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Thursday, September 1, 2011
Peter Hitchens on Arab Spring
Here are a few quotes:
"The moment has come to admit that I loathe the Arab Spring and almost everything about it. It looks to me pretty much like a football crowd armed with AK-47s and bazookas, with the added ingredient of Islamic militancy. Why am I expected to like it?"
"Just because existing regimes are bad, it does not follow that their replacements will be any better. The world has known this since the French Revolution of 1789, when bliss and joy turned to mass murder and dictatorship in a matter of months. The test of any revolution comes not as the tyrant falls, but two or three years later, when the new rulers have shown us what they are really like. Power can be given (not often) or taken, and shared out in different ways. But it never ceases to exist."
"The official pretext, that we are ‘intervening to protect civilians’, is lying hogwash and should be laughed at every time it is used. In the past few days – according to reliable reports – Libya’s rebels have been guilty of indiscriminate shooting into civilian areas and the brutal and arbitrary arrests of suspected opponents."
Go read the whole thing.
"The moment has come to admit that I loathe the Arab Spring and almost everything about it. It looks to me pretty much like a football crowd armed with AK-47s and bazookas, with the added ingredient of Islamic militancy. Why am I expected to like it?"
"Just because existing regimes are bad, it does not follow that their replacements will be any better. The world has known this since the French Revolution of 1789, when bliss and joy turned to mass murder and dictatorship in a matter of months. The test of any revolution comes not as the tyrant falls, but two or three years later, when the new rulers have shown us what they are really like. Power can be given (not often) or taken, and shared out in different ways. But it never ceases to exist."
"The official pretext, that we are ‘intervening to protect civilians’, is lying hogwash and should be laughed at every time it is used. In the past few days – according to reliable reports – Libya’s rebels have been guilty of indiscriminate shooting into civilian areas and the brutal and arbitrary arrests of suspected opponents."
Go read the whole thing.
Sayonara Solyndra
Despite massive government stimulus, Solyndra is closing its doors.
"Solyndra, a California business which manufactures solar panels, has shuttered and is filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy. This comes just over a year after the company was touted by the President as an example of public-private partnership and the bright future of green energy.
Solyndra received over half a billion in loans from the Treasury at extremely low interest rates, allowing it to build a new manufacturing facility. Congressional investigators have caught a whiff of scandal as the rates given the company were extremely low and neither Treasury or OMB will provide documents to justify them. We’ll get to that part of the story in a moment, first here is President Obama visiting Solyndra last year."
This is hope or change?
"Solyndra, a California business which manufactures solar panels, has shuttered and is filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy. This comes just over a year after the company was touted by the President as an example of public-private partnership and the bright future of green energy.
Solyndra received over half a billion in loans from the Treasury at extremely low interest rates, allowing it to build a new manufacturing facility. Congressional investigators have caught a whiff of scandal as the rates given the company were extremely low and neither Treasury or OMB will provide documents to justify them. We’ll get to that part of the story in a moment, first here is President Obama visiting Solyndra last year."
This is hope or change?
Poaching
Your government at work.
"Put simply, stimulus funds caused more job shifting than job creation. Another key finding? Union-friendly wage protections kill jobs:
Among organizations required to pay prevailing wages, 38.2 percent thought that they could have hired workers at wages below the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage (Figure 3) while another 17 percent were unsure. This meant higher costs for the federal government and fewer jobs created."
H/T: Literalville
"Put simply, stimulus funds caused more job shifting than job creation. Another key finding? Union-friendly wage protections kill jobs:
Among organizations required to pay prevailing wages, 38.2 percent thought that they could have hired workers at wages below the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage (Figure 3) while another 17 percent were unsure. This meant higher costs for the federal government and fewer jobs created."
H/T: Literalville
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