Sense of Events

That's not why they pay you the big bucks

2012-01-23T04:03:00.000Z

Why did the New York Giants win the NFC championship? Because San Francisco Giant player Kyle Williams, returning a punt, fumbled the ball deep in his own territory. Observe how he is (not) holding the ball. The Giants took possession and scored a field goal, ending the game.

Sure, Kyle, that's why they pay you a gazillion dollars per year.

Let the Silence resume!

2012-01-20T21:00:00.000Z

Noted Tennessee blogger Michael Silence is back online. A good day for the blogosphere!

Volkswagen's 2012 Super Bowl ad continues the Dark Side theme

2012-01-20T19:48:00.002Z

Remember last year's VW ad for the Super bowl?

Well, here is (purportedly) this year's Star Wars themed VW ad.

I guess ya gotta love dogs to get into it.

HT: Never Yet Melted.

Does Obama have other children? Well, none to speak of

2012-01-12T23:57:00.000Z

President Obama’s got sons? - In the Loop - The Washington Post:
What do you make of this, asks the Post:

President Obama, speaking last night in Chicago at a fundraiser at a private home, unloaded this bombshell:

Obama, according to the White House transcript, talked about “The first bill I signed — a bill that said that we’re going to have equal pay for equal work because I want my daughters treated the same way as my sons.”

Sons? What sons? How many? Where? Names? Do the girls know? (More importantly, does Michelle?)

Obama has sons? Who knew?

Reminds me of the old joke of a man boasting about his two kids with his wife standing nearby. He's asked whether he has any other kids. Flustered for a moment, he turns red in the face and leans to his interlocutor and replies, "Well, none to speak of."

When seconds count, the cops are only a half-hour away

2012-01-12T18:41:00.000Z

Woman Bound, Robbed When 911 Call Drops - Louisville News Story - WLKY Louisville

NEW ALBANY, Ind. -- A woman called 911 as her residence was broken into, but police didn't arrive at the house for more than a half-hour.

Police said the incident was a case of human error. It wasn't until a second call came in that the operator realized the mistake and immediately sent officers to the house.

"She was hysterical, saying that somebody was in the house, had a gun, was going to kill her. Then we lost our cell phone call," said Charles Conner.

Police said the New Albany house was broken into while a 23-year-old woman was home alone.

She needs to read this.

How Solyndra would have worked, if it had worked

2012-01-12T17:24:00.001Z

As you recall, Solyndra was a "green energy," Obama-led boondoggle that put the taxpayers in hock for more than $550 billion dollars. The company folded because it had no business plan worth the name, relied heavily (well, almost totally) on federal subsidies to begin with and, most importantly, did not have a marketable product (thin-film solar cells). That the failed companies were managed by Obama cronies - and they made millions no matter that the company flopped - is not beside the point. It is the point.

But let us suppose as a thought experiment that Solyndra had actually produced a useful product. How would it have gained a revenue stream? There is a real-world answer and it is provided by examining another famous government project, ~~Goverment~~ General Motors and its abortive attempt to produce a commercially viable hybrid auto, the Chevy Volt.

Commercial flop = government success

The Chevy Volt flops—Patrick Michaels - NYPOST.com:

By most accounts, “Government Motors” has stuck with the Volt mainly to please the Obama administration, which still owns a third of its stock in the wake of the 2009 government “rescue” of the company. But just how badly is the effort faring? Well, consider the 1,529 sold in December.

More than a third of those were fleet sales to corporations. None of these were the traditional large-fleet purchasers, i.e. Hertz, Avis and the other big rental companies. They were more like Verizon and General Electric — with GE having committed to buying 12,000 and having already purchased unspecified “hundreds,” with continued “daily” deliveries, as The Wall Street Journal reported recently.

Then there are the direct taxpayer buys. Fifty to New York City. The city of Deland, Fla., brags about buying five with an Energy Department grant. The federal General Services Administration has bought 101 so far, but President Obama has ordered it to procure only hybrid or high-mileage vehicles by 2015. (The taxpayers buy about 60,000 cars a year for GSA.

This is a textbook example of crony capitalism:

A. General Electric, of course, is Obama's pet corporation because its head, Jeffrey Immelt, is Obama's croniest of crony capitalists. So no wonder GE has "committed" to buying 12,000 Volts. They won't of course, but they'll find another way to scratch the backs of the robber barons in Washington.

B. "Then there are the direct taxpayer buys." I am sure you saw that municipal governments get federal money to buy Volts. Understand what this means: the government owns a third of GM, which makes it a truly major shareholder if not the largest shareholder. The government takes money (taxes) from you and me and then gives it to, say, Deland, Fla., so it can buy cars from a company the government controls. And Obama has ordered the GSA basically to buy nothing else until the end of his presumptive second term.

"Why didn't I think of that?"

Well, Obama said he wanted to spread the wealth around. The Mafia could not do it better.

But the whole "green" car racket is a scam, a gigantic corporate-welfare machine.

See also, "Buy A Honda, Kill a Polar Bear."

And today, this: "Bankrupt Solyndra seeking to pay bonuses."

Now seems an unlikely time for handing out bonuses at bankrupt Solyndra LLC, but that’s the plan of company attorneys intending to dole out up to a half-million dollars to persuade key employees to stay put.

Nearly two dozen Solyndra employees could receive bonuses ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 each under a proposal filed by Solyndra’s attorneys in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

That means that you and I are paying those bonuses. The looting continues.

Related: "Detroit unsure over the future of green cars." "But the economics are not attractive yet for the average consumer." What?

Answering the questions Glenn Reynolds won't!

2012-01-09T21:45:00.001Z

Seems Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has become the shrinking violet of the blogosphere. Maybe it's because he's pork-barreling around the Cayman Islands ("giving a speech" - hahaha, Glenn, good one!), or maybe it's because he's just gotten old and lazy like me, but he sure seems to ask or repeat a lot of questions while leaving the answer dangling. So here we go with his questions-without-answers, followed by the answers supplied by me:

Glenn's Q: Which successes were those?
My Answer: Obama got to more than 90 rounds of golf played.

