Accounting

So I'm back taking more classes, this time doing accounting.  Which will come in handy once I've retired and we're starting our own business.  Anyways, anytime I have to participate in a group discussion, I like to go find a quote related to the subject.  As we were discussing Governmental accounting, aka what we tell Uncle Sam so he can tax the shit out of us, I came across a quote from Thomas Sowell:

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

Ayup.

As an aside, if you're wondering about the lack of posting yesterday and today, it's because I'm trying to un-cross my eyes after reading pages on accounting.  I know some people love that stuff.  My father is one of them; he loves math problems, and give him an accounting spreadsheet and he's happy as a clam.  I take after mom, who appreciates math but doesn't love it by any stretch.

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, Don't Flip The Switch Edition

From Larry Correia:

A friend of mine who is a political activist said something interesting the other day, and that was for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down, with things like protests, and riots, all the way up to destruction of property, and sometimes murder… But for the vast majority of folks on the right, it’s an off and on switch. And the settings are Vote or Shoot Fucking Everybody.  And believe me, you really don’t want that switch to get flipped, because Civil War 2.0 would make Bosnia look like a trip to Disneyworld.

Got some thoughts percolating in my brain.  May or may not post them tomorrow.

Stealing my Quote of the Day from Ace's Place

It's Quote #5 in the post.

“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer.”Benjamin Franklin

As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, when you subsidize something, you get more of it.  Subsidize the behavior that makes people poor, and you'll get more poor people.

Ragin' Dave's quote of the day, TRUTH edition

From Peter Grant.

Those addicted to illicit narcotics have to come to the same place.  They have to decide that something - life itself, or a partner, or a job, or whatever - is better, and more important to them, than their addiction.  Persuasion, courses, propaganda . . . none of them will work without that elementary, life-changing decision on the part of the addict.  I fear that with the advent of carfentanil, many of them won't have time to make it before the consequences of their addiction catch up with them . . . but it's their choice, no-one else's.  Those knocking themselves out to save them from the consequences of their choice need to bear that in mind.  Death is just as much a correction to the problem of addiction as is deciding to stop.

Emphasis mine.

Throwing money at an addict who doesn't want to change is wasting that money.  A person has to want to quit, and if they don't, then they're not going to.  Like Grant, I'm a former cigarette smoker.  I've also worked in a hospital that had an addiction recovery unit.  The rate of success for that unit was less than 10%, and most of the people in there were court ordered.  Which means that the moment they got out, they went right back to using.

Sometimes, the kind thing to do is just put them in a room with the drugs of their choice and let them go.  Think of the millions of dollars that could go to helping people who actually needed it: car accident victims, cancer patients, trauma victims, rather than pissing those dollars away on the crackhead who continues to use Emergency Rooms as their own private hospital and pharmacy.

You can call me cruel if you want.  You can say that I don't care about people.  But I do care about people.  I care about the people who get less care and help than they need, because the medical care was used on a person who has no interest in getting healthy.  They just want to be able to get the next high.

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, Competing Ideologies edition

From Sultan Knish, who I really need to add to the blogroll.

Conservatives ask us to be better than we are. Liberals ask us to be worse. They tell us that we ought to be angry and feel sorry for ourselves. And that if we don't have what we want, we ought to take it from others. 

At the heart of this is a deeper question. 

If a right is freedom, then freedom demands responsibility. But if a right is entitlement, then it's a demand. A demand that others give us what we deserve. 

Free people fight for independence. But the left's revolutions are struggles for tyranny. They protest for better masters. They violently agitate for rulers who will run their lives better.

This really does explain the childish pathology of the Left.  Responsibility is hard.  Taking ownership if yourself, your actions, and their consequences, is hard.  Which is why the Left avoids it.  Instead, they act like the children that they mentally are:  blame others.  Never take responsibility.  Ask someone else to take care of them.  Gimme gimme gimme.

That's why socialist societies always end in failure and ruin, without exception.  Building and maintaining a society, a country, is difficult.  It's hard.  It means that people must take responsibility for themselves and things under their purview.  When the mental children run things and enforce their socialism, then you get the cliques, the snobbish elitists, the breakdown of things that used to work.

The Right demands that you do better.  The Left demands that YOU do better so that THEY don't have to.

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, too much government Edition

From a post detailing why Americans refrigerate their eggs, while Europeans don't.

I further submit that government has proven more generally dangerous to public life than any disease that an egg might give us. Salmonella is curable; government, not so much.

It's Sunday.  Can I get an AMEN?!?!?!?!

Ragin' Dave's quote of the Day, I stole it from Kevin edition

But he quoted from someone else, so I'm stealing his entire post.  Because I'm busy today, so this is all you're getting.

You can see the similarity between liberals and Muslims. 

Only a handful of each are violent, but the peaceful ones won't do anything to stop them. 

They both believe in religions that have long since been debunked by reality. 

They both want the entire world to embrace their faith, by force if necessary. 

They both have large elements who believe that the rule of law shouldn't apply to them, only their own internal law. 

They both think it's okay for famous people to molest kids.

Dayum, there's some liberals wondering why they have a handprint appearing on their face....

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, Leftist Fascism edition

From Zombie, who's taken photos and videos of the UC Bezerkeley riots.

There is no limit to the extent and magnitude of the lies leftists will tell to absolve themselves of blame. 

If you need more proof of this, just look at how many Leftists utter the complete hogwash of "Socialism hasn't really been tried yet.", or when confronted with the murders, brutality and complete breakdown of the USSR, Venezuela, Cuba, and every other Socialist hellhole, "Oh, that's not real socialism!"

