And so it was today that I found myself in the BD behind a mother and two children (12-14 year olds?). When it was her turn she didn't have her boarding passes (!!!) After digging them up, she didn't have valid ID ready (!!!!!!) She eventually got through the process. My turn – I hand my boarding pass and ID to the TSA (it's been IN my hand since I entered the airport) and am cleared htrough quickly. Now I find myself behind them going through the scanners. She has no idea that she has to take off her shoes OR that she must go through the scanners with nothing in her pockets or hands. When I politely advise her this is the case she gives me the “mind your own beeswax” look and tells me I MUST be wrong. I'm not. Further delay.

An inexperienced skier on the BD run will likely be hurt. A pity the same isn't an option for those using the BD check-in line.

Related note: If your ticket sez you're in seat 23B, and you see that the FIRST row is row 1, you can pretty much bet your @$$ that you aren't in the next row. “23” is quite a ways back. It ISN'T the second row, 23^rd seat. The planes aren't that wide. And the airlines, in what can only be labeled a stroke of genious, have organized the rows NUMERICALLY, not randomly! Walk back to the 20's THEN start checking. </rant>

this time to Blackshear GA.  No.  Really

Currently in ORD (listened to ESPN's PTI on the way up.)

Next stop - Jacksonville.  Listening to:  Bastiat's Essays on Political Economy.

Driver will meet me in JAX and drive me to Blackshear to pick up an International Diesel.  Thence to Atlanta, Chattanooga and Knoxville.  Spend the night with Uncle Kenny and Aunt Betty with whom we share a wedding anniversary (12/7.)   Listening to: Kling on Patterns of Sustainability, last month's Hinderaker-Ward Report, and the Fantasy Guys football podcast.  That should get me to Atlanta or so.  Will follow that up with Munger on Profits and Entrepreneurship, FF Toolbox's most recent podcast, and the good guys from Ricochet.  Filling in the cracks with my usual driving mix.

Will head home in the morning.  Mapquest sez five hours.  Tabarrok on Innovation, last month's Uncommon Knowledge interview with "W", and the DLF podcast.  Filler will be my driving music mix, Federalist #25 and probably another chapter or two of Bastiat.

And people wonder why I love my Ipod!

edit to add:  expect MANY Chick Fil A sammiches to be consumed.

“Lesbians making out *and* chicken sandwiches? Is this heaven?”

The last year, summed up:

NICK SCHULZ: The President’s Internet Blunder. “The implication is that government deserves a bigger slice of the wealth created in the private sector because that wealth was impossible without the initial taxing and spending — and because future taxing and spending will facilitate even more wealth. This argument is not just wrong but revealing in several interesting ways.” - go read it all.  Some other good stuff there.

JASON BRENNAN observes:

Suppose I were to buy a loaf of bread. If I trace the history of that bread, Leonard Read “I, Pencil”-style, I’ll find that in producing the bread, a wide range of governmental services were used. These services come from local, state-wide, and federal governments, both local and foreign. It would be bizarre, then, to assume that in buying the loaf of bread, I acquire some special debt to the US Federal Government.

Another major error is to assume that people must repay their debts through taxes. I don’t know what Thomas Edison paid in taxes. But I can safely assume that he did more to repay his “debt to society” through his inventions than by paying taxes. A similar point will apply more weakly to many of the rest of us.

A final problem with the hypothetical politician’s argument is that it does not establish how much people should pay. The argument above (and the real-life argument to which I allude) do not tell us at all what marginal tax rates should be. Perhaps I owe the government 95% of my income. Perhaps I owe it 5%. The argument does not say. One might try to argue that I owe the government everything, since life would be lousy in the absence of government. But we could just as easily say that the government owes us everything, since it couldn’t function without us.

and the biggie:

JAMES TARANTO: Explaining Obama’s Ressentiment: Unearned success is the central theme of his life story.

The claim that Obama saved GM is fraudulent. What he did was use political muscle to intervene in a bankruptcy process in order to ensure a settlement on terms favorable to his supporters, the United Auto Workers union, at the expense of taxpayers (or “freeloaders,” in the president’s parlance) and bondholders. It would be more accurately characterized as an act of larceny than salvation.

Yesterday’s column discussed the philosophy behind Obama’s belittlement of the successful. Today we’d like to examine the psychology behind it. For it seems to us that Obama’s generalities about success being undeserved are absolutely true in one particular case: that of Barack Obama. Unearned success is the central theme of his life story.

written 7/23 but posted as my friday fitness

wanted to do 600/300/100 in less than 2:14/1:02/20.

jogged 1 lap, light stretching and another lap trot

600.

First 100 in under 19!  Blazing (and probably too fast)...then a 21.....300 in 1:02!  Coasted the back stretch, extended my stride, blasted the fnal stretch ....2:11.6.

100w, 100j, 100w and ready for the 300.  No time to watch the clock for splits.  57.6.  cut over 5seconds!  better that 1.6 per 100.  VERY good. 

