hugo

LaRussa rested most of his regular lineup today. Had Pujois available to pinch hit in the 10th. Game over.

I called someone, who had filled out an application, for a job interview. He did not answer, his answering machine was a rap song that referred to bitches and getting high. I hung up.

Let me make it clear that kid was not mine.

I'm from Missouri. Ya gottta show me.

That sounds like the gal who complained about me eating a hotdog and making out with her at the same time.

RO informed me he is also a Taurus. I always thought we had a bit in common, besides the fact that he is younger, smarter and better looking. Damn, no wonder I caint pick up no women at this site.

Ya might consider gettin' that hump removed.

Christianity will learn to coexist with evolution just like it learned to coexist with the theories of Copernicus.

A Taurus myself, all I know is people born under whatever sign covers Dec 9 are annoying.

Milton Friedman Quotes: "The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit." "Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property." "Governments never learn. Only people learn." "So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not" "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom." "Most economic fallacies derive - from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." "What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system" "History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition." "The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both."

I actually like the Texans chances better than the Chiefs this year, I need to check and see how Cassel is doing. I know he went down in the last game I see Missouri having a bit of a down year (about 7-4). The Big 12 is getting tough. I don't think Chase is really quite big enough to be a pro quarterback nowadays. I am rooting for him though.

That pic in post 255 is the one that gives me nightmares.

"I'm just two beers away from a good day".

If ya sittin on your ass the whole time while you are doing it, it ain't a sport. At least in the sport of curling ya gotta get off your ass.

Declarations of independence: Positive vs. negative rights People have the right to be individuals and associate with whom they choose, but not to the coerced support of others TIBOR R. MACHAN After so many years of Americans aspiring to live up to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, with much success, critics of America have changed their tune. It used to be that this country failed to be true to those principles but as that has gradually - and at times abruptly - changed, critics had to find something else to beef about. And, sure enough, they found it, in that highly questionable doctrine of "positive rights" first laid out in 1944 in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's so-called Second Bill of Rights. The tact now is to say, yes, the founders did promote the doctrine of individual negative rights - which are prohibitions barring people from intruding on others, recognizing everyone's rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (property) - but these aren't really the rights in need of government protection. What needs to be protected, they argue, are the entitlements everyone has to material support from government, for which others must pay through taxes. In short, these new "rights" amount to nothing less than the imposition of involuntary servitude on taxpayers! But this is a hoax. No such rights exist. Indeed, the entire point of rights talk is to set borders around each of us, borders that may only be crossed with permission. For example, someone needs to ask your permission to enter your home or drive your car. If somebody asks you to stop saying or writing certain things - you must consent or they must desist. Those are examples of the negative, or freedom, rights all humans have because of their nature as moral agents. A moral agent requires the freedom to exercise moral choice, for better or for worse. Only if a person invades another's realm is there justification for interference (in self-defense). This is an individualist social-political outlook closely associated with the American founding but it is now being drastically undermined. These days, no sooner does one speak up in support of individualism than one will be accused of wanting to isolate individuals, to destroy human community life. This is plain wrong and either a misunderstanding or an out-an-out attempt at distortion. Just because adults require independence of mind and a sphere of personal authority, which is secured by protecting their basic rights, it doesn't mean people do not greatly benefit from community life. There is little that's more satisfying than the associations people forge with their fellows: marriage, family, companies, teams, choruses, orchestras and myriad others. Alas, there is one way of forming communities that is unsuited to people: coercively, when they are herded into groups they do not choose based on their own understanding and goals - that is, by violating their rights. Prisons are such involuntary communities, and the only reason they are supposed to exist is to house people who refuse to live peacefully with their fellows. None but the crudest defense of individualism omits that when individuals come together, much of what makes their lives worth living stems from their togetherness. And, yes, as children we are involuntary members of one community, the family, at least until we grow up and have free choice. That, indeed, is what parents and guardians ought to aim for when they raise children, to prepare them all for becoming competent, loving, responsible and adventurous independent adults. Yet forcibly grouping people immediately undermines this by depriving the young of their opportunity to hone their skills at making decisions for themselves, decisions that are usually quite unlike the decisions others need to make. That's because we all are unique in many respects, while at the same time also much alike. As one of my favorite philosophers, the comic actor Steve Martin, put it in his novel "The Pleasure of My Company": "People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity was interrupted only by their individual variety." Of course, much of this is evident from the history of the more Draconian and brutal attempts to make us all one, from ancient Sparta to societies in the 20th century. But, sadly, too many people hold on to the vision of human associations without remembering that the "human" must be very closely heeded when one embarks on community life. Human beings, more than anything else in the world, are individuals, with minds of their own, which, however much they learn from others, must get into operation from their own initiative. While other beings are pretty much hardwired to do the right thing by their nature, our nature is that we must learn what that right thing is and then embark on doing it of our own free will. This, mainly, is the source of individuality. Forgive me for bringing in a bit of personal history, but I do have some experience to draw upon here, having lived under communism for much of my early years. And my father was an avid fascist, supporting the Nazis. Neither of these political systems offer a promising community life; nor do communities that try to go just a bit in those political directions. Human communities are, indeed, marvelous but only when they do not quash the human individual. When they do, when they try to compromise the principles of individualism, look out. They will try to lie and cheat and bamboozle since only in doing so can coercive community life be made credible. They will emphasize the fabulous goals and forget about the vicious means by which they propose to reach them, like conscript armies or schools or any other collective endeavors we are forced to join. The American founders knew that the central public good is securing for us our rights. Everything else in society is to be done by individuals and voluntary groups, not the government. This false doctrine of entitlements, of positive "rights," fundamentally undermines their project.

