Yes

The history of the infamous perpetually-burning-mine-fire-mountain outside of Glenwood Springs. Actually burning since 1910:

The South Cañon Number 1 Coal Mine fire: Glenwood Springs, Colorado

From The Island of the Day Before. Senor de Salazar:

Occasions will arise when confidence in your own perspicacity and the impulse to tell the truth will enable you to give sound advice to someone of higher station. Never do it. Every victory produces hatred in the vanquished, and if the victory is over one’s own master, then it is foolish or harmful. Princes wish to be assisted, not outstripped. But you must be prudent also with your equals. Do not humiliate them by your merits. Never speak of yourself: either you will praise yourself, which is vanity, or you will denigrate yourself, which is stupidity. Rather, let others discover in you some venial sin, which envy can gnaw on without doing you too much harm. Be much but seem little. The ostrich never aspires to fly, and thus risk an exemplary fall: he allows the beauty of his feathers to be revealed gradually. And above all, if you have passions, never display them, however noble they may appear. Not everyone must be granted access to your heart. A prudent, cautious silence is the cabinet of wisdom.

Here is my fiction reading list for the coming year. Similar to Edvard Munch’s creature, I will be surprised if I make it through this heap of pages.

1) Les Miserables
2) All the King’s Men
3) Foucault’s Pendulum
4) Jane Eyre
5) Dubliners
6) Gone With the Wind
7) David Copperfield
8) Free Fall
9) Our Mutual Friend
10) Bonfire of the Vanities

Mayhap a non-fiction list to come.

Barak Obama wishes to increase Social Security tax on people who make more than $250,000 per year.

Here is the article.

The reasoning is insidious. From the article:

[Obama] told senior citizens in Ohio that it is unfair for middle-class earners to pay the Social Security tax “on every dime they make,” while millionaires and billionaires pay it on only “a very small percentage of their income.”

Make no mistake. Middle-class earners and those millionaires and billionaires (there are a lot of those running around) pay the exact same percentage in the exact same income range. It caps at $102,000, after which you don’t have to count additional income toward that percentage. So someone making 1 million per year pays the exact same dollar amount to Social Security as poor old Mr. Middle Class who makes $102,000.

Obama wants to use the facade of “unfairness” (hint: “hard work by rich people”) to justify a cheap way of fixing the Social Security problem. This is a slap in the face to high-income earners and the hard work they’ve done to get there. High income does not a criminal make.

Little Billy, who’s just broken his mother’s picture window with a baseball, does not go over to Mr. Money Bags next door and make off with a bit of cash to fix up with before Mom gets home. What’s that Billy? But Mr. Money Bags is rich? Now who’ve you been getting your ideas from?

Once upon a time, they floated down the Guadalupe.

It had been a brilliant idea, hatched within godlike minds. Immerse themselves in nature. Leave behind the city. Conquer the water. Skip church. The idea had been as though received in a dream with all its mystery, yet crystal clear, like starting at a bottle of Dasani.

Pregnant with glee, they assembled at the Gruene River Company.

“How many in your party?” queried the girl behind the desk who wished greatly to text upon her phone, or perhaps to be sleeping, or at the very least to be flirting with some worthy, moppy-haired, sufficiently tanned, cargo-shorts-wearing adolescent male. Certainly flirting was not too much to ask.

“Seven,” said he.

The girl behind the desk stared blankly, her mind rivaling the Void before God stepped in. Clearly the significance of this heavenly number was lost on her. For it was indeed a divine force, representing divine capabilities, divine aspirations, yea; embodying the Seven Wonders of the World! “She sees, yet she does not comprehend,” thought he, pitying the girl behind the desk, complementing his own sensitivity. When he returned home, he would go do some volunteer work.

After handing over requisite monies, The Seven hopped in the Short Bus with a trailer full of black inner tubes. They winged toward the River in the Bus, much like Hermes scuttling off from Zeus with a dire missive, its beastly, manly-sounding 8-cylinder engine roaring, the seats caked with unknown years of grade-school-student sweat. It was a good ride, thought he. For anticipation was high and the Demon on the River yet unsuspected.

Gas prices are quite high now with an average national price per gallon at $4.023. This is painful. This is certainly more than a typical inflation rate on a commodity. This affects personal spending.