Q: They’re not really going to ask for an exemption for themselves, are they?
A: Of course they will. Sheese.

Q: Johnny Depp-Gate: What Did the Mainstream Media Know and When Did They Know It?
A: They knew everything from the beginning, natch.

And same place:

Q: Hmmmm…“Why don’t White House visitor logs report Hollywood Halloween guests?
A: Because they are Democrats and they don't have to. Who's going to call them on it? The press? See just above.

Q: What Does Keith Olbermann Have Against Bald People?
A: Same thing he has against everyone else: he hates them.

Same post:

Q: I wonder what his boss thinks of Olbermann’s tweets attacking the follicly challenged?
A: This assumes his boss even thinks much of Olberman at all.

Q: Why can’t their candidate do this?
A: Because. He. Is. Mitt. Romney.

Q: THE DRUG WAR — WHICH SIDE ARE WE ON AGAIN? (This, being is all-caps, is therefore REALLY URGENT!)
A: The drug lords, of course.

Q: Can Qatar bail out France’s banlieues?
A: And all the rest of France, too.

Q: POLITICAL WIVES: Do They Hold All The Power?
A: Why would political wives be any different?

Q: IS POP CULTURE IN PARALYSIS?
A: No, it's in rigor mortis.

Actually answered this one:
WANT TO SEE YOUR PREEMIES IN THE NICU? Not if Jay-Z and Beyonce Are In the House.

It won't do any good to point out that some of these unanswered Qs were actually posted my temp blogger Ed Driscoll. It's Glenn's site and the buck stops there.

Answers! We demand answers! And thanks to me, not Glenn, you got 'em!

The future of aerial drones

2012-01-09T12:51:00.000Z

Japan's ministry of defense has developed a spherical flying machine that can hover like a helicopter, fly forward like an airplane and can even roll along the ground.

Conceptually, this machine is similar to circular-winged aircraft that were developed decades ago. Aerodynamicists have long known that circular wings can be extremely efficient. They are part of the class of design known as non-planar wings.

The aerodynamics of nonplanar wing systems that form closed loops are very interesting. Such configurations include box-planes, ring wings, joined wings, and "spiroid-tip" devices. Wings that form closed loops, such as the ring-wing illustrated below, do not eliminate the "tip vortices" or trailing vortex wakes even though the wing has no tips. Still, the vortex drag of the circular ring wing is just 50% that of a planar wing with the same span and total lift and the concept has been studied at several organizations, including early aviation pioneers, a major aircraft manufacturer, as well as several toy companies.

Israel and the "land for peace" fiction

2012-01-08T22:39:00.000Z

Caroline Glick :: The land-for-peace hoax:

Indeed the land-for-peace formula will be exposed as a twofold fiction. First, it is based on the false proposition that the peace process is a two-way street. Israel gives land, the Arabs give peace. But the inevitable death of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord under an Egyptian jihadist regime makes clear that the land-for-peace formula is a one-way street. Israeli land giveaways are permanent. Arab commitments to peace can be revoked at any time.

The conflict is not about land.

The plain fact is that Hamas, Fatah/Palestinian Authority and Hezbollah are united in one goal: the elimination of Israel as an independent, Jewish state. This has also been Syria's goal since modern Israel was founded in 1948. Syria is an Iranian client and I am sure no pixels need be expended to explain Iran's hostility to the Jewish nation. Israel's enemies want to destroy the country as a political entity. Hamas has said bluntly, over and again, that all Jews must be expelled or killed.

The conflict is over Israel's very existence, not its "borders."

Read the rest.

The Left's only question: Who is to rule, that is all

2012-01-07T21:23:00.000Z

The New Authoritarianism by Fred Siegel and Joel Kotkin - City Journal

Much of the administration’s approach has to do with a change in the nature of liberal politics. Today’s progressives cannot be viewed primarily as pragmatic Truman- or Clinton-style majoritarians. Rather, they resemble the medieval clerical class. Their goal is governmental control over everything from what sort of climate science is permissible to how we choose to live our lives. Many of today’s progressives can be as dogmatic in their beliefs as the most strident evangelical minister or mullah. Like Al Gore declaring the debate over climate change closed, despite the Climategate e-mails and widespread skepticism, the clerisy takes its beliefs as based on absolute truth. Critics lie beyond the pale.

"Progressives" have no absolute belief but in themselves. Their purpose is power. Political power is their bread and meat. It is their religion, their overriding quest. As I explained in, "The Po-Mo Deconstructed Presidency,"

One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power.

Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.

This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism, as reworked by Leninism. Since Marx held that his communist theory was literally scientific, his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely, they were certain. To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliche comes from). As formulated by Lenin et. al., truth is therefore not statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable and impermanent, the concept of truth being only practical. In practice, all of language became subservient to the dominance of the party, a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak.

As Orwell put it in 1984, "We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

Lewis Carroll understood this quite well in Through the looking Glass.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'

And that is the only question the Left is interested in. This explains why George W. Bush's policies were bad when he was president, but are good when continued by Barack Obama. Statements about policies are not really about the policies, but about getting or keeping power. That's all.

Update: The SF Chronicle's Deb Saunders explains how this has worked in the last few weeks, another example of when the Republicans did something, it was bad, but when the Democrats do it, it's good.

Stalin responds to Hitler Downfall mashups

2012-01-06T22:33:00.001Z

What might have been, Uncle Joe.

Why Obama should be called, "Your Excellency"

2012-01-05T21:43:00.000Z

An Occupy leader in Iowa thinks that President Obama should be called, "Your Excellency."

Well, there is good reason.

In November 2008, shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, Valerie Jarrett, co-chair of his transition team, appeared on "Meet the Press." She told host Tom Brokaw that "Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one."

Shouldn't someone who had reached the political heights that Jarrett had reached know that kings rule but presidents are elected to serve and are accountable to Congress, the courts and the voters? ...

A little more than three years after Jarrett declared Obama's majesty, his spokesman Jay Carney warned on the day of the Iowa caucuses that "if Republicans choose the path of obstruction rather than cooperation, then the president is not going to sit here . .. he's going to take the actions that he can take using his executive authority." ...

