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Twenty Eleven
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About Me
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| Friday, May 18, 2012 ∙ 2:21 pm EDT |
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So Right, It's Embarrassing
...told ya so.
December 2011
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© 2011
McGehee
43°
sunny
Newnan, GA
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Charles G. Hill channels me, or I him:
You can see the pattern here: keep escalating the conditions until one of them applies. Stopping on the third question implies something not exactly poverty, but well short of wealth. How much would I have to have backstopping my current income to keep worries at an absolute minimum? (I have just defined “wealth,” at least according to my lights.) It would have to be enough to restore my current, um, lifestyle with no discernible compromises — twice. (Because after the first restoration, I’d be on edge about every little thing.) I am loath to declare a dollar amount, if only because some of what is lost is time, and I can’t buy that for any number of dollars. ► Determining the Envy Quotient
That said, the “current lifestyle” I would need to be able to restore, would not necessarily be the one I’m ... currently ... living. A house that holds heat in winter, and holds it out in summer, would be included—and there’s no telling what other luxuries I might require after something like that.
Then again, in my opinion the one thing surest to adhere to poverty is hating people who have things I don’t. So while I’m not rich, I’m also not poor and never have been—regardless of how broke I may have been from time to time.
My upbringing never made much of the Tenth Commandment as such, so I can’t say why I take it as seriously as I do.
1773
Dividing by Zero
So Right, It's Embarrassing
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June 2011
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© 2011
McGehee
81°
sunny
Newnan, GA
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When I finally went back to college in the latter half of the ‘80s and majored in a field more interesting to me (and, believe it or not, even less useless) than my first major, I took some pre-law courses and considered trying to get into law school.
In the end I decided not to pursue that option, for the simple reason that the last thing America needed was more lawyers.
It’s taken a while, but the legal profession’s job market seems to have come around.
If I had succeeded in getting into law school, graduated, and passed the bar (all big ifs), I would have been starting a law career in the early ‘90s and would—I should hope—have been well enough established by now that the only worries about my future would have been for my soul rather than my pocketbook. Which by definition is not something a lawyer ever seriously worries about.
This lawyer bubble thing should have burst decades ago, but better late than never.
So Right, It's Embarrassing
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May 2011
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© 2011
McGehee
52°
fair
Coweta County, GA
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Way back in 2000 I wrote a thing for what was then my political email list, riffing on then-Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign.
Many people, after listening to Al Gore’s speech last Thursday night, found it ironic that, after stating that the President’s job is to “fight for all the people,” the Vice President went on to—in effect—declare war on broad categories of Americans.► You Might Be the Enemy If…
I’m often surprised at how eloquent I could be back then, over things that—these days—barely excite me to roll my eyes and shake my head.
Al Gore Might Consider You “the Enemy” If…
...you work hard, obey the law, pay your taxes, and then have to go and spoil it all by expecting the government to leave you alone.
...you think you had more to do with the current economic prosperity than the Clinton-Gore administration.
[...]
...you think it’s “compassionate” to care more about people than about vermin and weeds.
...you think the single most important legacy you can leave future generations is the freedom that past generations left for us.
From here it looks like a different planet.
So Right, It's Embarrassing
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April 2011
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© 2011
McGehee
72°
fair
Coweta County, GA
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I hope you’re happy.
What the @#$!! did I do?
President Obama has released his long-form birth certificate, and it contains absolutely nothing potentially damaging to him.
And how is that my fault?
You predicted it.
The fact there’s nothing embarrassing in it wasn’t a prediction, just a judgment. Actually, what I predicted was the opposite of what happened—that he would keep refusing to release it because the people demanding it are out of their cotton-picking minds.
Well then, that means YOU WERE WRONG!
►
Read more...
Dividing by Zero
So Right, It's Embarrassing
The Twenty Eleven Self-Interview Series
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© 2011
McGehee
5 comments
52°
fair
Coweta County, GA
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Not that I’m surprised. In fact, I am sufficiently cold-hearted and anti-social that I even feel a tiny bit vindicated.
Inflation is back, with higher prices for food and fuel hammering American consumers, and this time it really hurts.
It’s not just that prices are rising — it’s that wages aren’t.
Previous bouts of inflation have usually meant a wage-price spiral, as pay and prices chase each other ever upward. But now paychecks are falling further and further behind. In the past three months, consumer prices have been rising at a 5.7 percent annual rate while average weekly wages have barely budged, increasing at an annual rate of only 1.3 percent.
And the particular prices that are rising are for products that people encounter most frequently in their daily lives and have the least flexibility to avoid. For the most part, it’s not computers and cars that are getting more expensive, it’s gasoline, which is up 19 percent in the past year, ground beef, up 10 percent, and butter, up 23 percent. ► Inflation inflicting pain, as wages fail to keep pace with price hikes
Apparently I didn’t bother saying so here, but in comments on other sites I distinctly remember arguing that the combination of a down-trending economy, Obama’s big spending and big-borrowing habits, and the cronyism by which his treatments are directed, would require the coining of a new word because “stagflation” just wasn’t going to cut it.
The funniest part, to this malanthrope, is that the idiot responsible for turning a moderate recession into a full-blown economic apocalypse thinks he’s going to get re-elected.
H/t: some guy in Tennessee.
Update: Speaking of coining that new word, maybe I’ve got it: it’s a combination of income immobility and commodity inflation so, immolation!
So Right, It's Embarrassing
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March 2011
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© 2011
McGehee
69°
partly cloudy
Coweta County, GA
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Years and years ago, the first time the seemingly separate issues of Islamist terrorism and border security met (probably on the afternoon of September 11, 2001), I (among millions) came to the conclusion that the fight against terrorists would have to trump political correctness when it came to dealing with people entering the U.S. illegally.
One of the most exasperating things about George W. Bush’s administration was that they refused to see this obvious fact.
In this court filing, provided exclusively here at Pajamas Media, prosecutors admit that Dhakane, who ran a human smuggling ring based in Brazil for the Somali Al-Shabaab terrorist group, transported “violent jihadists” into the country. He stated that “he believed they would fight against the U.S. if the jihad moved from overseas locations to the U.S. mainland.”► DOJ Memo Confirms Terrorists Have Crossed the Border
Yes, George W. Bush and his people could be driveling idiots about some things. They were still 1,000 times better than the current crop. And if you doubt me on that, remember how right I turned out to be on the border issue.
So Right, It's Embarrassing
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