But this is not an oil-company conspiracy. While such is possible, it is lazy to suggest that because gas prices have been skyrocketing while oil companies are realizing record profits (and receiving federal tax breaks, by golly!), corruption is sure.

This is a free market economy. This means that if you work hard and find the right business, there’s money to be made. The oil business is and always has been a profitable sector. Oil companies are making lots of money. They are not, however, corrupt.

If someone claims that oil companies are realizing outrageous profits at the expense of the strained middle class, they make many assumptions:

1. They assume no one is investing in oil as a security, which would drive up its price (this is happening).
2. They assume there is no such thing as tight oil supplies.
3. They assume there is no such thing as international oil-market competition.
4. They assume that oil companies hide the quantity of their oil reserves, creating the facade of a tight oil supply.

And they ignore the fact that the tax breaks are designed to create incentive for further growth in the oil markets, thus increasing supply and driving down prices.

A free market economy inherently understands that the concept of supply, demand, and business progress necessitates that commodities all undergo periods of high and low pricing, high and low demand. This is the nature of free markets. It is easy to question prices in difficult times. However, the alternate is far worse: strict government regulation of profits and prices, which is not capitalism but communism.

Demonstrated by the matchless Churchill:

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best and the old words best of all.

And perhaps because of this:

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

The Fed recently bailed out investment bank Bear Stearns by lending them $29 billion during its fast collapse on March 14. That collapse was due to overextension — loans to unqualified borrowers and inappropriately risky investments that arguably made them unable to support those loans. While it’s been claimed that Bear’s collapse was due to lack of consumer confidence, the firm had high stakes in subprime hedge funds, derivatives, and collateralized debt obligations. The idea is that if you want to make a gamble and take on subprime loans, you have either the cash or the safe investments to support those loans should they default. Not so with Bear, in a big way. So to reward Bear for its exemplary behavior, the Fed gallantly saved them with a cool $29 billion infusion. Because of course, as Bernanke suggests here, that is far “preferable to the chaos and disorder that would have resulted from the firm’s bankruptcy.”

The rules of responsibility and accountability are not confined to certain sectors of commerce or certain areas of life. They apply everywhere. Even to Bear and the chaos that would have resulted.

And here lies the problem: chaos may well have resulted. There is a certain point at which Laissez-Faire is inappropriate. There needs to be a rescue or else things get much, much worse. Take this article on potential outcomes of Bear collapse if the Fed had not saved them. Many people are affected, even if they’d never heard of Bear before.

And yet, if the Fed is not careful, they establish precedent by saving Bear from its iniquities. They establish justification for irresponsible banking practices. Banks, just like everyone else, should be responsible for their own actions. Perhaps a bailout was necessary; but now should come the personal consequences and new regulations for future rigid accountability. Though it’s a bit ironic that more and more rules must be handed down simply so that a Laissez-Faire economy can work properly.

Ideas Have Consequences is an important book for reorienting our thinking toward traditional, logical, and universals-based thinking. Current cultural rationale is a bit like the pot, and we’re the frog unless we have constant reminders of objective truth.

Logic is not simply a concept for the classroom. Objective truth is not confined to church. Do you know why you believe certain issues, or is it because someone told you? Learning from those wiser is excellent; “learning” from just anyone who opens their mouth is not. Because a book has been published does not mean it’s true. Because a leader insists upon a point does not imply its alignment with reality.

Use people, books, and opinions as evidence. They are not conclusions. Do not use them as a replacement to slovenly unwillingness to think logically and research fully.

The nine sections of Ideas Have Consequences:

1. The Unsentimental Sentiment:
• Without a respect for forms, life ultimately devolves to either sentimentality with its “emotion lavished upon the trivial and absurd” or to brutality, “which can make no distinctions in the application of its violence.” The solution “lies in restraint imposed by idea, but our ideas . . . must be harmonized by some vision.”
2. Distinction and Hierarchy:
• Current culture has little desire for distinctions. Because commitment to material standards are primary, transcendence and distinction are tossed out since they require knowledge and virtue. Shakespeare: “When degree is shak’d, which is the ladder to all high designs, then enterprise is sick . . . and appetite, an universal wolf, so doubly seconded with will and power, must make perforce an universal prey, and last eat up himself.”
3. Fragmentation and Obsession:
• There is a cultural “flight toward periphery.” Focus is on specialization. Facts and skills are stressed. The importance in mastery of principles is foreign; educational emphases in philosophy and theology are met with funny faces, wondering what in the world one does with such impractical topics. Facts take the place of Truth. The emphasis is on “becoming” rather than on “being.”
4. Egotism in Work and Art:
• The ideological move from universal to particular, from objective values to egotistic sensation, creates egotism in work and art. Art forms no longer reflect universal or objective ideals but rather create an avenue toward immediacy and sensation.
5. The Great Stereopticon:
• An analysis of the Press. Nietzsche: “Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper.” And “for Plato, truth was a living thing, never wholly captured by men even in animated discourse and in its purest form, certainly, never brought to paper. In our day it would seem that a contrary presumption has grown up. The more firmly an utterance is stereotyped, the more likely it is to win credit.”
6. The Spoiled-Child Psychology:
• Entitlement and self-satisfaction is the order of the day. The truth that pleasure is a function of effort is non-existent. “If cities encourage man to believe that he is superior to the limitations of nature, science encourages him to believe that he is exempt from labor.” There is slovenliness in his mental processes, occurring “simply because [he does] not have to think to survive.”
7. The Last Metaphysical Right:
• Our right to private property is the last metaphysical right. “Is it not, in truth, quite comforting to feel that we can enjoy one right which does not have to answer the sophistries of the world or rise and fall with the tide of opinion?” Private property is tied up in the expression of its owner’s being: “By some mystery of imprint and assimilation man becomes identified with his things, so that a forcible separation of the two seems like a breach in nature.” Private property additionally “provides indispensable opportunity for training in virtue. Because virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, it flourishes only in the area of volition.”
8. The Power of the Word:
• Emerson: “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.” Language necessarily has teleology; without it, words are relativistically individualized interpretations of things. From Prometheus Unbound: “Language is a perpetual Orphic song, which rules with Daedal harmony the throng of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.” The concepts of limitation and contradiction, of distinction and hierarchy, are only meaningful when words are respected as things, or objective realities.
9. Piety and Justice:
• “Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego.” Respect of nature, of all other people, and of the past are the true characteristics of piety.
• Finally, how to enact change in a culture in decline? Is there a desire among people for the culture to go on living? If so, “Are you ready . . . to grant that the law of reward is inflexible and that one cannot, by cunning or through complaints, obtain more than he puts in? Are you prepared to see that comfort may be a seduction and that the fetish of material prosperity will have to be pushed aside in favor of some sterner ideal? Do you see the necessity of accepting duties before you begin to talk of freedoms?”

Very interesting. From Hugh Hewitt:

Today, just before 1PM in the East, Harry Reid took to the floor for the purpose of substituting a 491-page amendment by Barbara Boxer on the Climate Change bill currently being discussed. The clerk read the title of the bill, which is customary. Senator Reid asked that the reading of the bill be ended so time could be divvied out and the matter discussed on the floor, which is again very customary. Mitch McConnell then objected to the suspension of the reading of the bill, much to Reid’s surprise and amazement. Watch the video of the antics of today.

The bill is still being read as of this writing. Senator Boxer, after complaining bitterly to any reporter in the Senate gallerly wishing to listen, took to the floor during this process a couple of times, desperately trying to stop the open reading of the bill on which she wants people to discuss and vote. I guess the irony was lost on her.

Meanwhile, Senator McConnell held his own press conference to explain what the maneuver was really about. He has no qualms about debating the 491-page gas tax that Senator Boxer thinks will save the Earth. He’s very confident that going from $4 bucks a gallon to $4.50 virtually overnight if the bill were to become law isn’t exactly the solution most Americans are looking for. But a deal is a deal, and he’s calling the Democrats out for their consistent screwing of Bush judicial nominees.

For conservatives who bemoan Congressional Republicans always spending too much money, or not being pure enough on one issue or another, they should take note of the lengths Senate leadership is willing to go to protect one of the principles on which all conservatives should agree, and that’s the the abilty of appointed conservatives to be able to be confirmed to the courts.