Wednesday, December 12, 2012

ENDANGERED SPECIES

The Democrats want to make the Western Gopher an endangered specie.  Yip, you read that right.  Gopher.  And to buttress their arguement, know this: the Tacoma Gopher is already gone, dead as a species (as I guess it was).  Let's keep the pests digging up our lawns and gardens of civilization or they'll die out, the gardens that is, not the gopher.  Tacoma is already gone.  (Or is it that I moved from Tacoma and another pest, and I'm not a gopher, bit the dust.)

Well, now, how about another important species about ready to die out:  Republicans.   Yes, they are dying out.   From what, you might ask.  From not having any balls.  (Think about it.)

Republican former leader, Mitt Romney had no balls.  He did not scream: Unions Are Corrupt.  He is too polite and has no balls.  He did not call out the fact that union monopolies (yes, the same ones that have destroyed, destroyed American education) finance the Democrat Party as its largest financier.  Yes, the largest.  Do unions just love the Democrats' platform or stuff like that?  NO, heavens no.  Union bosses get billions in dollars over ten years from Democratic Party legislated union monopolies.  Of if not definitional monopolies, the legislation forces non-union workers -- those workers who choose NOT to join a union for whatever their own reasons are -- to pay union dues, much of which goes to pay for the elections of Democrats.  Even if (heaven forbid) a worker supports the conservative, rational beliefs of the Republican Party its union pays the Democratic Party (with 95+% of its political donations).

What else was Former Leader Mitt Romney afraid to say?  The second largest financiers of the Democratic Party are the billionaire jet plane-owning Trial Lawyers.  What do these leeches-on-society like about the Democratic Party?  The trial lawyers' bank comes from the Democrat Party-passed laws allowing contingency payments from settlements of threatened trials.  Threatened...Most lawsuits are settled, not litigated in a court of law.  Trial lawyers get hundred and thousands of "plaintiffs" to represent, file suit against a company for some accident or unknown design flaw or as with asbestos, against companies never having touched asbestos, but those which might have purchased a company that once used asbestos in a product.  Although there never is a direct cause and effect from said asbestos -- more "risk" or what might have could have  happened -- just facing thousands of litigants, force companies to settle.  How does one spell b-l-a-c-k-m-a-i-l?  With cigarettes and asbestos TRIAL LAWYERS SCORED BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN FEES.  Did Mitt attack the Democratic Party with these truths?  NO.  (President Obama and the Democrat Party relentlessly and successfully attacked Romney with lies about who he wasn't and things he didn't do.  LIAR!  LIAR!)

Add in the relentless seventy-year propaganda effort against Repuboicans, business (which Romney was in), free enterprise (ditto, and which brought America its present prosperity), freedom, the Rule of Law and so on.  The propaganda comes from:  the union-monopoly educational system of kindergarten through high school and then the far-left post graduate professors, college administrators and instructors (87% of which are Democrats).  From the media owners, personalities and pundits most of which (from the New York Times through ABCNBCBSPBS and just plain BS) excluding the News Corporation (which has news not propaganda) and virtually all the entertainment (sic) industry and its Far-left owners and actors ARE so-called PROGRESSIVES (sic).  Yip George Clooney, sad to say.  Relentless Far-left propaganda clouding the minds of most American voters.

So there's no hope for the Republican Party.  I nominate someone to nominate it for being added to the Endangeres Species List.

Any second?

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

The Left owns the Propaganda and has won.


In “Barack Obama’s Persuasion Army” (Wall Street Journal, Opinion, November 15, 2012, page A17) Daniel Hemminger touches on a few truths about which no one else seems to have a clue.  The first is “propaganda;” but he does not go far enough.  Virtually the entire American educational establishment is controlled by the so-called Progressives, K – 12 by unions and post-graduate education by Democrat administrators, professors and instructors.  And the Non-Fox Media (NFM which includes the Wall Street Journal) is an unabashed cheerleader for everything Obama and Democratic.  All are engaged in pervasive, incessant anti-business, anti-free enterprise propaganda.  Most Americans have a knee jerk reaction against business and business leaders which has been drilled into them since kindergarten.  The propaganda closely links “big business” with the Republican Party so it, too is automatically distrusted.  This propaganda includes withdrawing Darwin’s law of Natural Selection by diminishing its exceptionalism, which includes the success of executives, and promoting the fantasy of “fairness” and “equality” of outcome.

 

Next, he got right the use by the Democratic Party of the (hated) “private sector’s advanced marketing techniques” but without the same “Truth in Marketing” as demanded by Federal law, regulation and lawsuit.  The government and “free” political speech can issue any message without need for truth, as this past campaign proved, while commercial speech by companies is severely managed word-for-word.

 

He commented: “Some Republicans are consumed with how to make more people like them.”  This is something I have written for years.  The Republicans in general seem to pay heed to what the New York Times, the network “news” shows and their followers say and in some cases believe it.  Republican don’t understanding that there seems to be a visceral antagonism toward everything Republican by the Left.  Republicans tend to respect morality and believe in basic right and wrong and principles (and the Constitution) even sometimes at the expense of winning.  Their opponents have no such barriers.  To Democrats winning is everything.

 

The United States into which I was born almost seventy years ago has been chipped away and now is gone forever, I believe.  Our country exists now to feed the United States government which grows and grows and consumes our economy and the political foundation so brilliantly established beginning in 1776.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

We've lost the greatest country in history

Nothing is funny about the election or the demise of rational, "conservative" thought. It is tragic. But inevitable as I have been saying for years. The Republican/conservative movement has been playing on the so-called Progressives' playing field and to their tune and always responding, never leading.  Defending from Progressives, never attacking.   Romney had all the ingredients for winning. Except balls. Progressives win by catering (and giving) to union bosses and trial lawyers. Romney said what about this? Happiness is supposed to be each of us pursuing it as we individually wish, not how Progressives demand. (Go out and work for a non-profit, help the homeless, Progressives say. But more lives have been saved and enriched by U.S. entrepreneurs getting "selfishly" and "greedily"rich selling stuff like pharmaceuticals, computers, software and cellphones.) Romney defended the magnificent good business has done for the world how? We legislate saving species of little bugs; liberals go out and rescue sick and abused dogs, but kill millions of human fetuses. Romney said what?  After the election was over, Romney blabbed something about Obama doling out goodies to special -- and especially ethnic -- interests.  After the election.  After!   He is so afraid of what the liberal NFM (non-Fox media) will say or write, he doesn't stand up for much of anything. Ditto all chickensh** Republicans.

We have lost this wonderful country. Like the Jews of WWII, the princes of Russia, we do nothing and lose the greatest country in history; they only lost their lives. I am glad I am 70 and don't have three decades to go through.

America     I cry for you!

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Obama Won, America ZERO (0)

Obama won.  America 0.

A play on words, but a truth.  The America into which I was born died last night.  Well, it'll be a while dying but the mortal wound was performed last night.  While the causes and reasons will be debated endlessly, it doesn't matter.  Obama and the Progressives, who are anything but, won.  America and us -- its citizens and inhabitants -- lost.   Our score: ZERO (0).

Arguably the most inexperienced and unqualified president in history, President Obama has proven to be the most far left, or possibly off the left-hand charts.  He has never touched or been touched by free enterprise or capitalism except for the financial support he had by corporations in 2008 and less so in 2012.  But what created the greatest country and system -- political and social -- in the history of the world means nothing to the president.  Nothing.  Mr. Obama went from university and a couple years hanging out in his home country in Africa to small time organizing in Chicago.  That did not work out well for those "organized" since they weren't.  Then quickly to the Illinois legislature briefly and on to the United States Senate where he gave a speech, or was it the speech then the U. S. Senate?  Doesn't matter, well rehearsed he voted "present".  He had some important handlers and advisors.  But off of the conspiracy theory and on to the presidency of the United States of America.  In his first term, he ran up the deficit $5,000,000,000,000 but who's counting?  Unemployment flatlined at high.  The economy struggled to be positive.  African American unemployment increased to near-15% and crime, drug use and illegitimate children continued marching upward.  And energy money accrued to his financiers, giving them a good return.  But luckily for him abortion continued unabated, especially for African Americans.  Choice won.