Clearly our American arrangement of checks and balances written into the Constitution is an impediment to this president. Before Carney made his statement Tuesday, Obama himself said in October that "we can no longer wait for Congress to do its job. ... So where Congress won't act, I will."

As the Cato Institute's Roger Pilon notes, "All of Obama’s appointments yesterday are illegal under the Constitution." Why?

But clear beyond the slightest doubt is the language of the statute (itself unconstitutional on any number of grounds not relevant here). As my colleague Mark Calabria wrote yesterday, “authorities under the Act remain with the Treasury Secretary until the Director is ‘confirmed by the Senate.’” A recess appointment, even if it were constitutional, is not a Senate confirmation. There is simply no wiggle room in that language that gives Cordray any authority, as litigation will soon make plain.

Except, of course, that we have a "living" Constitution, which means that you can use it to justify whatever you want to do. So Obama's actions were illegal? Sez who? Congress, especially the Senate, whose delegated powers Obama just usurped? That is to laugh. Congress, especially the Reid-led Senate, will not raise a whimper.

God's plan just fell apart, I guess

2012-01-05T18:05:00.000Z

RealClearReligion - A Divine Call Won't Get You Votes

Michele Bachmann explained at the beginning of her campaign why she was running, "It means I have a sense of assurance about the direction I think that God is speaking into my heart that I should go."

And she is not the only one "called by God" to discover that apparently God didn't help her follow the call very well.

There is a certain way of speaking among evangelical Christians (not all, necessarily, but as a demographic) that uses divine call or revelation as a crutch to prop up what the speaker wants to do or persuade others to do.

Examples:

When I was a landlord, my last tenant told me that God had revealed to them that I was to allow them to break their lease early and with no penalty. My reminder to them that they had also told me when signing the lease that God had led them to rent my house was of no import. It's easy for God to change his mind when you change yours, yes?

A Baptist church member whom I have know for decades told me that one day the Sunday School superintendent walked up to him and said, "God has told me that you are going to teach our youth class!" To which the member replied, "God didn't send me that memo."

Which brings me back to presidential politics. The linked article also includes this nugget:

Herman Cain explained his call this way: "Whether that is ultimately to become the President of the United States or not, I don't know. I just know at this point I am following God's plan."

So Cain's campaign was a divine plan that apparently included public humiliation? (Actually, since the Lord "has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts," maybe so. The question for Cain is just where is he with the Lord now? And that's a question for all of us, too.)

There are three things I have learned about God's call:

1. I am not a messiah, only God is a redeemer, deliverer or savior. So I view very suspectly people who claim to be called by God to save the rest of us, whether religiously, politically or socially. The people whom I would say really are doing that, however slightly or greatly, have all been mortified that it they are God's instrument. Which leads to ...

2. The object God's call is to make more apparent the glory of God among people, not to exalt the hearer of the call. That means ...

3. God's call almost never corresponds, even remotely, with what you want to do. Hence, any specific desire that exists, however slightly, in your heart that a subsequent divine call seems so wonderfully to endorse is almost absolutely not the voice of God but of the Deceiver. God's will is rarely appealing, at first.

And so, at the cusp of this New Year, to be reminded of the Wesleyan Covenant of Commitment:

Commit yourselves to Christ as his servants. Give yourselves to him that you may belong to him. Christ has many services to be done. Some are more easy and honorable; others are more difficult and disgraceful. Some are suitable to our inclinations and interests, others are contrary to both.

In some we may please Christ and please ourselves. But then there are other works where we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves. It is necessary, therefore, that we consider what it means to be a servant of Christ. Let us, therefore, go to Christ, and pray:
I am no longer my own but yours, O God.
Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you,
exalted for you or trodden underfoot for you;
let me be full, let me be empty,
let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and with a willing heart
yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours.
So be it. And let this covenant renewed on earth be fulfilled in heaven. Amen.

Michele Bachmann Drops Out of Presidential Race

2012-01-04T18:06:00.000Z

Michele Bachmann Drops Out of Presidential Race - ABC News

Rep. Michele Bachmann suspended her presidential campaign after placing sixth in Tuesday’s Iowa Republican caucuses, she announced today.
“Last night, the people of Iowa spoke with a very clear voice, so I have decided to stand aside,” Bachmann said at a news conference, flanked by her parents, husband and five children. “I have no regrets, none whatsoever. We never compromised our principles and we can leave this race knowing we ran it with the utmost integrity.”

The best news I've seen from the Iowa caucus.

Apres L'America - les deluge!

2012-01-03T21:00:00.000Z

After America - by Zbigniew Brzezinski | Foreign Policy:

Not so long ago, a high-ranking Chinese official, who obviously had concluded that America's decline and China's rise were both inevitable, noted in a burst of candor to a senior U.S. official: "But, please, let America not decline too quickly." Although the inevitability of the Chinese leader's expectation is still far from certain, he was right to be cautious when looking forward to America's demise.

For if America falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor -- not even China. International uncertainty, increased tension among global competitors, and even outright chaos would be far more likely outcomes.

Good analysis, but the best one I have seen yet is this one:

Actually, this is pretty much how Europe does it

2012-01-03T20:04:00.000Z

Dave Barry’s 2011 Year in Review:

In Europe, the economic crisis continues to worsen, especially in Greece, which has been operating under a financial model in which the government spends approximately $150 billion a year while taking in revenues totaling $336.50 from the lone Greek taxpayer, an Athens businessman who plans to retire in April. Greece has been making up the shortfall by charging everything to a MasterCard account that the Greek government applied for — in what some critics consider a questionable financial practice — using the name “Germany.”

As succinct and accurate explanation as you are likely to find.

If you don't fly a fighter jet ...

2012-01-03T16:26:00.002Z

This is as close as you are likely to come. Click to full screen and select the HD version.

