The Wine Commonsewer™

A Decade's Gone In A Heartbeat

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

In a flash my boy went from a blue baby to a ten year old. On this special day, which he shares with Milton Friedman and Harry Potter's birth mother, he moves to double digits forever. I guess that means TWC has put on a decade as well (dang, meant to call my Dad last night).

Pretty sure I couldn't have done better even if given a couple of hours weeks at Kid's Are Us.

Jake's a friendly sort with a ready smile but he's got that stubborn streak like the proverbial hard-headed Dutchman. Comes by it honestly enough, the Snell's ARE Dutch. It's a sure bet that Jake is THE guy who'd go to the guillotine still screaming Down with the king.

Update: Of Milton Friedman's extensive body of work, his 1980 book, Free to Choose, is perhaps the most important. Not because it dazzles the anointed, but because in simple, everyday language, it quickly conceptualizes (in layman's terms) what it means to be free.

Every day Americans deal with a plethora of governing agencies, which many of us take for granted. Most of us have also heard the phrase well, that is the price of freedom. This, of course, is a grievous lie. It isn't the price of freedom at all. It is the price that free individuals pay so that others may control their lives. In that context comes the success of Uncle Miltie's book. He relates the case for freedom by examining and contrasting the various roles of institutions and agencies in American society and their effect on our individual choices and the paths our lives take on a daily basis.

Happy Birthday Son, May you always be free to choose and may you always choose wisely.

As Ever,

TWC

My Ponytails Are Too Tight

Gentle Readers,

TWC can trash a computer in jig time and once I'm done there is no salvation, reformatting just prolongs the inevitable.

The new work horse arrived with a flat panel monitor originally designed for the latest Carrie Underwood concert tour (you could hang it in a drive-in theater if there were any left).

Oh, it is a sweet thing, too, with lots of ports, plug-ins, and USB receptacles for connecting any number of devices, including cable TV or the video camera (directly to the monitor). I love it, too, except that it's widescreen and wants to stretch everything sideways so it looks like you've grabbed the skin at the outer edge of each eye and pulled your lids, folds, and loose eye skin back around the curvature of your face as far as possible, while hollering to your friends, Mommy, Mommy, my ponytails are too tight.

Oh, and the movies. Almost as good as Mrs TWC's hang-on-the-wall TV upstairs. I may never leave my desk again.

As Ever,

TWC

The Cashless Society & Monopoly Money

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

El Jeronimo de Crow is a progressive and he was already banging the drum for this cashless society stuff three decades ago.

About the same time he brought home a small dazzling, mirror-finish plastic cube that he fished out of his front pocket while carefully explaining how music would someday be encoded under the surface and read by a laser beam. I thought it was cool but couldn't fully get my brain around it. 

It'll come as no surprise to him that Monopoly has gone cashless. He'll just grin and ask what took so long.

A Parker spokesman tells us that....

The new electronic Monopoly reflects the changing nature of society and the advancement of technology.

I'll keep my cash, thanks.

As Ever,

TWC

tip of the glass to Tyler Cohen

Mrs TWC on WLS 890

Gentle Readers,

Mrs TWC is scheduled for the Eileen Byrne show on WLS 890 (Chicago) at approximately 10:00 AM Central (8:00 AM PDT) Thursday July 27.

Listen live here.

As Ever,

TWC

Mrs TWC In Chi-Town

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

If you got a coupla twenties and you happen to be in Chicago on Thursday drop on by the Metropolitan Club in the Sears Tower for lunch. Mrs TWC will be the July headline act for The Heartland Institute's 2006 Educational Choice Speaker Series.

As Ever,

The WC

No Divine Retribution, Neither

Gentle Readers,

File this one under there is no justice.

A 29-year-old Orange County woman will spend less than a year in jail after pleading guilty to falsely accusing six men of kidnapping her at gunpoint and raping her.

Had her victims been convicted, they'd be facing life in the Big House breaking big rocks into pea gravel.

Don't get me wrong, this ain't a man thing. I could blog full time on the injustices of American Jurisprudence. Trouble is that Walter Olson beat me to it. He's a tease more qualified too.