I argue that the President of the Democrats (and who could argue with that nomenclature?) and the late Fuhrer of Germany had parallel lives to a certain extent.  Neither succeeded at much of anything until...until they spoke and moved people.  Both had alcoholic, womanizing and absent fathers (President Obama's a bigamist).  Was President Obama a bastard?   Hmmmm.  Both were mothered smotheringly and uncritically.  Both were (are) narcissistic to a fault.  Both thought (think) themselves saviors of their respective countries and if possible, the world, although Adolf didn't make it that far.  Both consider(ed) themselves "change agents".  Both made their major platform hate.  In Hitler's case, Jews.  In Obama's, "millionaires and billionaires" and bankers.

But now my troubling prognostication.

With the retirement or death of one conservative Supreme Court Justice, including seventy-six year old Justice Scalia or seventy-five year old Kennedy,  the United States Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiter of the United States Constitution, would be controlled by ideologue liberals.  As with Kagan and Sotomayor they are not strict constitutionalists but arbitraryists, making decisions based on their life experiences and proclivities.

Now let's say President Obama makes an Executive Order or perhaps his Democratic majority Senate passes a bill that the term of the presidency should be extended to, say, ten or twenty years.  Let's just say.  Someone sues with outrage.  From court to court.  To the United States Supreme Court, the final court of jurisdiction on the meaning of the Constitution with no appeal.  Let's say.  How might his appointed idealogues rule?

Voila!  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have the end of the path.  The Road to Serfdom inevitably ends here.  Someone has to make the decision: "what is fair".  Or, rather, who gets what?  The division of the "equality", the redistribution of the spoils. 

This was the end of the country into which I was born.  And the end of the road will be.  Serfdom.









OBAMA WON, AMERICA 0 (Part 1)

No one gets it.

This election is not just the end of the America into which I was born, but the one to which Thomas Wight sailed around 1730.  The one whose founders led thousands in war to defeat a mighty enemy.  Why?   For our freedom.  Then after winning their was for independance, a very small number of (as the so-called Progressives like to say) rich white men conceived, drafted and convinced a larger number -- I don't remember how many -- of similar men representing all Americans to agree to a new United States Constitution.  That Constitution created what was to become the greatest nation ever known to human beings.  Its inhabitants -- us -- became the most individually free in history.  This freedom allowed us to innovate for the world.  This brought prosperity and high standards of living beyond the imagination of much of the world.  They created the most innovative political system ever invented.   It separated institutions so no one of them could dominate.  It kept self-interested groups apart, so they couldn't gang up on the rest of us.  It gave each of us freedom to pursue happiness as each of us defined it for ourselves.  It delineated laws by which all people equally had to obey, but the freedoms were not granted by government but were self-evident, unalterable truths of God.

But that very freedom and prosperity finally brought THAT United States of America to an end.  Last night.  November 6, 2012.

While the creators of that prosperity were busily starting companies others were living off the wealth they created in order to destroy that very freedom and prosperity.  Those "others" were different from the moral individuals who invented the United States, the people who respected one another, who, not being perfect (being humans) changed their country when necessary, freeing slaves and granting to all the right to vote.  To those "others" power, their own raw power over others was -- is -- all that is important.  The fears of "Publius"  -- the pseudonym  of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in writing the Federalist Papers -- have come true.

And they have diligently worked -- consciously and unconsciously -- since around the 1910s Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to gain and retain that power.  They infiltrated the entire educational system and turned it against "business", the very institution that created all the wealth for our country.  "Business" became an epithet.  Still is. 

The "factions" written against in the Federalist Papers and kept apart in the structure of the United States government now control it.  Democrats.  And the products of their power:Union bosses and trial lawers who finance the Democrats who legislate to enable those factions.  And a media that proudly promoted those factions and deprecated business and those successfully engaged in it.  All this within a sad, self-absorbed society fixated on "stars" and their own pleasure.  Thus was borne the first American Idol -- The President.  Elected and reelected last night.  Endowed with a deep persuasive voice, a winning smile, a dark-colored nose and brilliant political strategists Barack Obama was -- and is -- singularly ill-equipped to manage one of the largest institutions in the world.  But these factions were built into a electorial majority: so-called African Americans, many Hispanics turned against Republicans' ideas on immigration, the young and impressionable educated against free enterprise and capitalism, women afraid of losing their right to abort their fetuses all within a media universe unabashedly, and nearly universally promoting the Progressive way of life and the Democratic Party.

End of Part 1.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

THIS IS ABOUT POWER


The bottom line that everyone seems to miss is that this election and the entire basis of Progressivism, Democrat-Party Liberalism, the "Left" and the like is nothing more than POWER.  Gaining and retaining it.  The details to get it -- from Federal Income Taxes to Social Security and Obama's Affordable (sic) Care Act -- are nothing more than props, talking points.  If it wasn't for the unprecedented success of free enterprise, capitalism if you will, and its underpinnings of property rights, the Rule of Law, and initially a government of countervailing and separated powers, there would have been nothing for the Progressives to want to take.  No wealth, no assets, not much of anything.  But while capitalists were starting and building companies, creating wealth not only for themselves but for the world, including jobs, Progressives were diverting some of this wealth to the government for them to redistribute.  Much has gone to "not-for-profit", governmental and non-governmental organizations employing and paying for their ideological soulmates to -- again with funding extracted from the private sector where it could have been used to create more companies, wealth and jobs -- strategize, plan and accomplish the taking of power from those capitalists and put it into the hands of themselves, to use primarily to gain and retain more power. 
 
If the federal government wouldn't have pushed for federal income taxes each of the states would have had countervailing power and the push for standardization of every American citizen would not have taken place.  I'd argue that Medicare would have been cheaper and better with the competition among states.  I'd argue that fewer Americans would have had the societal pressure to attend college and would have been happier in jobs more suitable to their own, individual choices, not the choices of the few leaders in government. 
 
If the federal government hadn't invented Fannie Mae, sure there'd be smaller home ownership, and with that there would have been no housing and financial crisis.
 
How about the United States Postal Service in business only -- in my view -- to satisfy labor union bosses and their financial support of the Democratic Party.  UPS and FedEx have proven that there is no need for the USPS.  And how about Amtrak?  And on and on and on.
 
If Social Security would have invested into a broad mix of securities of United States corporations, the American economy, there would be no financial crisis and spectre of its bankruptcy.
 
Don't anyone forget that is was a very few -- perhaps two -- industrial "tycoons" who reinvented the United States manufacturing economy to mobilize World War Two and beat the Nazis, not FDR, who, to his credit, eshewed his prior Progressive blather and made that decision to keep the government  out of the war industry.

Would the country, and its individual citizenry be better off right now if the Left had not taken power?  An unanswerable question.  But the bottom line of is: what is the measurement we use?  I.  individual personal happiness and the ability of each of us to pursue it in the way we wish or II. how a very few elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats decide we ought to lead and live our lives?

To be or not to be that WAS the question.  Now since the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America has made it clear that it (life) is a God-given right, along with freedom and the pursuit of happiness, the definition and who is the decision-maker is (are) the question(s).
 
 
 
 

 While that is a somewhat ideological comment, and the Left has accomplished some benefit to mankind in general there is no way to know that it all wouldn't have happened anyway.  Like Obama's "creating or saving six million jobs".