HT: Neptunus Lex

I was accepted into the naval flight training program my freshman year in college, but the Army stepped up and offered me an ROTC scholarship, so I became a soldier and not a naval aviator. Even so, I learned to fly while stationed at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1977. I was not yet married and was collecting TDY pay for the Artillery officer Basic Course. Flying was not expensive then - the Cessna 150 student pilots used rented "wet" (including fuel) for $14 per hour. Yes, you read right - fly an hour for $14, including gas. The instructor charged $7 on top of that, but after you soloed you didn't need the IP very much.

This was at the flying club there, of course. The only place you could learn to fly on the Army dime was at Fort Rucker, Ala.

British dhimmitude pushback

2012-01-01T23:42:00.000Z

Frankly, I am surprised the Palace of Westminster had the cojones.

Ah, to fisk like a Brit!

2012-01-01T23:37:00.000Z

Only the British have retained enough elegance of expression to deliver a fisking like this.

Meanwhile, utterly lost in his own green dreamworld, the man supposedly in charge of energy policy, Chris Huhne (below), babbles about chequering thousands of square miles of our countryside and our coastal waters with a further 32,000 crazily expensive and useless windmills. It is a vision so insane that one cannot imagine why men in white coats have not already hauled him off – rather more expeditiously than the Essex police who, we are told, wish to see him prosecuted for perverting the course of justice over an alleged traffic offence.

Even if Huhne’s pipedream could be achieved (it is technically out of the question), he still has not grasped that it would be necessary to pay billions of pounds more to build dozens of grown-up gas-fired power stations, as essential back-up for those still days that render the energy contributions of windmills all too frequently derisory. Something that we can predict with certainty is not going to happen in 2012 is any trace of sanity on these matters entering this absurdly dangerous man’s charmless head.

It's good to see that the English have not lost the art of English.

Hello, universe, anyone home? Hello?

2012-01-01T12:02:00.001Z

The Fermi Paradox raises its head again, this time over at Outside the Beltway. Doug Mataconis posts, "Hey, Is Anyone Out There?" in which he tries to answer the paradox. The paradox, first formulated by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, is this:

The universe is many billions of years old.
Fermi calculated that an alien species smart enough to become spacefarers could reach any point in the galaxy in five million years.
But we we have no scientific evidence that aliens beings have been here.

So, Fermi asked, where is everybody?

Doug does a good job in laying out the premises of the paradox and offers some perspectives I haven't seen before, including that while the galaxy may be teeming with intelligent species, they have all become addicted to entertainment and simply are uninterested in space travel, a notion floated by Geoffrey Miller.

Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. ...

Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction. As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally normal conditions.

The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves.

Behaviorally, this makes a lot of sense, but it falls into the same trap that pretty much all discussions about the commonality of intelligent life off earth do: the assumption that earth and humanity are typical examples of planets and life anywhere else in the universe. This is usually referred to as the Theory of Mediocrity, that earth and its creatures are just average, universally. Doug himself endorses this notion in a comment to his post: "it does seem hard to believe that we are the only intelligent form of life to ever evolve in our own universe." The problem is that Mediocrity is not a scientific conclusion but a presumption that is necessary for ETI searchers to do any work at all.

Last year I put together a slide presentation for the topic to discuss Fermi's Paradox at my church. You will probably be surprised at the conclusion. Here tis:

Fullscreen here.

Related:

Stephen Hawking, science fiction writer

This is pretty impressive, too.

Why We Matter (link was dead, fixed now.)

Let there be

So this is how the 99 percent lives

2011-12-31T15:57:00.000Z

Obama’s vacation home in Hawaii - The Washington Post

So President Obama stands behind the Occupiers? How nice to know that our president comports with the unwashed 99 percent, especially in his choice of vacation getaways.

Americans love movies, but ...

2011-12-31T15:52:00.000Z

... we are rapidly coming to dislike movie theaters - and other movie goers.

I'll tell you why movie revenue is dropping... :: rogerebert.com

Kickoff

2011-12-30T23:48:00.001Z

Opening kickoff, MSU receiving. They had a good return, but got sacked deep on their second down. Wound up punting.

It"s Music City Bowl day

2011-12-30T22:50:00.001Z

At LP Field for the Music City Bowl, my alma mater, Wake Forest, playing. Miss. State.

Temps in the high 50s, clear sky. Great night for football in Nashville!

The venue:

Ultimate gamer gear

2011-12-30T18:30:00.000Z

I do not play video games myself since I have, you know, a life. But for those who do, I present the ultimate gamer station.

NYT: Gun owners less lethal than general population

2011-12-29T16:08:00.000Z

The New York Times has the numbers to show that people who possess firearm carry permits are six times less likely to commit murder than the general population.

But of course, since no real reporters actually work at the Grey Lady, they did not understand the portent of their own data

Why does Obama do the things he does?

2011-12-29T15:00:00.000Z

Victor Davis Hanson on Barack Obama:

For Obama the great tragedy of a Solyndra was not the corruption of old-style fast-buck artists masking their greed through insider green lobbying with members of his administration, but rather that such scandals (along with Climategate and the implosion of Al Gore) have sidetracked the entire green philosophy that mandated more government unionized employees, government technocrats, and government tax collectors to reorder society itself.

The result of all this is a sort of unending but rarely expressed war. The business man does not know what his taxes are, only that they should go up, given his privilege. He is judged not by the good that he does but by the excessive money he makes. The corporation does not know what the rules of the game are, whether his energy is too polluting, his workers not unionized enough, or his product not regulated enough. None believe Obamacare, as promised, will reduce costs. None believe that government borrowing and massive new entitlements are reducing unemployment and raising GDP. None believe that wealth can be created by record deficits and aggregate debt. None believe that printing ever more money will not lead to inflation.

What we have, then, is a war on two ends: the better off are hesitant to work more, given their fears that additional profits will either be more difficult to come by or not remain their own; the poor are hesitant to work more, given their expectations that entitlements will be extended and will be easier to come by. They both expect more government and they both as a result are not so eager to take risks and seek greater income in the private sector.

The result of Obama’s war is the current three-year slowdown. Obama in response counts on two strategies to nevertheless be reelected: either at some point the private sector will conclude that it is not going to get any better, and thus it is preferable to shrug, take its medicine, and get back to work, and so the economy picks up a little in 2012; or, to the degree that Obama can blame the lengthy pause solely on the minority of the undeserving rich, he believes that an angry and fearful bare majority may agree.

