Bonanza!

Today's front page at Faux News is a veritable gold mine of stories illustrating the unlimited capacity of government to do stupid stuff.  There is so much bloggable material there, in fact, that I have decided to take all of it on in a 'quick thoughts' format.

So here goes...

1). The lead article is about the deteriorating situation in Syria.  It's interesting to consider Mordor-on-the-Potomac's reluctance to aid the Syrian resistance, whereas they were comparatively eager to meddle in Egypt and Libya.  This probably has something to do with Syria's very recent history of supporting Palestinian resistance groups.  Assad is evil, to be sure, but at least he's a known quantity, not to mention a secularist.  If he goes down, it's highly probable he'd be replaced by an unpredictable Islamist regime, and Damascus is closer to Jerusalem than Cairo, Tripoli, or Tehran.  The stupid part here is that Mordor meddled anywhere in the first place.  Not only do such actions violate the sovereignty of foreign lands, create instability, and lead to unforeseen repercussions for America, but intervention in country A leads the good folk of country B to expect they'll receive similar aid.  We intervened in Kuwait, but not Kurdistan.  Korea, but not Budapest.  Saigon, but not Prague.  Our continued boasting of promoting democracy around the world is given the lie when we so obviously pick and choose where we will promote self-determination based on our own not-very-well disguised strategic interests.  And then the sheeple wonder why we encounter so much opposition around the globe when we're so obviously the 'good guys'.

2).  (Echoes of Bowie's Space Oddity reverberate in the background.)  Ground control to Major Newt.  Ground control to Major Newt.  America is broke.  There is no money for your grandiose schemes for moon colonies and other black holes for government largesse.  Please do us all a favor and drop out of the race now.

3).  The U.S. Air Force's super-ultra-really-big bomb turns out to be not super-ultra-really-big enough to take out Iran's underground nuclear program.  Notice the article says "...the only country known to have buried its nuclear weapons."  I wonder if this is an honest slip (Iran has no nukes), or whether Faux is deliberately attempting to plant the thought into the uncomprehending minds of its usual blood-lusting readers that Iran already has nuclear weapons.  Also interesting is the part that says, "Initial tests reportedly indicated that the bomb wouldn't be able to destroy some of Iran's facilities, although it was unclear if depth was a factor, or if Tehran had since added new fortifications to protect them."  Really?  We seem to know an awful lot about Iran's supposedly secret underground facilities.

4).  This last article illustrates that the Feds don't hold a monopoly on government stupidity.  California bureaucrats on the Air Resources Board passed rules requiring 1/7 of all vehicles sold in California to be electric or zero-emissions by 2025.  When will the government learn that top-down, heavy-handed decrees like these never make life better for people?  Consumers obviously want fuel-efficient vehicles; that's why the Volkswagen Golf/Rabbit is the third-best selling car of all time.  I snort with disdain every time I see some car commercial on TV, especially for the much-touted hybrids, in which something in the slightly over 40 mpg range of fuel economy is loudly trumpeted.  The original diesel-engined Rabbit got 57 mpg, and it wasn't alone in the 50+ mpg category.  New cars these days can't approach that figure because they are encumbered with hundreds of pounds of government-mandated equipment.  Why not let the consumers decide?  Put your $25,000 hybrid up against a stripped-down $15,000 gasoline-powered car that gets ten additional miles per gallon, and see which one consumers flock to.  Contrary to what the average economically ignorant sheep might think, the auto manufacturers actually support the new rules.  Well of course they do!  Because they know that, thanks to the new rules, there soon won't be any $15,000 cars to purchase.  Everyone will have to purchase the expensive hybrids and electrics, and the auto manufacturers will laugh all the way to the bank.  And the energy producers won't care one way or the other, because all that electricity the new cars use has to come from somewhere -- and in the U.S. that usually means a coal- or oil-burning electrical power plant.  Government -- it tends to be goofy and inefficient at every level.