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Secretary of State Clinton Resigns

The election is over, President Barack Obama wins a second term.  His administration slowly begins hinting that the  atrocity in Benghazi came as a result of lax management at the State Department and that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was assessing the situation.  The media picked up on the line and began an accelerating diminishment of the secretary.  The day after his inauguration his administration releases a press release accepting her resignation.  Immediately denials commenced from the State Department with the administration suggesting that the release was "unauthorized" and only a draft based upon private conversations.  Several noisy days later the Secretary of State offered her resignation saying she had fulfilled her goals she had set out when she first accepted the position. She is "looking forward to rejoining private life out of the spotlight".  The president "reluctantly" accepted it, saying it while was lamentable that the incident in Libya put a cloud over her career otherwise highly successful.

To paraphrase: Hilary Clinton was pushed under the bus to obfuscate President Obama's poor record in foreign affairs.  Mr. Obama diminished her future possibilities as a presidential candidate.

Monday, September 17, 2012

The Obama Basketball Athletic Management Association






The Obama Basketball Athletic Management Association (“League”) for the 2013 – 2014 season.

A brief summary of the revised rules of the League are as follows:

The fifteen players on each team were deemed terminated as of the 2012 – 2013 season end, April 30, 2013.  Any extended or other contractual provision for any player was subject to mandatory mediation as managed by the U. S. Government, Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service.

The new season began July 1, 2013, with a new draft which was and in the future always will be a random selection of citizens throughout the United States between the age of eighteen and forty-five with a fifteen day opt-in or -out requirement for each citizen so selected.  The ultimate makeup of each team of fifteen players as closely as possible shadowed the population of the United States as a whole, with regard only to sex and race as defined in the U. S. Department of Census in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”).  One player in each team must be wheelchair-bound.  Salaries will be $250,000 per year with the working conditions and hours as elucidated in OBAMAOSH (the Obama Basketball Athletic Management Association Occupational, Safety and Health contract, a cross-disciplinary contract concerned with protecting the safety, health and welfare of OBAMA players to foster a safe, healthy and gentle work environment). 

The Rules of Play include:

The game is played according to the Fourteen Official Rules of the Obama Basketball Athletic Management Association (“FOROBAMA”) revised as of May 15, 2013.                

Significantly Revised Rule 1: At the beginning of each game the chief official opens a new deck of regulation bridge playing cards, shuffles according to the shuffle clause of OBAMAOSH.  Three cards are dealt to each team captain.  The numbers of the three cards (as indicated, with jack=11, queen=12, king=13, ace=14) are added together to establish the beginning score of each team.

Significantly Revised Rule 14: With the Official Clock time being one (1) second remaining in the fourth (4th) quarter, an official timeout is automatically called.  The chief official and two team coaches gather in front of the official scorer.  That official scorer delivers the official score.  The excess number of points of one team over another team is calculated by subtraction.  That result is added to the score of the lowest-scoring team.  The Official Clock is restarted and the game ends.
  
It is frequently asked, “How did this League come about?”  The answer is simple.  After reelection in November of 2013 the President of the United States, Barack Obama, issued an Executive Order, number 13641 as published in the Federal Register May 6, 2013.   It in essence quasi-nationalized the National Basketball Association (“NBA”) and renamed it with new rules and regulations. 

Executive Order number 13641 declared the NBA to be a non-bank financial firm under the Financial Stability Oversight Council (“FSOC”) which is chaired by the U. S. Treasury Secretary as promulgated by the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“D-FWSRCPA”).  The Order further declared that the NBA was deemed to be a systemically important financial institution (“SIFI” or “too big to fail”) and a risk to the financial soundness of the United States of America (“USA”).  Additionally, the Order declared a national emergency to deal with such risk and while it was not nationalized board of directors of the NBA was directed to adopt specific new rules and regulations under the jurisdiction of the U. S. Department of Justice (“Justice”) with the possibility that Justice could appoint a majority of the directors.

The media was caught completely unaware of the unexpected order and was livid at being left out of the loop entirely.  The minority Republican Party howled with indignation.  It was immediately challenged in court by a number of Republican state attorneys general.  The Attorney General of the United States arranged to have the whole issue brought forth for review by the United States Supreme Court.  After the angry public reaction, including threatened lawsuits by owners, players’ agents and unions, television networks and consumer groups that had the tort bar celebrating, the Supreme Court decided to take up the matter. 

In a surprise rarely, or if ever encountered in American history, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas strangely announced their immediate resignations mere days before that NBA announcement day.  While the spokespeople for both former justices refused to issue statements or make any comment, the Internet blogosphere was full of gossip about both men beginning new careers, each with a newly-formed, non-profit, non-governmental organization funded to the tune of $100,000,000 by institutions connected to or funded by billionaire international investor George Soros.  However as of the date of this article such gossip has not been verified.  Later, the reduced court ruled 6-1 in favor of the President’s right to issue such an order and for the Justice Department to carry it out.



The Subjugation of the Democrats

The Chicago strike by its teachers union boss and the feint of settlement (and kids returning to their miserably-failed schools)  to Mayor Rahm has to embarrass Obama's close bud.  And it is telling Democrats "We don't need you anymore except to give us fat pay, great healthcare, expensive pensions, little measurement, jobs-for-life and easy work." And no doubt Obama's henchmen are leaning on Obama's former henchman-in-chief to give in, give up and get the strike over.  And he will cave, no doubt about it, but first the union has to rub the Democrats' face in the mud. That has been done.

Is this the coming end of the union middleman - the Democratic Party?  Or just further subjugates it to the unreal demands of the unions.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Who's in Charge?

From the Arab Spring with a preening Sexy Prexy trying to be beloved
to
The Arab Fall.

Is Egypt our ally?
Is Egypt our enemy?
Is Obama in charge?
Is anyone in charge?

Freedom's Just another word for Vote Romney.  Because President Obama doesn't seem to have a clue.

His man, Rahm, can't control the Democrats' financial agency, the Chicago Teachers' Union.  300,000 kids - most who wouldn't graduate anyway, so who cares - without a place to go ecause teachers don't want to be judged.      

His Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, charged up the stock market.  The Rich Get Richer, thanks to Barack and Ben.  Ben's printing $40,000,000,000 to buy mortgages.  The goal: Reelect President Obama and keep his own job.  Dow is 13,539.86.  Wish Social Security had believed in America and invested in. The American Economy, not loaned it to the Dmocratic Party for it to buy votes for election and reelection.

But he has destroyed the private sector student loan industry and added a trillion dollars to U. S. obligations. He has fixed prices of many banks' product offerings and forced them to offer products he wanted.  He as severely reduced the profitability of the healthcare industry.  He has tried (and thankfully failed) to stop the Boeing Company opening a thousand-employee non-union airplane plant in. On-union South Carolina, but has manipulated labor laws to anable easy in unionization.

But he has succeeded in getting gay people into the U. S. armed forces.  And he has ignored laws
passed by Congress and signed into law by former presidents.  The Defense of Marriage Act.  He has dictated freedom for young illegal immigrants under certain conditions.

And all that's just off the top of my head.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Obamerika or Team America


Obamerika or Team America

 

“And as president, I…reject the idea that if we just reward those at the top, that somehow that’s going to work for everybody – ‘cause that hasn’t been how America got built.”  This quote, which reinforces and upstages President Obama’s by now well-known and sometimes ridiculed phrase, “You didn’t build that”, was published in Parade Magazine (inserted in many Sunday newspapers on September 2, 2012, page 9 and 10).  It represents the antithesis of the American way;  those “at the top” haven’t been “rewarded” by the “we” or anybody, it has been their individual stories which incorporate intelligence, experience, passion, tenacity and luck, combined with America’s innovative financial industry.  All this within a sometimes chaotic system of free enterprise built upon the brilliance of our Founding Fathers’ political inventions.  The few “at the top” is exactly “how America got built” –  they began at the bottom in the scrum of Team America    Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, J. P. Morgan,  George Washington and George Washington Carver, Eli Whitney, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Herman Hollerith, John D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates, to name a few.  None of this was done by bureaucrats in Washington, D. C., but by individuals seeking to better themselves and their neighbors who rise to the top in competition with everyone else in what is the magical chaos of free enterprise.