The question is truly begged: If we stipulate that the effective destruction of America's economy is not an actual objective of a president whose political orientation is the most radically leftist of any figure to occupy the office (or most any office in Washington, for that matter), then: what would he be doing differently if that really was his objective? He would be doing hardly anything differently.

This administration is not so baffling perhaps, when viewed through this lens:

Bill Whittle explains in detail:

Hamas gets to the point

2011-12-28T22:27:00.000Z

normblog: The dulcet tones of Hamas:

As delivered by Ismail Haniyeh:
We say today, explicitly, so it cannot be explained otherwise, that the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel] from the blessed land of Palestine. The Hamas movement will lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine - all of Palestine, Allah willing. Allah Akbar and praise Allah. We say with transparency and in a clear manner, that Palestinian reconciliation - and all sides must know this - cannot come at the expense of [our] principles, at the expense of the resistance. These principles are absolute and cannot be disputed: Palestine - all of Palestine - is from the sea to the river. We won't relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine. The involvement of Hamas at any stage with the interim objective of liberation of [only] Gaza, the West Bank, or Jerusalem, does not replace its strategic view concerning Palestine and the land of Palestine.
You can see and hear him saying all that here. Next time you hear some Western leftist (verkrappt branch) mouthing off with the slogan 'from the river to the sea', all the while adding assurances about a secular-democratic state for Palestine, you might draw his or her attention to Haniyeh's words, 'expulsion of the invaders and usurpers from the blessed land of Palestine'.

It's worth repeating: Hamas has no objective but to rid the Middle East of Jews, and the more violently done the better.

Titanic 2012: Bring your own lifeboat

2011-12-28T20:00:00.000Z

Watch out for the icebergs... cruise recreating Titanic's fateful voyage is sold out:

For some, it might sound too much like tempting fate – and for others, it smacks of "disaster voyeurism". But for more than 2,000 Titanic enthusiasts, the chance to mark the centenary of the maritime disaster by sailing on a large cruise ship to commemorate the sinking on the very spot of the tragedy is proving difficult to resist.

As the Lord said to Noah, "How long can you tread water?"

The answer is, "Forever"

2011-12-28T15:49:00.000Z

Consider:

Voter identification continued to be a hot topic for legislators in 2011. Four states — Kansas, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Texas — approved laws requiring voters to present photo identification before casting ballots.

A fifth state, South Carolina, had passed its own voter-identification law, but it was overturned Dec. 23 by the Justice Department. South Carolina is required to submit revisions in voting procedures for federal clearance as a state with a history of discrimination at the ballot box, but it can appeal Justice’s ruling in federal court.

So: For how many years after the Jim Crow era will South Carolina's election laws be subject to the veto of an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat in Washington?

Forever, of course.

There is nothing South Carolina will ever be able to do to get the federal monkey off its back. If the state elected a black governor and a black-majority legislature, any election laws they pass will still be overruled at the whim of federal clerks. The federal government does not surrender power.

Norway UFO videoed by accident?

2011-12-28T14:00:00.000Z

This is a video taken by a Norwegian using a small camera mounted in front of a powered, remote-control glider, looking back toward the front of the glider. Pretty nice video.

But - just what is the object in the sky - upper right hand corner of the screen - between 1:43-44?

Super water repellent spray coming

2011-12-27T19:00:00.000Z

Amazing stuff, this:

So every coat can be a raincoat? I thought about using this stuff to treat my shirts and not have to worry about a raincoat at all, but if it repels water this thoroughly how could I wash my shirts? The spray doesn't repel dirt, after all. But it does seem pretty remarkable.

The NFL has gone off the rails

2011-12-27T16:05:00.000Z

Articles: Three Ugly Truths Exposed by the Tebow Assault:

[T]he league's oddball values (i.e., mainstream ones) have finally been exposed to an unforgiving light. It's the same wan, greenish light that characterizes all of the urban-poseur values of the sec-progs (usually reserved to their own sportless sphere of influence). It's readily visible if we select a view of a slightly bigger picture: the sec-progs advocate teaching kindergartners how to wear condoms but are offended by the concept that sometimes grown men fight with their fists. Or to put an even finer point upon it: they want to teach kindergartners how to wear condoms and (not "but") are offended by Tim Tebow's open chastity. The point is that in watching the NFL, there remains no longer any distinction between "urban values" and "rural values," for which the NFL used to surrogate. And as ever, these values remain at cross-purposes. Soon now, we the people will be put to a choice.

This second truth looms so large as to bleed over into the third: that our entire culture evinces a general trend whereby the popular sensibilities become thinner-skinned as the popular mores demand an ever stronger and stronger stomach. The average commercial shown during an NFL game threatens to corrupt the mind of the youth in far more pernicious ways than a few skirmishes by players during the game ever could. And yet the liberals who have long masterminded the realization of such a bizarre world with a thousand subtle nuances -- having effectually blinded the masses -- can simply shrug in feigned innocent perplexity.

The moment, which I believe has just passed us, wherein Tim Tebow's prayers and sexual chastity get formally denounced as dangerous needs to be a "moment of clarity," en masse, whereupon we can all reassess the paltry values that we have thoughtlessly embraced as a people. While, happily, it seems that enough folks have awoken to the economic blights of leftism for the 2012 election, such a realization -- in order to bear any meaningful change -- must be met with a concomitant moral reawakening. This is my New Year's wish. And God bless Tim Tebow.

Our impractical God

2011-12-25T11:50:00.000Z

A homily for Christmas Day

We pride ourselves on being practical people, do we not? Americans have a particular susceptibility to the practical and pragmatic. I don’t say that as a criticism, by the way, since I am one of those people whose first question about a proposal is usually how it will work. I am reminded of the story of the time the Little Sisters of the Poor were going door to door in a French city, soliciting alms for old people. There was a house on their route that belonged to a wealthy and very vocal opponent of the church. One of the sisters said it would not be practical to call upon him for a donation and to this they all agreed.

