Zeta Woof

Keith Riler ponders the big questions:

If I have a constitutional right be be gay, shouldn't I have a constitutional right to be Asian?

A passenger was thrown off a Brazilian airline by a female pilot because he was making sexist comments about women flying planes.

Trip Airlines said in a statement that the pilot ejected the man before take-off as he made loud, sexist comments upon learning the pilot was a woman.

He reportedly shouted: "Someone should have told me the captain was a woman.

"I'm not flying with a female at the controls".

Just for the record, I have no problem whatever with females at the controls of ninety tons of metal traveling 500 miles per hour.

It's the gay flight attendants that bother me.

(Taranto spotted it first.)

Convicted domestic terrorist and Democratic Party darling.

Michelle Malkin has the compendium.

Update: Max and Inno have joined the fray.

The trouble with my best predictions is that I don't publicize them while they're still predictions. By the time they're fact, and I find out I was right, all I've done was predict the past. That's alright. I know what I said.

Last Thursday at a dinner with a few other geeks we talked about the Facebook IPO. I said I thought that Friday would be the high point for the stock. From there on, I said, it would all be downhill.

Two reasons.

First, the software is incredibly lame. In my group there are a lot of people who do web development. Have any of you, I wondered, ever gone to Facebook and said, "Wow, this is really cool. How do they do it?" Of course not. The software is stupid. The local auto shop has a better web site than Facebook.

Two, the cool kids aren't on Facebook. Your mileage may vary, but when I joined Facebook I immediately got a flood of friend requests from old school mates, and of course I accepted them all. Good people; very nice people, and I'm proud to call them friends. But they weren't the really interesting people I remember from high school. Those kids weren't on Facebook. I know. I searched.

The big selling point to Facebook is that, by pilfering users' choice bits of personal information, they can place targeted online ads. Targeting whom? And selling what? Let's face it: the average Facebook user is the online version of the slow moving double wides you see in the Walmart aisles. You'll get a better return on your advertising dollar with full page ads in the National Enquirer.

What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettos launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.

It may be understandable that some people want to head off such a catastrophe, either by not reporting the attacks in this race war, or not identifying the race of those attacking, or by insisting that the attacks were not racially motivated — even when the attackers themselves voice anti-white invective as they laugh at their bleeding victims.

Trying to keep the lid on is understandable. But a lot of pressure can build up under that lid....

Read the whole thing.

Derb remembers the recent past.

It's not as if we all sat around thinking Deep Thoughts before the Internet age. We read more, but not that much more....

What did we do? Watched TV. Went to bars and ball games. Played cards. Bickered with our spouses and kids. Got quietly sozzled in the Barcalounger.

Human beings weren't made to work, or think much, or read much. Of our Paleolithic ancestors, Cochran and Harpending remark in The 10,000 Year Explosion that: "If they had full stomachs and their tools and weapons were in good shape... they hung out: They talked, gossiped, and sang."

If they'd had smartphones, they'd have been twiddling.

Like Garfield, I've been having great fun lately watching Dave and Cody out survivin' everywhere, eating snakes and alligators and grubs and things, making fire with sticks, sleeping on the ground, and generally having fun.

A lot of noise is being made lately about the Labor Force Participation Rate. Pretty much every graph starts in 1980, in order, I suppose, to illustrate that all the "gains" under Reagan-Clinton have been "erased" by Bush-Obama. The underlying assumption seems to be that the more people in the labor force, the better. I don't agree.

This graph goes back to 1948 and illustrates that the normal — and by normal I mean the way things were when I was a kid — labor participation rate is closer to 59%. Back then Dad worked and Mom stayed home and raised kids. After the Great Society programs kicked in Dad still had to work to support the family but more and more often Mom had to work too — to pay the taxes.

So a high labor participation rate is great if you're in the business of farming workers and harvesting taxes, but not so great if you just want have a life and raise a family.

Who are your working for anyway?

I confess — I feel more than a twinge of sympathy for the stupid drone (or, more likely, committee of drones) who came up with this Julia thing. I've done a thousand crappy educational slideshows just like it. Everything looks fine in bullet point form on the memo, and nobody spots the flaws, unintended messages and double entendres until it goes live and singes everyone's eyebrows off.

— S. Weasel

You wish.

The positive aspects of the pet insurance market aren't trivial. For starters, it offers far more choices. Only three companies market individual health insurance in New Jersey, while at least 10 write policies for dogs and cats. And the pet insurance carriers offer plans with benefits to fit any budget. Almost all pet insurance policies provide the same coverage at any hospital or vet, whereas almost all human health policies have no or limited benefits for "out of network" care. While people over 50 can have a very difficult time finding individual health insurance at any price, coverage for older dogs and exotic breeds isn't a problem since several companies will write a policy for any dog or cat of any age. And many of the features politicians have felt themselves compelled to mandate in health insurance plans are provided by pet carriers as a matter of course. Even very cheap policies often throw in some "wellness" coverage that discounts routine tests and checkups. And the pricing schemes are also more attractive than those in the private individual health market. Although pet insurance premiums rise yearly as individual pets age and veterinary costs go up, many pet insurers don't increase them on the basis of claims history, and most promise never to drop coverage no matter how sick a pet gets.

By the way, Mr. President, I caught your speech about Afghanistan tonight. It is EXACTLY the same as Nixon's speeches about Vietnamizing the Vietnam war some forty years ago. I suspect it will work out about as well. Can Mr. Obama really be that ignorant of history and reality? Yes, he can.

Ben Stein.