 

This highlights the clear and stark choice in the upcoming election.  Do we want a country governed by an oligarchy of elites led by a single man who wants to take a hard left from the foundations upon which this country was built?  Or do we want to continue on the zig-zagging path which has led to the most prosperous, most free country in the history of the world?  With that comes the fits and starts from the chaos of freedom – and free enterprise, the democracy of commerce.  This leader, Mitt Romney, has a history of hiring smart people and working with them to success.

 

On September 3, 2012, the U.S. population was 314,295,369 as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau.  The human body contains 4,600,000,000,000,000 strands, give or take since it’ll take a long time to count each one, of Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).  About 99.9% of it is common from body to body, leaving approximately 4.6 trillion of the little buggers being different from person to person. Taken all together, that’s a lot of difference from U. S. person to U. S. person, diversity of you will.

 

This is a lot of data with way too many variables for any computer or mega-systems of combined computers to be able to model (not to mention the impossibility of humans being even able to agree on what are the variables).  Yet government experts are trusted to write rules by which we are to live our lives by predicting how such rules will cause each of us to act.  A dictionary full of acronymic government agencies determine what we should buy, what we should eat, what we should wear, what we should drive, where and in what we should live, with whom we should associate, where we should…well, just about everything we do.  These rules micromanage our lives.  This is labeled “social policy”, a bed rock of the Democratic Party belief system.  Any social policy gives control over the freedoms of the individual to a small number of powerful elites.  Yet today our government elites can’t even predict with accuracy economic activity, nor the weather nor even corn prices in any predictable way.  You and I could guess with better accuracy.  (Even a dead clock is accurate twice a day!)  

 

In 1955 about 4,100,000 babies were born in the United States.  Of them only .00024% was Steve Jobs.  You double that when Bill Gates is added.  Who could have identified either of them at birth to become who they became?  Does this argue for more central control, maybe eliminating the consequential impact of people like these two, or the messiness of free enterprise with the “survival of the fittest” achieving prosperity for society as a whole as have Jobs and Gates.  President Obama chose Solyndra, free enterprise chose Apple.

 

Medicare rules, regulations and laws consist of over 150,000 pages of intricate, many times incomprehensible words, and this even before ObamaCare.  At any time any participant in Medicare is breaking some law; probably a felony. 

 

Is this really what we as a society desire or deserve?  These laws were written by a small number individual human beings trying to predict or direct the future behavior of human beings.  Belief in this central control is like believing in an unseeable God.

 

Yet that will be Obamerika.  Where the government eliminates dignity and substitutes dependency.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

"You didn't build it...and we rewarded you"

You all must remember when President Obama said, and I quote: "If you've got a business—you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." While the Left backpeddled and obfuscated, those were his words. "Someone else made that happen", "that" meaning "a business". Clear enough. But in today's puff piece (September 2, 2012, cover and page 6) in the Parade sixteen-page throwaway in your local newspaper (here in Seattle, the Seattle Times) President Obama said that he rejects "...the idea that if we just reward those at the top..." So the president not only believes that you didn't build your company OR earn the financial success in doing so because "we" -- meaning maybe society or the government, or perhaps Barry and Michelle -- "rewarded" you. Then he said that achievement and success of the few -- Oh, say, George Washington, J. P. Morgan, the Rockefellers, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, General Motors, R. H. Macy, the Nordstroms, Howard Schultz -- "HASN'T BEEN HOW AMERICA GOT BUILT".

Then I ask you, Mr. President, just how did America get built?

Friday, August 31, 2012

God-given Rights and nature-given truths

The Declaration of Independence declares that there are certain truths granted by God, or if one prefers, nature.  And in thinking about it, they all seem logical.

All men are created equal; "man" includes women, of course.  The equality part means that to be born, we are all equal in that we have:  Life, which is a given if we are born.  Liberty was a new concept back then given a long history of kings, nobility having ownership, virtual or not over all the rest of us.  But why shouldn't all of us have it?  The Pursuit of Happiness, whatever it is and however each of us choose to use our freedom to pursue it.  Equality clearly doesn't mean equality as in we are all the same.  That also is clear given height, weight, health and IQ of newborns.

To secure these things anarchy hadn't worked nor absolute kingships.  So governments had to be invented in order to secure the above.  And it happened.  Those unequal men of the U. S. Revolution not only led Americans in war, and won it, but did invent the most innovative government structure ever invented.  (On its second try!)

Back then life in America was hard-scrabble and bereft of physical comfort.  From that came what we have and what we are today. 

There were two underlying foundations of the United States.  One was a God.  The other was commerce.

Today both are under fire.


Wednesday, August 22, 2012

AKIN propaganda

Winning isn't everything.  Maybe for the Liberals, but look at what havoc that has reaped on the United States.  But the Bush/Republicans didn't stop the trajectory.  I know nothing about Akin, except that he has been blasted beyond recognition by the media and the Left (well, that's the same thing) as expected.  But by the Right?  That's shameful and indicative of the hopelessness of this election.  Republicans in lockstep at the bidding of the Left-wing media simply abandoned a viable candidate, Akin.  The reason the Republicans might not win the Senate is right there in their typical action: don't upset the Left-wing media that hates them and that for which they stand.  It is same old, same old, reason they always lose, and might again.

Akin's comments - taken wrong, probably on purpose - weren't off the mark.  A woman's body INVOLUNTARILY  can and in some unknown number of cases does reject a foreign body when it (her body) is under duress such as in rape.  The woman's body reacts and she has no control over such rejection or not.  I believe that the notion of voluntary - her "choice" not to get pregnant - is the purposeful misinformation by the Left of what he meant.  Such bodily rejection action is completely out of her control, but as with organ rejection is either done or not done involuntarily by the body.

SECOND CIVIL WAR

Who dies, the Democratic Party or the United States of America?  The choice is stark, but clear.  This is the Second Civil War for the soul of the America.  A country formed for freedom, for the Rule of Law, for private ownership, for equality (of opportunity) and for commerce.   It is the choice between the prosperity of free enterprise or the bureaucratic swamp of failure. Of choices made BY YOU or FOR YOU by a cadre of elites in Washington, D.C.  Of  capitalism or regulation, price fixing and micromanagement.  For the benefit of those seeking prosperity and betterment or those seeking (buying) reelection.  

It is up to you.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Our Society is Doomed

"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."


--- Ayn Rand

Thursday, August 16, 2012

HOT AIR OR OIL? 19,000,000 acres in the desert covered up or 23,000,000 acres in far away Alaska may be drilled. You choose which sounds best.

President Obama -- certainly without considering the upcoming election -- is thinking about possibly proposing the possibility of opening up for application to the Interior Department, EPA, OPA 23,000,000 acres in the National Petroleum Reserve, a remote wilderness in the far reaches of Alaska that no one would want to visit, as his "preferred alternative" out of four of them to have a few holes drilled looking for oil and natural gas deposits there.  This selection over the others would slam shut the door on tens of millions of acres of major government oil and gas holdings nearby.  Environmentalists cheered.  (Something's wrong.)

President Obama -- certainly without considering the upcoming election -- will approve, allow and encourage his favorite little taxpayer-financed industry -- 19,000,000 acres of readily-accessable vacationland to be covered with solar panels.  Starting with an immediate construction permit on 285,000 acres -- hundreds of thousands of individual solar panels littering desertland and pristine wilderness -- and streamlining regulations (wow, streamlining regulations!) of the National Environmental Policy Act while cutting up-front fees (saving taxpayers giving taxpayer money to the government, go figure)!  $9,000,000,000 of taxpayer monies went to such boondoggles from President Obama from 2009 through 2011.  Snail darters, owls, desert tortoises and bighorn sheep might suffer and ultimately millions of acres strangled of light.  But hey, metal structures convered with massive semiconductor panels are much prettier than nature anyway.  Environmentalists cheered.  (Something's wrong.)

President Obama also arbitrarily closed down the possibility of obtaining shale oil off of federal lands from the 2005 Energy Policy Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush.