All except one sister who knocked on the rich man’s door, anyway. He answered, she explained her request for a donation, and the man replied, grinning, “I will give you one thousand francs if you will have a glass of champagne with me.”

It was an embarrassing situation for the nun, and she hesitated. But 1,000 francs meant many loaves of bread or medicine for the poor. So she went inside. A servant brought the bottle and poured, and the brave nun emptied the glass. And then she said, "And now, sir, another glass, please – at the same price." She got it. Not so impractical to call upon that fellow after all.

Here are some some real, historical impracticalbilities.

Hail Cannons: In the late 19th century some Austrians devised a special gas-based mortar supposedly capable of preventing hail. By the year 1900, more than 10,000 hail cannons had cropped up across Western Europe. Given their popularity, it's a shame that the cannons proved useless.

"Goofybike:" In 1939, Charles Steinlauf made a bicycle to carry four people and power a sewing machine. Nuff said.

Jetpacks: James Bond flew one in the beginning of Thunderball, made in 1965, and jetpacks have not gotten better since then. You can buy the one on the right for $155,000, including training. But remember what the maker says: since it flies for only 33 seconds, you start looking for a landing spot the moment your feet leave the ground. And as for the flying cars we were promised 50 years ago, fuggidaboutit.

The Wright Flyer: December 17, 1901 – 120 feet in 12 seconds, 6.8 miles per hour, no more than 10 feet altitude.

France's SS Normandie

We all know the history of aviation after the Wright brothers took to the air. The significance of SS Normandie is less well known. It was launched by the French company GCT in 1932 and set a transatlantic speed record on its maiden passenger voyage. Setting that record was in fact the whole reason the ship was built. Yet its design was scoffed as impractical almost up to its launch.

Normandie was designed by a Russian emigre named Vladimir Yourkevitch, whose designs had been laughed out of court by the admirals of the Czar’s navy. Yourkevitch had been a junior naval architect then and was convinced that the key to speed for large vessels was a paunchy middle and an extremely pointed fore and aft. Yourkevitch persisted, his designs were tested but the Russian Revolution put an end to his dreams. He made his way to France where no naval work awaited him and he finally got a job on the Renault automobile assembly line.

Michael Anton recorded that after GCT announced it would build a ship to capture the record,

Vladimir Yourkevitch spent the closing months of the 1920s making a pest of himself with conduct that would, in our day, result in a restraining order. He wrote, he wired, and he called—with exasperating persistence—officials at CGT and the Penhoët shipyard, where the new French liner would be built. All his entreaties were ignored. Finally, he contacted an old friend from the Russian navy who had been welcomed into France’s military establishment. The officer got Yourkevitch a meeting.

The shipyard chairman, René Fould, barely concealed his disdain for Yourkevitch’s poverty, his lowly job, and his broken French. Still, he took Yourkevitch’s drawings and gave them to one of his engineers, expecting to hear no more of the matter. Weeks later, to Fould’s astonishment, the engineer reported that the Yourkevitch design principles were better than any he had seen. Fould convened his entire staff to confirm the result. They did.

To this day, Yourkevitch’s design principles are used on every oceangoing vessel launched around the world, including every American aircraft carrier in service. Vladimir Yourkevitch’s name is practically unknown by the public at large, but he was the most influential ship designer of the last century.

I have one more illustration of a supremely impractical thing.

It is Christmas and I come not to bury impracticability but to praise it. For when reading the passages of Advent and Christmas, it seems that God is not usually bothered by the practicability of his plans.

Luke 1.5-120

In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was a descendant of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years. Once when he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”

Luke 1.26-35

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.”

Now consider: Zechariah and Mary both know they are talking to an angel. Very impressive company, that; in fact, Gabriel had to tell both of them to calm down and not be afraid. Then the angel pronounces the most amazing news that could be imagine. To Zechariah, that he will have a son who will be a great prophet of the Lord. To Mary, she will have a son who will be the Son of God.

And both Zechariah and Mary immediately question the practicality of it all. “Not so fast,” they both basically say. “There are some practical considerations you have not considered!”

For Zechariah, he’s old and so is his wife. Mary says her prophecy is not possible because she knows there are certain, uh, steps that are required to have a child and she hasn’t taken them.

Zechariah and Mary are talking in person to an angel who tells them of God's amazing plans and therefore presumably isn't just making this stuff up – and all the both of them can say is, "Can't happen, won't work, you've got the wrong person."

Gabriel swatted these objections aside. "Nothing is impossible with God," he told Mary in verse 37. Immanuel, God With Us, is both impractical and improbable, seen from our perspective, and yet Jesus was born, God in the flesh. God willing, we will never be so practical minded that we shun God's plans, for our impractical God is not a God of practicalities, but of miracles.

Jesus, Joseph and the Marvelous Exchange

2011-12-24T17:50:00.000Z

A homily for Christmas Eve

Matthew 1.18-25:

18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 1She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ 22All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
23 ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel’,
which means, ‘God is with us.’ 24When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

He was faced with a detestable duty. He was a man of compassion, even tenderness. But he was also a man honor, a man of stern code. His obedience to the Law was unwavering. The moment he learned that his fiancé was pregnant he knew that it was the end. The end, certainly, of their betrothment, and perhaps even the end of her life.

It was two millennia ago in the Roman-occupied land of Judea. The man was named Joseph. His fiancé was Mary. She was going to have a baby and it sure was not his. Compassion, honor and duty dueled within Joseph. He could not pretend there was no problem. She obviously had betrayed him. The whole town of Nazareth was watching.

Finally, Joseph decided Mary would have to pay the price for infidelity as his honor and the Law required, but tempered with mercy. Joseph determined to break his engagement to Mary and dismiss her from his life without fanfare, leaving her to fend for herself. It would clear the slate, restore his honor and was as least hurtful to the young woman as any just solution could be.
What the outcome might have been by Joseph’s plan we don’t know, because God revealed to him what was really going on, and Joseph changed his mind.

Joseph dreamed of an angel, who informed Joseph that Mary’s unborn child was of the Holy Spirit. The angel gave Joseph instructions: take Mary home as his wife and adopt Mary’s child as his own, giving him the name Jesus, an ordinary name then, meaning,“God helps.”

