The Left Wing Redneck

  I just came across both a funny and slightly disturbing book called The New Bride's Guide to Training her Husband , by Emily and Ken Addison.  I thought it was going to be a joke, but no, these people are serious (either that or I missed the punchline). It isn't even the only husband training book out there, but this particular book's thesis is that men need to be dominated, and that women are better suited to manage a marriage and husbands,  and therefore, should be in charge of both. I grew up in the Dick and Jane era, when "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father knows best" were not reruns.  Then in my late teens, the bras were burned, white and male Dick's role was to be forever typecast as the perennial "Don't Bee"   screw up in every elementary school post structuralist morality play. Reading the New Bride's Guide got me reflecting on something that has been bugging me for a long time.  In the post WWII "Mad Men" e...

If you hate taxes you will love this guy . Death and taxes,  the only two sure things in life.  Is this really true?  I will let you know on the death part later, but is it possible to run a country without taxation?  Zero income tax, sales tax,  property tax?  Well as it turns out, the answer is yes indeedy, one country has managed to pull off this magnificent accomplishment, tax free since 1974.  The people's utopia of North Korea .  Next question. Perversely, that the DPRK has no taxes may be the best illustration of why taxation is a good thing.  There are a handful of other countries that do not have to rely so much on taxes for revenue, such as some of the  oil rich nations, or the countries  that get their revenue for providing international loopholes for banking, gambling, corporate registration, flags of convenience and such.  The thing  most of these countries have in common besides low taxes is low democ...

From 20 plus years spent as an uncivil servant, the Redneck would like to share what he learned about government and how it really works. The clowns  politicians who you vote for have little to nothing to do with the faceless bureaucrats  dedicated public servants who actually do government. One interaction between elected politicians and the public service that matters is the budget.  Every year politicians decide how much will be spent and what it will be spent for.  This determines how much the bur.. err dedicated public servants can do,  it doesn't change what they do, only whether they do it or not. Government money mostly comes from taxes in one form or another.  Nobody likes to pay taxes, the only reason we do, and that politicians are still marching around with their heads attached to their necks, their bodies uncoated with tar and feathers is because we the people get real or perceived benefits from government spending. ...

So you wanna know why electric cars are stupid?  Because all cars are stupid.  Electric cars will never be 'green'.  Being green is about not wasting resources and reducing impacts.  So how efficient is using a ton and half or more metal, plastic, exotic compounds made from rare elements, rain forest rubber etc. to move a few hundred pounds of flesh from here to there? Every time  a few tons get shoved around,   a few tons of energy are burned to make it go and a few more yet to make it stop.  Newton explained this in the 17th Century.  Was nobody paying attention?  It matters little where the energy comes from, sunshine, dead dinos, nuclear fusion, energy costs, the more you use the more it costs. Alternate energy vehicles will not stop urban sprawl or traffic jams.  One hundred years ago, the Model T, the first car built for everyman, meant freedom to go places.   But it turned out that the price of  mobile freed...

In a post last April the redneck ranted about   explained why political opinion polls may no longer be accurate.  Based strictly on my opinion, totally unbiased by research, data or methodology (known to be susceptible to errors and misinterpretation)  I am predicting the the polls are going to be spectacularly wrong in predicting the outcome of the November 2012 US presidential election.... like way more than a percent or three. For a combination of reasons, pollsters are no longer getting a representative sample of the population, mainly the growing number of people who no longer have a 'landline' phone, combined with privacy laws, call display and annoying telemarketers destroying telephoning for accurate information gathering. Lessee how prophetic this is, it is Sunday morning, November 4th, the Wall Street Journal is calling it a dead heat . Before the telephone pollsters used to go door to door.  That might be a problem today for so many reasons, at...

Surfing the web the other day, the Redneck Stumbled upon  an anarchist marxist   blog site that was actually readable, as in literate, enjoyable, and lacking the uh, earnest turgidity, that usually characterises these sites.   The Redneck has always had a soft spot for anarchists, marxists, and their relations.   The Redneck was a young man in the late 60's and early 70's when many of his peers were marching, protesting, and occupying the President's office of every institute of higher learning.  It was a fun time to be young.  Did the Redneck participate?  Sort of, but hampered by crippling commitment phobia, the Redneck never joined the Hippies, Yippies, Students for a Democratic Society, Communist Party, Black Panthers, Feminists (not being black or feminine was also a factor) or any of the other radical outfits of the day.  One of the Redneck's friends was a communist, he also coveted bourgeois sports cars, but this was not a pro...

Statistically one out of every two people is stupid (ie in the dumber 50th percentile), and even those that occupy the smarter half of the population will  find that still others are smarter* and so on.  So stupidity is ordinal, and relative, like velocity it depends on the viewpoint of the observer.   Regardless of point of view, stupid people can be broadly classified as one of three types, Type One, Type Two and Type Three. Type One Stupid people are your regular stupid people.  They know and we know they are stupid.   Found everywhere, usually in the way, doing stupid things such as buying 20 bucks worth of lottery tickets and scratch and wins daily, cruising along at five under in the fast lane while yakking on their cell phone,  those big box store employees that can't tell you where anything is, the ones who  get their 15 minutes of fame 30 seconds at a time guest starring on COPS...  In other words they are you and me.  Type On...