1001, 100j, 100w and ready for the 100.  Have already gone under 19.  Tired.  Don't wanna blow anything out.  Just a clean start, good form, and full puch all the way through.

16.2.   Better than FOUR seconds off last month.  Another two seconds and I'll start booking meetsand doing speed work.

VERY optimistic.  Using agre grading tables that give me a 65/62/70.  To start racing I wanna have 70's in the 100/200/400.  More to come

ok, LOTS of stuff on the POTUS' latest slam of us working 'Mericuns.

from You Own a Business? "You Didn't Build That," Says Obama

I'm sure that the idea of a non-government fire department seemed ridiculous to whoever crafted that speech, but a few minutes with Google might have saved the president the embarrassment of using such an inappropriate example. I don't know about Roanoke, but the last time I was in Annapolis, Maryland, the walls of buildings in the old part of town still bore 19th century metal badges indicating the fire service that protected that property. For about 150 years, in continental Europe, Britain and the United States, such badges commonly indicated specific fire companies, or the insurance companies that would compensate responding volunteer fire brigades. The system had flaws, as does any, but not to the extent that was claimed when clever politicians turned fire protection into a "modern" government service — and, along with police departments, later joined by other municipal agencies, rich sources of lucrative patronage jobs (PDF).

Robert David Graham of Errata Security writes:

What’s important about the Internet is that the OSI standard failed. It’s not the standard of today’s Internet. The government backed the wrong horse, so to speak. Instead, today’s Internet is based on TCP/IP -- a networking standard the government tried to kill off.

From PJMedia we have ANDREW MCCARTHY: ‘You Didn’t Build That!’ … Oh Yeah?

In one of a thousand vignettes, Johnson tells the story of the founding of Springfield:

Elijah Miles, who moved to the Sangamon River country in 1823, left a record of how he founded Springfield. It was then only a stake in the ground. He marked out an 18-foot-square site for a store, went to St. Louis to buy a 25-ton stock of goods, chartered a boat, shipped his stock to the mouth of the Sangamon, and then had his boat and goods towed upriver by five men with a 300 foot tow-rope. Leaving his goods on the riverside — “As no one lived near, I had no fear of thieves” — he walked 50 miles to Springfield, hired waggons and teams, and so got his stuff to the new “town,”where his store was the first to open. It was the only one in a district later divided into fourteen counties, so “many had to come more than 80 miles to trade. Springfield grew up around him.

The president can try telling Americans they can’t build businesses, careers, communities and lives without his broke and broken Leviathan, but history and common sense prove him wrong every time

 and finally (for NOW)

MORE PROOF THAT FOR BARACK OBAMA, Atlas Shrugged isn’t a cautionary tale, it’s a how-to manual.

“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”

“Who?”

“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”

She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”

Ouch.

Pretty good week.  Missed a HUGE swath from end of June thru early July.  Wedding on Long Island, 4th of July, Nevada trip.  Ten days of essentially sedentary life and fast food.  The NEXT 10 days however, while rough, were productive.  Weight back dow to 206.  And in the last 5 days I've lowered my mile by 8 seconds and my two mile by 27 seconds.  Not huge, but those baby steps I need to see.

Rain on the way today.  Once it moves through I think I'll hit the track for some speed.  600/300/100.  Goals?  Under 2:35/1:14/20.

Still chewing up my NFIB v Sabelius stuff.  But to keep you happy , hare are three "silver linings" from the case as observed by Tim Dalrymple.

1.  the long term effect will be rather to narrow — not legally but practically and actually — the sphere of government power.  First of all, placing the ACA under the Taxation power instead of the Commerce power places greater limits on how that power can be used and dramatically softens the penalty for non-compliance (you simply pay a tax, you cannot be jailed or otherwise punished for failure to purchase health insurance).  Congress cannot compel you to purchase insurance; it can only compel you to pay a non-extreme, non-coercive tax if you wish not to purchase insurance.  Second, by laying waste to the Commerce Clause argument and making clear that this sort of thing can only be done through the taxation power, the decision may make it harder to pass these sorts of laws in the first place.  You cannot hide in the subterfuge of the Commerce Clause — or, if you try, everyone will say, “No, we know better now, this is and must be a tax.”

2.  By placing the ACA under the umbrella of the tax power, Roberts may have made the ACA easier to overturn by several orders of magnitude.  The ordinary process, of course, requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.  But when it concerns budgetary matters, including taxes (like the Bush tax cuts), 51 votes are sufficient to put the law on hold for 10 years.

3.  The importance of the ruling on states and Medicaid should not be lost in all of this.  The administration’s claim that it could remove all medicaid funding for the states that refused to expand medicaid in the way the administration wants was rejected.  The administration can condition new, additional funding on states’ cooperation, but not the preexisting funding.  This is a big difference.  It will be much easier for states to opt out of the medicaid expansion. (which is happening!)