These things came to pass. In Joseph’s day, when a Jewish man gave a name to the child born to his wife, he was confirming the child as his own. Maybe others knew that Joseph was not the baby’s natural father, maybe they didn’t. It didn’t matter. When Joseph named the baby Jesus, he was also giving to Jesus his own identity, his own lineage. That is why Jesus could truly be said to be of the line of David, because Joseph was of David’s line and Joseph adopted Jesus as his own son. When Joseph named the child Jesus he was telling the world, “This child belongs to me, this child is my child.”

We give Joseph short shrift, perhaps because Joseph is treated somewhat cursorily in the Gospels. Mary gets a lot more play. Joseph never speaks. Joseph hears, Joseph dreams, Joseph acts and Joseph obeys, but not even one syllable of his speaking is related. Mary is the one with the speaking part. Her role is the most sought after in Christmas pageants.

Another pastor told me of one afternoon before the annual Christmas program, when a mother phoned the church office to say that her son, who was to play Joseph in the children's play, was sick and wouldn't be able to be there. “It's too late now to get another Joseph,” the director of the play said. “We'll just have to write him out of the script.” And they did. Joseph is easy to overlook and leave out.

In 1993, my wife played Mary in the Christmas pageant at our church. She got the part only because they needed our two-month-old daughter to play the baby Jesus, there being no other small infant in the congregation. Cathy and Elizabeth, Mary and Jesus, were a package deal, couldn’t get one without the other. But any guy off the street could have played Joseph. In fact, the pastor actually asked me, “Don, did you want to play Joseph or should I get a man from the choir to play him?” I said I would, but talk about feeling like a fifth wheel ... .

But more is going on with Joseph than is first apparent. A recurring theme of St. Paul is that Jesus' followers are adopted by God and made children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ. This should make us reconsider the significance of where Joseph fits in with God’s work. Joseph’s adoption of Jesus is highly significant.

What if Joseph had said no to the angel and had sent Mary away anyway? Can we imagine Jesus growing up in the home of an unwed, single mother, both Mary and Jesus therefore outcast from society? How would Jesus have conceived of God as his heavenly Father if Joseph had never taken on the role of Jesus’ earthly father? But father to Jesus Joseph was.

God adopts Jesus’ disciples as sons and daughters of God in the family of God. But first, God sent his Son to be adopted by Joseph into the family of mortals. Joseph affirmed on behalf of all humanity that God belongs with us, "God with us."

The symmetry of God being born into humanity and humanity thence being adopted to become, as Second Peter puts it, “partakers of the divine nature” is called the “marvelous exchange” in Roman Catholic catechism and theosis, or divinization, in the Eastern Church. It is to realize that God becomes one of us so that we may become like him, and so are perfected to live forever with God.

Theologian George Weigel explains, “God ‘exchanges’ his divinity for our humanity, thus enabling us to ‘exchange’ our weakness for his divine glory – the glory of which the angels sing to the shepherds of Bethlehem.” St. Paul proclaimed in Second Corinthians, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).

This is possible because of the power of God, of course, but also because of the strength of Joseph. Joseph adopted the Son of God as the child of humankind, and through Christ God adopts you and me as children of God. This is a marvelous exchange indeed! Should we not see the symmetry of salvation and relationship – dare we say partnership – at work in the will of God and the obedience of Joseph? We see in Joseph’s story that we and God belong to each other in the one whom Joseph named Jesus, “God helps.”

The government finance shell game

2011-12-21T16:54:00.001Z

USAID gives dollars to China.

That's to say, we borrow money from China to give to China. Oh, don't worry. It's only a few million, and most of it goes to "promote clean energy." It sounds so reasonable when you put it like that. Who among us hasn't borrowed money from his loan shark in order to buy his loan shark a hybrid?

Have to say I agree with this: "Government finance has become a giant shell game in which there is no ball to find."

North Korea: What do you do when your god dies?

2011-12-20T15:06:00.002Z

That's "god," not "God:"

Found at Video: The weeping North Koreans

Don’t just sample the clip for 10 seconds. Watch to the end and drink in the full spectacle of grown men, prostrate, screaming in grief at the death of their subjugator. I take it state media beamed this out to show the world how unlikely a North Korean Spring is; it might be their first honest moment. Count me in with Michael Totten and Dan Foster in thinking these histrionics are more genuine than we’d like to believe. After all, lesser cult leaders like Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite have asked and gotten more from their followers than this; surely a few tears were in order in Pyongyang upon learning that God is dead. The whole point of totalitarian conditioning is to draw this reaction without needing soldiers to stand just out of frame pointing rifles at the crowd. Go figure that it actually works on some people.

You cannot reason someone out of something that they were never reasoned into.

The god is dead. Long live the new god!

Totalitarianism must evolve into a religion to survive. The cultic center of the religion must be the dictator. In Lenin's Russia, the religion was communism. Lenin and the party changed it to Marxism-Leninism, but Lenin did not live long enough to become a true cultic center.

Lenin's successor, Stalin, did, with all Stalinism's attendant horrors. After Stalin died in 1953, the Party determined that no general secretary would become a cultic figure again. Instead, they substituted a theology of an Ideal Time and a reformed humanity, the goal being formally announced in 1964 by GenSec Leonid Brezhnev as the attainment of True Communism.

Marxism is an eschatological ideology (a godless religion in its own right, really). The ideal time is when "the workers control the means of production" after the capitalists have been violently overthrown. Lee Harris explained the basic tenets of Marxism, and its fundamental flaws, in his excellent essay, "The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing." Suffice it to say here that Marx considered revolution by the oppressed both essential and inevitable for true socialism to be established. This was a political version of Judgment Day, when the wicked capitalists would be judged and destroyed so that the pure in heart (the heavily romanticized working classes) could attain the Ideal Time.

This appealing but basically foolish ideology held power in the USSR for 70 years, abandoned long before its end by almost all the working classes themselves and most of the ruling class. Soviet communism became a shell game in which commissars and higher ranks lived large and the masses merely lived. Its Ideal Time, however, was hammered home by the propagandists as just around the corner. True Communism was always coming soon, a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit.