As Ever,

TWC

tip of the glass to Ken F

112 Degrees & SCE Takes A Powder

Gentle Readers,

It's not like we live in some third world burg like Mogadishu, Queens, or St Louis so TWC was not happy that the juice was off at Casa de las Rocas Grande from early Saturday afternoon until well past midnight. Dude, it was miserable hot too. 112 with thunderstorms (lots of humidity but it still wasn't Memphis).

Flex Your Power and Negawatts don't work so hot when most of the Sierra Club is home with their Birkenstocks up on the sofa and the A/C dialed down to 78 (more like 72, truth be told) hoping that Hell's gonna freeze over. I'm down with that though. Especially since a nature frolick this weekend woulda been a literal hike on the Highway to Hell. That'd be okay with that guy in the white F-350 4X though. Had a sticker in the back window:

Just the weekend for it.

I'm pretty sure Californicate is part of the first world and I'm pretty sure that this is the 21'st Century. Absent a drunk driver taking out a power pole, utilities should be able to meet peak demand without resorting to recorded messages indicating that they're clueless as to the cause of the outage but we're workin' on it by gosh.

Col Hogan was mad too.

As Ever,

TWC

Might As Well Be Walking On The Sun

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

TWC got up early to do some work and when I let the dogs out at 5:30 am it was still 87 degrees. When did we move to Tucson? It's now ten of eight and it's 100 degrees.

As Ever,

TWC

Taxpayer Super Heroes

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

It turns out that The Wine Commonsewer's old buddy and former anarcho-capitalist, Ed Royce, is one of only two in CONgress whose hand isn't permantly welded to your wallet.

I was a little disappointed that one of my favorite former libertarians, Dr Ron Paul, scored a measly 69%, which still earns him the designation as a friend of taxpayers. But a 69% rating is surprising for a guy whose colleagues in the swamp refer to him as Dr No because he votes no on everything.

I got up early this morning to get some work done so I'm going to crib directly from Tax Prof, who has done some really heavy lifting......

The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) has released its 2005 Congressional Ratings:

For 17 years, CCAGW has examined roll-call votes to separate the taxpayer advocates in Congress from those who favor wasteful programs and pork-barrel spending....

There were two Taxpayer Super Heroes with a score of 100%: Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) in the Senate and Ed Royce (R-Calif.) in the House. Taxpayer Heroes are members who scored between 80 and 99%. The total number of Heroes and Super Heroes in the House dropped from 59 in 2004 to 52 in 2005. The number of Heroes and Super Heroes in the Senate remained the same at 10.

Press Release

Report

House Scorecard

Senate Scorecard

The Club for Growth has just issued its 2005 Congressional Scorecard that rates every member of Congress on a variety of issues, including support for making the Bush tax cuts permanent and repealing the estate tax:

House Scorecard
Senate Scorecard

As Ever,

TWC

tip of the glass to Tax Prof Blog & Tim Cavanugh at Reason

Mozilla Firefox Review

Gentle Readers,

I've been doing a non-scientific, one-commonsewer test of Mozilla's hot browser for about a year now. I like it. A lot. 

I like it even better since MicroSoft has bloated Internet Explorer with downloads, hole plugs, and security measures rendering it a somewhat neutered, performance-less slug (remember your ancient 386?).

Although many users (not drug users)  have drifted to  Firefox out of fear of invasion through IE's flaws, that really isn't an issue for me because I have a miniature Israeli military presence at my firewall to discourage unwanted attacks.

With the exception of some government sites that aren't fully compatible, Firefox performs at least as well and generally better than IE. The controls and settings are easier to use than Internet Explorer as well.

To keep it simple I'm not going to do an in depth review as there are many available reviews online and Firefox has received the blessings of a plethora of techie magazines. Suffice it to say that my experimentation has evolved to the point where TWC uses Firefox 90% of the time. Is it perfect? Not quite, but it's on a whole higher level than the competition. I'm sold. 

And it's free. Download it here if you're interested. It's also available in other languages here.

Full Disclosure: Nobody paid me to write this nor did I get any freebies as a result.

As Ever,

TWC