You want economic growth?  It takes energy that for the forseeable future can ONLY come from natural gas, oil and natural coal.

President Obama prefers to buy oil for the energy needs of the United States from Saudi Arabia.


Makes you think.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!

As I have been strenuously arguing for years, the Left has no bounds, no limits; it will do and say anything to gain and retain its power, raw power over the rest of us. The Republicans play by their (Republicans') self-imposed rules of modesty, politeness and fairness. AND THEY HAVE BEEN LOSING MORE OR LESS FOR 75 YEARS!




Can't they catch a clue?



The Sexy Prexy will use every ounce of asset of the strongest country in history for one reason: to get himself reelected. Why does he want reelection? First, because he loves the easy, fat, cushy job itself. He can preen and have crowds admire and clap. He can read BS on his Teleprompter and have it repeated ad nauseum by the fawning media.  Ohhh, Ahhh!  He spouts inaccuries and outright made-up lies. 



Second, he wants to get reelected to show his worthless, drunk, abandoning father that he (Obama) is worthy.



Third, he wants to change the United States into a dictatorship (benigh,like they all are) with him at the helm to improve everyone's lives in the world to they way he wants.



So ladies and gentlemen, you ain't seen nothin' yet.



(The arrest of a top Goldman or other bank CEO should probably happen October 15!)     Will Mitt Romney get MAD?  Paul Ryan will!  Let's hope and pray they win the election...this the Second Civil War of the United States of America!

Friday, August 3, 2012

Did Al Gore really invent the Internet? Did the "government"?

President Obama:  "The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet."

1.  Well, no "government research" did not invent the Internet.
2.  It is so off-the-charts strange that President Obama would say that government research created the Internet "so that all the companies could make money off the Internet".
While much of President Obama’s speech gets mocked (Opinion, July 23, “Who Really Invented the Internet?”) I have not read one word about what is the most over-the-top weird sentence of the speech, perhaps of everything President Obama has ever said. Here it is: “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet." His contention about who “invented” the Internet – government research -- is factually incorrect (as is typical it was not one person or thing, it was a small string of predecessor inventions by individuals capped by Xerox PARC laboratories) as the L. Gordon Crovitz article writes. But the reason it was invented was, Mr. Obama said, “so that all the companies” – whatever “all the companies” means – “could make money off” – as if the money is just “made” without any human entrepreneurial intervention. And the term, “make money off” seems simply sophomoric. More than his other sentences, this one seems the most confused and incomprehensible. Not only is government research basic, not applied, its goal is not so companies can make money, whatever that really means. I need to stop here. Mr. Obama’s speech stands on his own, as is Mr. Obama’s confusion.








Crushed speech

It is not about religion.  It is not about chicken.  It is about freedom of speech.  Unarguable elected politicians of Left-wing cities are threatening a privately-held, major job creating company for its CEO's comments.

If that doesn't frighten and enlighten I know nothing any Democrat does will.  You should be enlightened because this is the future under Democrats: speech, mind and thought control.  Anti-Left-wing speech is crushed.  The actions of at this point only a few politicians, but many, many Left-wing citizens should give you a view of what they want in the future.

Frightening.

Vore for Freedom: Vote for Romney.

Monday, July 23, 2012

ANOTHER KILLER

Another killer emerged in Aurora, Colorado.  There can be no doubt reasonable or unreasonable that the man did the reprehensible, cowardly act.  No doubt.

But in our present society which protects the individual instead of society, the man will spend upwards of $50,000,000 of taxpayers' dollars and twenty or thirty years until he is "brought to justice".[sic]

The brilliant Founding Fathers and authors of our Constitution invented a true justice system that sought the truth.  Together the prosecutors and defenders wanted a fair outcome.  No guarantees of perfection, since human beings invented and must operate it, but as fair a system to society as possible. 

That has been destroyed by the so-called "progressive" or liberal philosophy (of electing Democrats) which protects the individual over society.  Not the greatest good for the greatest number.  To them it is "us vs them" where a defendant has more rights than society and those rights are strictly designed to allow a defending lawyer to use anything, truth or fiction, to win freedom for his client.  It is not the truth he or she is after, it is winning.  Even when winning means letting a killer free.  Because in winning the attorney gains notoriety which brings him fame and fortune.  The spotlight!  That overwhelms in our progressive society.

There is no doubt this killer killed all 12 innocent Americans.  No doubt.  Yes, he is presumed innocent and should be.  But his lawyers should be charged with getting to the truth not getting him off by any tortured means they can invent.  We all know the truth: the man killed.  Why devote $50,000,000 and twenty years?

I am sure there are those who want to consider the man's upbringing and his motives to ameliorate his punishment.  There are those who will blame society, capitalism, competition whatever.  Regardless, I can't believe anyone would think that he did not perform those insane random murders.

Is it time to discuss the issue of the individual versus society as a whole?  It can't happen in our environment where about half of the country (Democrats) don't want any discussion of anything troubling, they want their views upheld and legislated.  PERIOD!

Now this killer doesn't have to worry about studying for this Ph. D. or experiencing excruciating oral exams.  He will live off society and enjoy publicity and fame for twenty or thirty years, or the rest of his life.

We are on a fullcrum.  Vote Obama for more of the same.  Vote Romney for true change with hope for a free future where society can be supported over one individual.



Tuesday, June 5, 2012

President Obama a Killer.


  • President Obama has taken for himself the right to arbitrarily kill innocent people - people not indicted, tried nor found guilty of anything.

    Obama is, therefore, a killer. He has ordered the deaths of American citizens and recently in Pakistan, another human being: Abu Yahya al-Libi. Do you or I know what this man did? Was he found guilty of anything? Under our laws, he is, therefore, innocent. Yet, our president ordered him killed. I have no idea what this man did or did not do, and I will never know. If that isn't frightening ...to all American citizens I don't know what is.

    You Democrats who read the NY Times and saw the networks excoriate former president Bush for "enhanced interrogation" -- waterboarding included -- and agreed that his actions were wrong, against the law and against humanity ("torture") , how can you condone arbitrary killings ordered by our president? HAVE YOU EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT IT? What if it was a mistake and many, many innocent human beings have been killed by these drones. "Collaterial damage".

    You Democrats who are against capital punishment, after trials by juries of peers, and appeal after appeal, typically twenty years and $20,000,000 how can you accept arbitrary killings with the president of the United States being sole judge, jury and executioner by proxy. HOW CAN ANY OF YOU LIVE WITH YOURSELVES?

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

THEY THINK WE'RE STUPID

Yes, the Left, the so-called Progressives (sic) think we average Americans are stupid.

The Progressives (sic) think that they really know better than you do what cereals to buy your kids? They think you are stupid because you don't understand difference between Tony the Tiger and whole grains. They think you as a consumer need the government's protection. They think you are stupid because you (of course none of them) paid and borrowed too much for housing and didn't understand the mortgage documents as they clearly do, being much smarter than you.  They think you are fat because of schools or food companies.  You know it's because you choose to eat and not exercise.  After all, health care and insurance costs -- courtesy of the government price fixing -- are the same for you if you're obese, anorexic or average, so where's any incentive not to eat and watch TV?

Why can a government gaggle of bureaucrats know more about what you want and need better than you can for yourself?


Those few -- Democrat autocrat-wanna-bes -- cannot foretell the future any better than you or I can. But they want to tell us how to lead our lives, what to buy, what to eat, how to borrow, what to pay executives, how to manage companies. (Do THEY live their lives any better? Do THEY buy more intelligently? Do THEY eat better? Do THEY borrow more smartly? Do THEY have successful experience in hiring executives who can manage companies profitably? Have THEY ever managed a company or even managed people before? Have the actual policies they have passed over the past 75 years reduced poverty, increased affordable healthcare, expanded and improved education?)  Any review of all the government projection errors, from corn prices to Solyndra, from unemployment statistics to Federal Reserve growth projections to gas prices proves the government bureaucrats can't guess any better than you or I, yet they are running your lives.  That could be spelled r u i n i n g.