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, Write this down Edition

Here's the thing… What separates me from the modern-day Democrat is that I have nothing but admiration for the working class. I don't look back at those years or the people I worked with through a lens of contempt. 

Write this cold truth down… 

If artists and writers and journalists and pundits and actors and activists and teachers and comedians and late night television hosts, all disappear tomorrow, we would miss them but the world would keep right on turning. 

Try to live one week without auto mechanics, plumbers, janitors, truck drivers, farmers, fishermen, garbage men, bus drivers, the guy who plows the snow, the men who melt steel and stock the shelves and tow your car. 

These are the men and women who get up every morning to break their backs to keep our civilization intact.  Compared to them, nothing you or I do matters. It is not even close.

From How Democrats can learn to talk to Real People.

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, Don't Pick Romney Edition

From the Z Man...

The fact is, the meritocratic system that supports the managerial class is ruthlessly authoritarian. If you don’t check the right boxes, you cannot advance. This system is by design intended to boil off anything resembling dissent or innovation. It is why the Buckley Right locked shields with the Left in opposition to Trump. Their loyalty is to a system that has bestowed credentials and honors on them, along with a lifestyle they could never achieve outside in the dreaded private sector. Political ideology is just a decoration.

Read the whole thing.  We have a chance to actually have a real person in office, not some Establishment politician feeding us more lies while they go about looting the country for their own political gain.  DON'T FUCK IT UP BY GIVING PLUM JOBS TO ESTABLISHMENT POLITICIANS!

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day

From Mostly Cajun in the comments to the below post:

It's a difficult shift to go from 'Designing For Sasquatch' to dealing with an actual woman that you don't need to hide.

Moochelle's face just got a handprint-shaped welt on it, and she doesn't know why.  Well, THIS time.....

Oh, I'm stealing that for my lexicon

From the incomparable brain of John C Wright:

Throw your scabbards away, gentlemen. The sword will not sleep in your hand, not for many long and bloody winters of war.

By the by, if anyone out there enjoys good fiction, check Mr. Wright out.  His "Swan Knight's Son" is an excellent book in the fashion of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, albeit in a much shorter tome.

But that phrase...  "Throw your scabbards away, gentlemen".  Does that not encapsulate exactly what needs to be said and done?

Another Quote of the Day, Russian Roulette Edition

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. 

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

Emphasis is mine.

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, I agree wholeheartedly edition

From The Truth About Knives.

“(B)y shielding children from every possible risk, we may lead them to react with exaggerated fear to situations that aren’t risky at all and isolate them from the adult skills that they will one day have to master”. (From WSJ: “Should we let toddlers play with saws and knives“)

I also encourage kids to learn how to shoot.  A single-shot .22LR rifle, or a .410 shotgun is a perfect learning tool.

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, Blunt Truth edition

And this is why liberalism and conservatism cannot co-exist peacefully.

Everything that modern liberalism accomplishes is accomplished at the barrel of a government rifle.

The entire piece is full of wisdom.  Go thee hence and read.

Things what make me laugh out loud

Just as the half-liter is too small and the liter is too large compared to the drinking perfection of a pint, so too is the 5k evidence in the hubris of trying to make real life fit into the metric system.

From here.

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, Maybe YOU Won't Edition

From According to Hoyt (Don't know if Sarah wrote it or one of her people who occasionally co-blog)

In some blog, long ago, in the comments section, someone said that if the left got what it wanted, it would backfire so badly we’d be hunting them with dogs and beating them to death with their “no blood for oil” signs.  I think it’s going to be worse than that.  I think it’s going to be so bad that the rest of us are not even going to enjoy it.  Even if they brought this on themselves, by creating an enemy they thought they’re prefer to confront, an enemy that didn’t exist outside their lies.

Yes, some people won't enjoy it.  Some people will.  Those are the people who you need to keep an eye on, and make sure they're on YOUR side.

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, The Power of Language edition

From John C Wright:

The Devil invented lies to turn the power of speech into a weapon of falsehood. And God invented the parable, the poem, the epic, the song, and the sonnet in order to turn the power of lies into fables, myths, types and shadows, to turn fiction into a weapon of truth.

I know more people who were converted by Aslan than by Aquinas. What does that tell you about the power of fiction?

I could tell my co-workers about how Satan operates, how he tries to manipulate people into damning themselves.  But they would yawn and tune me out faster than you could blink.

Put a copy of "The Screwtape Letters" into their hands, however....

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, Evil Exists Edition

It's the comment on a piece over at Instapundit, but it needs to be hammered into people's heads:

The West doesn’t want to admit the appeal of evil, because that would require admitting that evil exists. And if evil exists, then that implies a duty to be good, which they would find onerous and tediously old-fashioned.

The Left (and some of the Right) desperately want "evil" to be just a make-believe concept dreamed up by the toothless, sister-humping Jesus-freak fly-over-country Rednecks.  Because then they don't have to do anything, and they can satisfy their moral preening desire by taking your money and giving it to someone else rather than doing anything of value.

Ragin' Dave's Quote of the Day, Have you ever Kippled edition

From a commenter at Vox Popoli.

In the Obama bungle we were promised an end to strifewhich started by taking a toke and calling a man your wifeBut though we had plenty of laws there was nothing our laws could stopand the Gods of the Copybook Headings said "it's a long way down from the top"

Most Congresscritters today either never read Kipling, or they can't understand why he wrote what he did.