was clad in truth:

UPDATE:

Thatcher's biggest mark domestically came in economic policy, when she rejected the ideas of the Keynesian social democratic consensus which had informed policy since 1945 in favour of monetarism, inspired by Milton Friedman and FA Hayek. The papers reveal little about the opposition to these heterodox views from the Treasury and other civil servants. Just two weeks after the general election, she was writing to Hayek: "I am very proud to have learnt so much from you over the past few years. […] As one of your keenest supporters, I am determined that we should succeed. If we do so, your contribution to our ultimate victory will have been immense."

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Now I'm enjoying the lamentations of the Democrats as much as the next man, especially the lamentations of their women, but as I scan down the headlines and the commentary it seems like the Executive Branch has no authority left. This is getting serious.

Reflections on a good week

I had a drink with my neighbour yesterday belatedly to celebrate Chris Christie's win in New Jersey. On top of that was the Massachusetts win, the apparent death of Obamacare and the Supreme Court re-instatment of free speech for corporations other than media corporations. Some week.

It's good that Obama is president. Better Obamanism then renaissance than McCainism then decline. The growth of giant government has been sapping the West all my lifetime. Maybe Obama is the culmination of the sickness which provokes America's immune system, ie its culture and Constitution, to kick in hard and inoculate the body politic against socialism.

For the time being it's good that the right has no leader; better that the true character of the country should emerge spontaneously. A leader like Gingrich of old or Palin of the future would be a target to distract the aim of the Democrat circular firing squad. For the time being the hobgoblins are mumbling 'Bush did it' and 'teabaggers' as tho obscenity were argument, which I suppose it is in their circles.

I foresee that blacks who presently vote as a bloc of serfs will move away from mono-politics as they see that Obamanism is a dead-end. Plenty of decent blacks get it that abortion and absent fathers are their modern holocaust not racism. Maybe someone like Allen West will show the way.

As the whiskey kicked in I orated that the NJ Governor needs a vision beyond a tax freeze. NJ is almost the worst state in the Union to do business in thanks to the cancer of big government and big tax, but its natural setting is top-notch; great beaches, 4 seasons, lots of open space, NYC, strong communities outside the statist dependency hatcheries, hours from Britain and Europe, major international airport, entrepot potential thanks to the deeper, wider Panama Canal....
The vision should be a special economic zone something like Shenzen next door to Hong Kong or Eire minus the Euro. The emphasis should be on tax incentives for foreign capital and when I say 'foreign' I mean flight capital from California especially. Cutting tax collects more tax; cutting government cuts corruption. Anyway Nj should be thinking like a young ambitious far eastern mercenary state not like a Californian government apparatchik or a tenured academic. Go East, young man, they'll say in Silicon Valley.

The cherry on the top of last week was a climate change for Anthropogenic Global Scamming. There were grotesque exposés of the shoddiness and bias of the IPCC UN report to the point where there's talk of taking back its Nobel Prize. Glancing at the comments threads of Warmist organs like the Guardian and the BBC, it seems that hardly anyone defends Warmism any more. Instead of priests intoning 'settled science', 'overwhelming consensus' and 'peer review' there's an overwhelming consensus that climate scientists and climate journalists were driven by:

• Peer pressure
• Fear of ostracism
• Politics
• Groupthink
• Biased models
• Selective data
• Superstition
• Religious impulse
• Scientism
• Misanthrope
• Refusal to admit error
• It's where the money is
• Disinterested enquiry, not so much.