The government of the Democrats thinks that you and I all are too stupid to survive without the government watching out over us.  This is the same government that takes money only from the successful -- whom they politically, and falsely, label the 1%, but is closer to 30% -- whom they think are the only ones who can succeed without government assistance.  But is that true?  Are the rest of us -- the 99% or 70% -- really unable to cope with our lives without Democratic Party overseers telling us how to? 

No!  So tell them in November to give us back our freedom.

We don't need Superman to bring back truth, justice and the American Way, we need President Romney!

One of the experienced, successful 55% who pay federal income taxes.  He can help the remaining 45% get to an income level so you, too, are able to contribute to the American Way on your own.




Tuesday, May 8, 2012

The issue of the conservatives (sic) versus the Progressives (sic)  is not ideas -- conservative or progressive (sic) -- it is power. For the most part the Left has it because the arms of communication, the media, the educational system is under the spell of the Left. Propaganda Power leans left.


Then there's the 88 major union bosses and myriad trial lawyers put into power and riches through legislation who in turn shower the proceeds of legislation (monopoly dues extraction and class-action settlements) into the Democratic Party which writes.

The Right has been busy creating companies, jobs and prosperity allowing the Left to use that wealth to gain and retain power. The Right tends toward modesty and restraint, the Left anything but. So the Left will do anything for that power, and does. We have a president that will stop at nothing to be reelected, using the entire asset base of the United States of America, lawful or not, he cares not, since power and "truth" is in the hands of the winner.

The terms "conservative" and "progressive" are inaccurate.  The so-called conservatives do not want the status quo of union boss power, a huge centralized government, dictatoral powers by the president and entrenched politicians.  The so-called Progressives are not progressive, they have the power and want to keep it using any means available, including dividing the population into discrete groups and showering each with something for which they'll vote in the Progressives

The Right has to change to win this Second Civil War, the second internal war for the survival of the United States and that for which it stands.  It needs to keep to its ideals, but become winner-take-all fighters for truth, justice (equally for all no matter wealth or nose color), and the American Way.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Good Job, Mr. President, except...

GROWTH IN GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (USA)
Eleven quarters since the official end of a recession
Under President Barack Obama    Under President Ronald Reagan
2.4%                                                                 6.1%

Over the last year GDP has grown by $600,000,000,000;
The deficit by $1,300,000,000,000

Thursday, April 26, 2012

I applaud you, Mr. President!

I applaud you, Mr. President.  You just conceived and assembled a  fail-safe method of bringing to an abrupt end any and all future genocide.  (Why weren't you around when Adolf Hitler was visiously attacking and arbitrarily killing one single targeted entity -- Jews -- for political and ideological reasons?)  The United States Atrocities Prevention Board.  YES!  As you so aptly and emotionally stated in your speech: "Never again."  Such a brilliant turn of a word.  Interagency it'll be and permanent with members from the Department of the Treasury, State Department, and U. S. Department of Defense, while chaired by Samantha Powers, the National Security Council senior director for multilateral and humanitarian affairs.  (Appropriate name, hers.)

"National sovereignty is never a license to slaughter...And when the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony continued its atrocities in Central Africa, I ordered a small number of American advisors to help Uganda and its neighbors pursue the LRA.  And when I made that announcement, I directed my National Security Council to review our progress after 150 days.  We have done so, and today I can announce that our advisors will continue their efforts to bring this madman to justice..."  That'll stop him.

Our president demanded the resignation of President Bashar al-Assad, the overthrow of his government, and an end to nearly five decades of Ba’ath Party rule.  Well, keep talking Mr. President, while another ten thousand Syrians get killed.  But hey, that's not the Holocaust.

"And our diplomacy continues, because in Darfur, in Abyei, in Southern Kordofan and the Blue Nile, the killing of innocents must come to an end..."  Sometime; until then, we have the Board.

"That does not mean that we intervene militarily every time there’s an injustice in the world.  We cannot and should not.  It does mean we possess many tools -- diplomatic and political, and economic and financial, and intelligence and law enforcement and our moral suasion.."

Keep talking, President Obama...




Tuesday, April 24, 2012

     I am hoping (against hope) that Romney will eschew the Republican fear of not being popular in the New York Times. Mr. Romney: the Times will try to seduce you by playing nice, then attempt to crush your every breath. It has worked for decades and look at where we are: nearing moral and financial bankruptcy. Of the media, only MSNBC is honest: it is the far-left mouthpiece of the Progressives. And for the rest of you America-loving voters: invest in your future, invest in Romney and conservative members of Congress. Yes, keep your nose to the grindstone (the government won’t pay YOU, only left-wing “activists”) but pay and stay in the fight against unions, trial lawyers, George Looney and Barack Obama. They want to own you and crush freedom and free enterprise. Donate and talk to everyone, convince only one person about how dangerous the Progressive agenda is, and we — America — will win.

Does Candidate Romney have an O'Bomb?

It has been almost four years since Mitt Romney watched John McCain take the Republican nomination from him.  Four years!  Has Mr. Romney been sitting around shrewedly investing his well-earned fortune?  Or has he been carefully preparing for the moment when the Republican nomination is his?  Has he been investing in his future by carefully and legally combing every possible record, locating and interviewing (or having interviewed) people with whom Barack Obama had some relationship back in his Hawaiian or Occidental College days?  The so-called popular media has had no interest in the real Barack Obama for fear it might derail their careful narrative of the country's first African American president.  And so far in 2012 there is nothing about President Obama's background unearthed.  It is almost as though he never existed, never had a footprint.  Who financed his college and post graduate education?  What were his grades, extracurricular activities, writings?  No one seems to know.  And the extent they care depends on whether they are liberal Progressives caring only about keeping their pet president in office even though his true accomplishments are scant; or Republican conservatives who seem to want him, his philosophies, policies and personnel out.

Stay tuned for some answers.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Most of us are average

The Far-left indoctrinates kids to "change the world" and that they all are "special". Truth is: most of us are average. A tiny, tiny few will ever change anything but many if not most are made to feel guilty for being simply average and not trying to change the world. The basis of  democracy and, for that matter capitalism, lies in each person living their lives for themselves not others.  The People -- everyone together -- make decisions for themselves, which in the main become best for the most people.  More people are happy simply making themselves happy. Isn't THAT the goal of a life?  For the Founders of country the pursuit of happiness was paramount.  The Progressive mantra of change and equality is a huge lie for them to gain power. Period.  So I say worry about yourself first, if everyone does that, the world will be a better place.  But with that pursuit of happiness must come self-discipline along with written rules of law which are obeyed.  Happiness is not pursuing pleasure with abandon, that also seems to be part of the Progressive mantra.

Here's the article from the Seattle Times today that brought on my post:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2017976951_brooks15.html

If you attend a certain sort of conference, hang out at a certain sort of coffee shop or visit a certain sort of university, you've probably run into some of these wonderful young people who are doing good. Typically, they've spent a year studying abroad. They've traveled in the poorer regions of the world. Now they have devoted themselves to a purpose larger than self.

Often they are bursting with enthusiasm for some social entrepreneurship project: making a cheap water-purification system, starting a company that will empower Rwandan women by selling their crafts in boutiques around the world.

These people are refreshingly un-cynical. Their hip service ethos is setting the moral tone for the age. Idealistic and uplifting, their worldview is spread by enlightened advertising campaigns, from Bennetton years ago to everything Apple has ever done.

It's hard not to feel inspired by all these idealists, but their service religion does have some shortcomings. In the first place, many of these social entrepreneurs think they can evade politics. They have little faith in the political process and believe that real change happens on the ground beneath it.

That's a delusion. You can cram all the nongovernmental organizations you want into a country, but if there is no rule of law and if the ruling class is predatory then your achievements won't add up to much.