Mine: Baseball: The St. Louis Cardinals, with the addition of an apparently rejuvenated Smoltz to strengthen the best pitching staff in baseball they look ready to battle for another World Championship. Football: Kansas City Chiefs, Houston Texans Basketball: Houston Rockets College Football/ basketball: Missouri Tigers If ya north of the Mason- Dixon line I guess we might let ya list a hockey team.

This is what we are fighting for; Andrew Napoltano: Reason: Let's talk about natural law and positivism. Sketch the two camps and why you believe what you do. Napolitano: Scholars and lawyers and jurists and people interested in this have always debated what is the source of our rights. There are many, many schools of thought, but they basically fall into two categories. One says that our rights come by virtue of our humanity because we are created in God's image and likeness. Because God is perfectly free, he has instilled in us all the yearnings for freedom that we have: freedom of thought, freedom to develop one's personality, freedom to express oneself, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, freedom of association, etc. That school of thought is known as the natural law. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration; James Madison, who wrote the Constitution; and virtually all the Founding Fathers, even though some were deists and some were atheists, they were to a person believers in the natural law. �The other school of thought is sometimes called positivism, sometimes called legal realism. It basically says that the law is whatever the lawgiver says it is. As long as the lawgiver follows its own rules, whatever it says is the law. So positivism would say the majority in a democracy always rules. There are no minority rights because there are no brakes on the majority will. If the majority wants to get rid of the First Amendment, the majority rules; there is no First Amendment. Therefore, there's no protection for freedom of speech. If the majority wants to take property belonging to person A and give it to person B because the majority rules, the majority can do that because, again, there are no natural rights that would allow person A to keep his property against the will of the government. The attraction to positivism is it is pure democracy. The majority literally always rules. Or whoever is in power always rules. Positivism didn't rear its head successfully, in my view, until the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when we took a decided step toward a centralization of power in Washington and ultimately toward many socialistic programs that we now have because FDR was the ultimate positivist who believed whatever law he signed was a good law and there were no brakes on that. [The FDR era] began, in my view, the dark part of American history where the federal government believed that it could solve any problem that was national in scope, irrespective of whether it was a federal problem. A federal problem is one arising under the 18 specific enumerated powers given to the federal government under the Constitution. A national problem is something that exists in New Jersey and California and Texas and Illinois. But just because it's national doesn't mean it's federal and therefore can be addressed by the federal governmen

A saying I do not here anymore is "Poor, but proud".

Video: Fox News' Judge Andrew Napolitano: Gates arrest "violated the federal Constitution" | Mofo Politics | Hoping Obama Fails Judges don't get any more conservative than that guy.

Now, that is someone who has the philisophical grounding I look for in a President.

The Libertarian Philosophy of Freedom and Free Markets INTERVIEWER: Philosophically speaking, what was the wellspring of your ideas? Were you influenced by people like Friedman or Hayek? NEWT GINGRICH: No, I think I was influenced more by Adam Smith and by the founding fathers -- Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Washington -- and to some extent by the Whig historians of the 19th century. I was very much influenced by Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative" and by Reagan's speeches starting with "A Time for Choosing" in October of 1964. I actually came to Hayek backwards through Reagan, rather than the other way. In my mind, at least, what you had was a clear overdevelopment of the state in the 20th century as a vehicle for humans to organize their lives, so you needed a party of freedom that was committed, almost in the British 19th-century liberal tradition, to argue for personal choice for markets, for private property rights, and for taking Bismarck's insurance state and transferring it into a personal insurance system, as we're trying to do now on social security. What I saw was a deviation from the long 18th- and 19th-century rise of freedom in the Whig tradition with four different patterns: the regulatory state in response to industrialization, where Theodore Roosevelt is probably the leading American developer of it; Fabian socialism with its British class warfare style, which never fit America, but the underlying anti-wealth, anti-achievement patterns did, [such as the] distrust of private property and private activity; third was Bismarck's insurance state, which gradually spread across the industrial world and which is essentially right if you can organize it so that people are insuring themselves rather than as a paternalistic bureaucracy trying to take care of you; and then finally, with Ludendorff's war economy in Germany in 1917, you really get what shapes John Kenneth Galbraith and a whole generation of younger economists, including Keynes, and that is the power of the state for a very short time to mobilize power and wealth remarkably. What they didn't realize was that while you can do that for about the length of the second world war, which in the American experience is not quite four years, if you do it much longer than that, it creates its own internal distortions. [This] is exactly what Hayek writes about it and what Smith understood: that a combination of politics, bureaucracy, [and] the distortion of power in the long run is radically less effective than the market as a place to allocate resources. So you had, from 1917, compounded by Leninism and then by Maoism, this affection of the left for the state as an organizing system, which when I was a young person in the late '50s was really close to its peak. There was a sense [that] this is the intelligent, sophisticated future, and those of you who favor free markets and private property represent this obsolete past. What all of us who believed in freedom felt was that in the long run centralized commanding control systems decay and collapse, and that's a historic pattern. You have to concede at least that Reagan was far more right than most of his left-wing critics in his understanding of the Soviet empire and the fact that in the end it just couldn't keep functioning.

My dad taught me this one early, "There isn't much a little elbow grease can't fix".

I think he should be put in a cell with Bubba for 18 years and then drawn and quartered.

See Milton's Four ways to spend money. Health care is largely paid for with other peoples money. That is the primary flaw in our health care system. Democrats wish to expand on this flaw. RO is correct, health insurance should only cover catastrophic illnesses.

The fact is health insurance companies operate on about a 4% profit margin. There are no significant savings to be found. It is another mostly unfinanced government program.