Furthermore, important issues always spark disagreement. Unless there is a healthy political process to resolve disputes, the ensuing hatred and conflict will destroy everything the altruists are trying to build.

There's little social progress without political progress. Unfortunately, many of today's young activists are really good at thinking locally and globally, but not as good at thinking nationally and regionally.

Second, the prevailing service religion underestimates the problem of disorder. Many of the activists talk as if the world can be healed if we could only insert more care, compassion and resources into it.

History is not kind to this assumption. Most poverty and suffering — whether in a country, a family or a person — flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it.

Yet one rarely hears social entrepreneurs talk about professional policing, honest courts or strict standards of behavior; it's more uplifting to talk about microloans and sustainable agriculture.

In short, there's only so much good you can do unless you are willing to confront corruption, venality and disorder head-on. So if I could, presumptuously, recommend a reading list to help these activists fill in the gaps in the prevailing service ethos, I'd start with the novels of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, or at least the movies based on them.

The noir heroes like Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon" served as models for a generation of Americans, and they put the focus squarely on venality, corruption and disorder and how you should behave in the face of it.

A noir hero is a moral realist. He assumes that everybody is dappled with virtue and vice, especially himself. He makes no social-class distinction and only provisional moral distinctions between the private eyes like himself and the criminals he pursues. The assumption in a Hammett book is that the good guy has a spotty past, does spotty things and that the private eye and the criminal are two sides to the same personality.

He (or she — the women in these stories follow the same code) adopts a layered personality. He hardens himself on the outside in order to protect whatever is left of the finer self within.

He is reticent, allergic to self-righteousness and appears unfeeling, but he is motivated by a disillusioned sense of honor. The world often rewards the wrong things, but each job comes with obligations and even if everything is decaying you should still take pride in your work. Under the cynical mask, there is still a basic sense of good order, that crime should be punished and bad behavior shouldn't go uncorrected. He knows he's not going to be uplifted by his work; that to tackle the hard jobs he'll have to risk coarsening himself, but he doggedly plows ahead.

This worldview had a huge influence as a generation confronted crime, corruption, fascism and communism. I'm not sure I can see today's social entrepreneurs wearing fedoras and trench coats. But noir's moral realism would be a nice supplement to today's prevailing ethos. It would fold some hardheadedness in with today's service mentality. It would focus attention on the core issues: order and rule of law.

And it would be necessary. Contemporary Washington, not to mention parts of the developing world, may be less seedy than the cities in the noir stories, but they are equally laced with self-deception and self-dealing.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin

Excellent assessment by black author Shelby Steele:  (From The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2012, page A15.)

OPINION Updated April 4, 2012, 7:17 p.m. ET Shelby Steele: The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin


The absurdity of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.Article Comments (665) more in Opinion

By SHELBY STEELE

Two tragedies are apparent in the Trayvon Martin case. The first is obvious: A teenager—unarmed and committing no crime—was shot dead. Dressed in a "hoodie," a costume of menace, he crossed paths with a man on the hunt for precisely such clichés of menace. Added to this—and here is the rub—was the fact of his dark skin.

Maybe it was more the hood than the dark skin, but who could argue that the skin did not enhance the menace of the hood at night and in the eyes of someone watching for crime. (Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are black though we are only 12% of the population.) Would Trayvon be alive today had he been walking home—Skittles and ice tea in hand—wearing a polo shirt with an alligator logo? Possibly. And does this make the ugly point that dark skin late at night needs to have its menace softened by some show of Waspy Americana? Possibly.

What is fundamentally tragic here is that these two young males first encountered each other as provocations. Males are males, and threat often evokes a narcissistic anger that skips right past reason and into a will to annihilate: "I will take you out!" There was a terrible fight. Trayvon apparently got the drop on George Zimmerman, but ultimately the man with the gun prevailed. Annihilation was achieved.

If this was all there was to it, the Trayvon/Zimmerman story would be no more than a cautionary tale, yet another admonition against the hair-trigger male ego. But this story brought reaction from the White House: "If I had a son he would look like Trayvon," said the president. The Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, ubiquitous icons of black protest, virtually battled each other to stand at the bereaved family's side—Mr. Jackson, in a moment of inadvertent honesty, saying, "There is power in blood . . . we must turn a moment into a movement." And then there was the spectacle of black Democrats in Congress holding hearings on racial profiling with Trayvon's parents featured as celebrities.

In fact Trayvon's sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America's civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the "poetic truth" that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.

The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this "truth" has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.
If Trayvon Martin was a victim of white racism (hard to conceive since the shooter is apparently Hispanic), his murder would be an anomaly, not a commonplace. It would be a bizarre exception to the way so many young black males are murdered today. If there must be a generalization in all this—a call "to turn the moment into a movement"—it would have to be a movement against blacks who kill other blacks. The absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites.

So the idea that Trayvon Martin is today's Emmett Till, as the Rev. Jackson has said, suggests nothing less than a stubborn nostalgia for America's racist past. In that bygone era civil rights leaders and white liberals stood on the highest moral ground. They literally knew themselves—given their genuine longing to see racism overcome—as historically transformative people. If the world resisted them, as it surely did, it only made them larger than life.

It was a time when standing on the side of the good required true selflessness and so it ennobled people. And this chance to ennoble oneself through a courageous moral stand is what so many blacks and white liberals miss today—now that white racism is such a defeated idea. There is a nostalgia for that time when posture alone ennobled. So today even the hint of old-fashioned raw racism excites with its potential for ennoblement.

For the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton, for the increasingly redundant civil rights establishment, for liberal blacks and the broader American left, the poetic truth that white racism is somehow the real culprit in this tragedy is redemption itself. The reason Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have become such disreputable figures on our cultural landscape is that they are such quick purveyors of poetic truth rather than literal truth.

The great trick of poetic truth is to pass itself off as the deep and essential truth so that hard facts that refute it must be dismissed in the name of truth. O.J. Simpson was innocent by the poetic truth that the justice system is stacked against blacks. Trayvon was a victim of racist stereotyping—though the shooter never mentioned his race until asked to do so.

There is now a long litany of racial dust-ups—from Tawana Brawley to the Duke University lacrosse players to the white Cambridge police officer who arrested Harvard professor Skip Gates a summer ago—in which the poetic truth of white racism and black victimization is invoked so that the actual truth becomes dismissible as yet more racism.

When the Cambridge cop or the Duke lacrosse players or the men accused of raping Tawana Brawley tried to defend themselves, they were already so stained by poetic truth as to never be entirely redeemed. No matter the facts—whether Trayvon Martin was his victim or his assailant—George Zimmerman will also never be entirely redeemed.

And this points to the second tragedy that Trayvon's sad demise highlights. Before the 1960s the black American identity (though no one ever used the word) was based on our common humanity, on the idea that race was always an artificial and exploitive division between people. After the '60s—in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake.

It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt. The tragedy surrounding Trayvon's death is not in the possibility that it might have something to do with white racism; the tragedy is in the lustfulness with which so many black leaders, in conjunction with the media, have leapt to exploit his demise for their own power.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).

A version of this article appeared April 5, 2012, on page A15 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Exploitation of Trayvon Martin.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Mr. President, Free Enterprise Works

Mr. President: Free Markets Work.


As doubtlessly you read this morning (March 27, 2012) in The Wall Street Journal, Mr. President, the article “Steel Finds Shale Sweet Spot.” It illustrates that free enterprise is alive and well in America and assisting in your agenda. Innovative technical advances from the private sector in oil and gas drilling, hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) coupled with horizontal drilling, allows access to huge deposits of oil and natural gas nearing two miles below the earth’s surface. Usual vertical drilling reaches only a few hundred feet down. Some government projections indicate a hundred year supply of natural gas and twenty-four billion barrels of oil within these shale lands in the contiguous 48 United States.

In ways central control of an industry can never predict, as the Journal article described, the cascading consequences of this technology come from a newly-accessible large supply of natural gas which pushes prices down – more than 35% from a year ago. Lower energy prices benefit the national economic turnabout. More gas creates lower prices which triggers increased useage (demand). The unchanged price of the major gas competitor, coal, causes its demand (and useage) to drop. This forces companies to shutter the unneeded coal plants expanding your agenda, Mr. President, of exchanging dirtier coal-burning plants for cheaper and cleaner-burning natural gas. Lower energy costs increase the profits of energy-dependent companies, where natural gas can be substituted for oil. For the steel industry more sophisticated drilling creates more demand for tubular steel products, such as the needed pipes, tubes and joints. More demand from lower prices creates a need for more production employees and those needed for support of higher sales of these steel products. The increased profits in the steel industry spreads out to suppliers of everything from transportation to accounting computers to toilet paper. The expected higher profits have increased the price of steel companies, with X – U. S. Steel’s New York Stock Exchange symbol – increasing from a 52-week low of $18.85 to yesterday’s close of $29.54, a change of over $14 billion accruing on paper to retirees, pension and mutual funds and other investors.

You see, Mr. President, the free markets work and work to enable your agenda. You might relax and let them just happen.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

FILTHY REMARKS BY FUND RAISERS LOWER THE PRESIDENCY

I MAY BE OLD, BUT I SIMPLY DO NOT UNDERSTAND HOW ANY AMERICAN CAN BE PROUD OF A PRESIDENT WHO BY HIS ACTIONS ENCOURAGES FILTHY REMARKS BY BILL MAHER AND THIS CEE-LO-GREEN  (see-low, how low can you go?) DUDE?


CAN ANYONE ANSWER? DO YOU JUST TAKE ANYTHING FROM THESE SCUMS IN ORDER TO BE POPULAR WITH YOUR PEER GROUP?

Bill Maher, donor of $1,000,000 to President Obama's reelection: "C-word" and "T-word" about Sarah Palin and unrepeatable comment about Ms. Palin's daughter.
Co-Lo-Green at an Obama fundraiser: "F-word" and flipped up his middle finger to the crowd.

DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND THE LOWERING OF THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENCY?

PRESIDENT OBAMA HAS LOWERED THE PRESTIGE OF THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES LOWER THAN "I AM NOT A CROOK" NIXON OR W. JEFFERSON [sic] CLINTON, WHO TOOK ADVANTAGE OF AN IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG INTERN IN HIS POSITION AS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN. PLEASE.

DO THE LIBERALS SIMPLY TAKE ANYTHING IN ORDER TO BE POPULAR WITH THEIR PEER GROUP?

MOM AND DAD ARE ROLLING OVER IN THEIR GRAVES.

Monday, March 12, 2012

OBEDIENCE TRAINING

Obedience Training

The software company Microsoft was founded in 1975 by nineteen and a twenty-two year-old kids in Albuquerque where their first customer was. It incorporated in June 25, 1981, moving to Bellevue, Washington, the kids’ hometown. It performed an initial public offering of its securities on March 13, 1986. Almost exactly twenty-six years ago! Its 1986 revenues were $197,514,000 with 1,153 people. Driving force Bill Gates was brilliantly innovative, yet business savvy enough to take advantage of circumstances as they came up. He built the company the old-fashioned way, by creating something he thought customers would want or need. By grindingly hard, disciplined work. By a cadre of equally dedicated mostly young people.

He was a successful young businessman in a free enterprise society. Or was he?

On May 18, 1998 the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) of William J. Clinton’s Administration and some states filed a set of civil actions against Microsoft Corporation pursuant to Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The government alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers with operating system and Internet World Wide Web browser sales.

The trial started on October 19, 1998. On November 5, 1999, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found that Microsoft's dominance of the x86 based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly. The judgment was split in two parts. On April 3, 2000, he issued his conclusions of law that the company committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying, all violations of the Sherman Act. On June 7, 2000, the court ordered Microsoft broken in two. One part would make operating systems and the other to produce other software components.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Judge Jackson's rulings on Microsoft’s appeal.

Judge Jackson had given interviews to the news media while hearing the case, a violation of the Code of Conduct for U.S. judges; the appeals court accused him of unethical conduct for not accusing himself from the case.

George W. Bush became the Forty-third president of the United States on January 21, 2001.

The DOJ announced on September 6, 2001 that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty. Microsoft decided to draft a settlement proposal allowing PC manufacturers to adopt non-Microsoft software. Two month later the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case; some critics called it a slap on the wrist in that the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future, much less break it up. On June 30, 2004, the U.S. appeals court unanimously approved the settlement rejecting objections that the sanctions were inadequate.

So began the obedience training of Microsoft and the entire high-technology industry.

In 1995, Microsoft had but a single lobbyist; seven years later it had one of the largest Political Action Committees (PAC) in history. The software giant's budget for its PAC increased from about $16,000 in 1995 to $1.6 million in 2000. Total donations to political donations from Microsoft and its employees to political parties, candidates and PACs in the 2000 election cycle amounted to more than $6.1 million.

Fast forward to today: this is all very funny to Democratic senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) chairman of the committee leading an antitrust investigation of Google Inc. According to the Huffington Post, he smirked, "I consider myself a public works project right here…My colleagues call it the Leahy Full Employment Act." But there is something more ominous with the ascension of the present central control of business by Washington, D. C.. Virtually every business action in the United States of America requires approval from one or more federal government bureaucracy or entity headquartered in Washington, D. C. and many times part and parcel of approval is vigorish in the form of lobbying, campaign and other contributions.

In 2011, Google hired eighteen lobbying shops and around year end had over ninety separate individual human lobbyists and its reported $9.7 million spend beat Microsoft’s $7.3 million and its employing around eighty lobbyists.

A recent The Wall Street Journal article (Mar. 1, 2012, on page B2, “FTC Attorney to Join Microsoft”) said that Microsoft hired a senior Federal Trade Commission attorney who led several of the agency's antitrust investigations into Google Inc. It seems clear from these two bitter rivals that competition is as or more intense in our nation’s capital as it is in the commercial marketplace.

Subscribers to The Wall Street Journal typically read of at least one article a day describing an investigation, indictment, charge, inquiry, target. (Here’s a smattering: “Banks May Face Charges From SEC”; “Inquiry Targets Goldman Official”; Fund Company in Valuation Inquiry”; “Watchdog Targets Overdraft Charges”; “Insider Targets Expanding”; “SEC Charges Noble Ex-CEO In Nigeria Bribe Investigation”; “Regulators Scrutinize Ties With Exchanges”; “Investigators Probe a Rush At MF Global to Move Cash”; “Watchdog Aims to Put Focus on Credit Bureaus”; “SEC Opens An Inquiry Of Wynn Resorts”; “Sites Are Accused Of Privacy Failings”;”Foreign Bribe Case at Avon Presented To Grand Jury”; “Lawmakers Target Google’s Tracking”; “Ex-Bond Highflier Is Warned by SEC”; “Red Flags Ignored, DEA Says”; “Criminal Charges Are Prepared in BP Spill”; “Banks Sweat as Tax Net Tightens”; “SEC Ups Game to Find Rogue Firms”; Deutsche Telekom Settles Charges”; “BofA Settles Lending Case”; “CEO Takes Leave After Suit by SEC”; “Fed Raises Bar For Bank Deals”;”Fed Writes Sweeping Rules From Behind Closed Doors”; “New Old Media Battle Over Net Rules”)

One of the most enlightening is: “After AT&T: The New Antitrust Era” announcing not only the killing of a $39 billion merger agreed to by AT&T and T-MobileUSA but that hereafter few corporate transactions will be allowed without central control by the U. S. Government.

And in today’s Journal was “U. S. Warns Apple, Publishers” about Apple changing the business model of book publishing after accomplishing the same in recorded music with its $.99 per song which unbundled a song from a CD at a low price.

I call all of this “obedience training” mandating that companies “heel” on a short leash held by the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D. C. That is the future of the United States governed by the Democratic political party.