That year, 1964, really marked the beginning of the long decline of Soviet communism because non-cultic True Communism required an exhaustively worked and intellectually rigorous theology founded on rationalistic, not cultic, bases. That eliminated Stalinism once for all and Brezhnevism never got started. But without a cultic figure the center would not hold. Brezhnev ruled from 1964 until his death in 1982. After his death, the USSR went through general secretaries like a kid eating candy until it dissolved in 1990-1991. Brezhnev's 18-year tenure is what made the USSR last as long as it did after Stalin's death.

The Party's problem with trying to remake the empire on a non-cultic, intellectual religion was that the state had to devote great efforts and resources into reasoning and educating its people into the religion, beginning the arduous process in pre-school and never ceasing it.

Cultic tyranny's major efforts are domestic, to maintain the regime and its supporting apparatus. Foreign and military endeavors by cultic dictators tend to do poorly because the apparatchiks are selected and elevated based on their loyalty to the leader, not their basic competence in their duties. So: for Stalin, the Great Patriotic War; for Saddam Hussein the Iran War, the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War - all bungled jobs by their cultic leaders.

It was not until the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ejected cultism from its ideology that the USSR became genuinely dangerous to the West. Brezhnev was never a cult figure, instead he was the leader of a triumphant, missionary religion. True Communism brought the USSR into nuclear-military-superpower status. It was under the banner of True communism that the USSR sponsored "wars of national liberation" in Asia and Africa and sought to subvert the governments of Europe and many others. Soviet-sponsored terrorist cells flourished in western Europe, such as the Rote Armee Fraktion in West Germany. Blessedly for the West and the world, Brezhnev was not succeeded by young, vigorous true believers but by aged Party-climbing apparatchiks who each had not long to live, until Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary. Gorbachev, however, was no true believer and True Communism held no thrall over him. Even before the Berlin Wall was hammered down, he and almost the whole regime were mightily glad to be quit of it.

Intellectually and religiously both, True Communism simply sputtered out, having been built on foundations of sand to begin with. Having exhausted itself by reasoning the people into True Communism, the state never recognized that people who are reasoned into something can be reasoned out (or reason themselves out), and there were more than enough smart Russians to figure out the flaws and inherent, fatal contradictions of the whole, phony system. (The coerced member states of the USSR pretty much never bought into this Russian religion in the first place.)

And so the whole intellectual, rationlistic-but-fragile edifice of True Communism could be brought crashing to ruin by, for example, asking the very simple question, "Who will carry the sewage under communism?"

"Take Kiev, for instance, and see how much of its one and a half million inhabitants arranges his own sewerage system, in his free time, and cleans it and maintains it in good order.

"Who, under communism, will bury the corpses? Will it be self-service or will amateurs carry out the work in their spare time? There is plenty of dirty work in a society and not everyone is a general or a diplomat. Who will carve up the pig carcasses? And who will sweep the streets and cart off the rubbish? . . . Will there be any waiters under communism? . . .

"And finally, for someone who at present has not the slightest idea about how to set about sewage-cleaning, like Comrade Yakubovskiy himself for instance, has he any personal interest at all in the arrival of that day, when he will have to clean up his own crap all by himself? . . .

"What, exactly, does an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Secretary of the District Party Committee stand to gain from this communism? Eh? Plenty of caviar? But he’s got so much caviar already that he can even eat it through his [rear end] if he wishes. A car? But he has two personal Volga cars and a private one as well. Medical care? Food, women, a country house? But he already has all these things. So our dear Secretary of the most Godforsaken District Party Committee stands to gain bugger-all from communism!"

North Korea decades ago ceased to be communist in any sense of the word. Kim Il Sung's objective was never communism, it was dictatorship, a goal he achieved brilliantly. Since then the overriding imperative of the regime has been simply stated and easily enforced: maintain the status quo for the regime no matter the cost in lives and treasure to the rest of the country.

What will change with the apparent succession to the throne of his grandson, Kim Jong Un? Let us hope nothing will. The country is making plenty of trouble in the world now. May its cultic religion remain, for if North Korea's dictator(s) ever get converted to a theology of True Communism, there will really be trouble, indeed.

Update: R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has more.

What do you do when your god dies?

2011-12-20T04:36:00.000Z

Please click here to get to the post. Due to a formatting error, I reposted it.

Two perfect records wrecked today

2011-12-18T21:50:00.000Z

Two NFL teams with perfect records got those records wrecked today.

The formerly undefeated Green Bay packers went down in a shocker to Kansas City, 19-4. That makes the Packers's W-L numbers 13-1.

At the same time, for formerly winless Indianapolis Colts beat the Tennessee Titans 27-13, making the Colts 1-13.

Isn't that a curious coincidence? I am reminded of Yogi Berra's observation, "It's too coincidental to be a coincidence."

Obviously, the number of wins and losses in the NFL must equal. After all, in every game one teams loses and the other wins (disregarding the extremely rare tie game, allowed by rule but very difficult actually to obtain).

And if the Packers had won today and the Colts also, the ratio of 1:1 win-loss across the league would not have changed. Still, it's almost eerie that both teams had a "1" entered onto their respective records at the same time. Seems sort of cosmic... .

But there is no determinism at work here. Going into today's game, there were six teams with 10-3 records, but none with 3-10.

How to fall asleep the right way

2011-12-18T19:37:00.000Z

Bayou Renaissance Man: Can't sleep?

It works, mate!

Failed Democrat Pol Sues Critics for "loss of livelihood"

2011-12-17T19:10:00.000Z

Failed Democrat Pol Sues Critics Over Election Loss - Peter Roff (usnews.com):

When voters in Ohio's 1st Congressional District threw Democrat Steve Driehaus out of office after only one term, he did not bow out gracefully. No, he decided to get even. So he did what anyone does in today's culture: he sued somebody.

Charging that its activities contributed to his defeat and thus to his "loss of livelihood," Driehaus is suing the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that supports pro-life candidates for Congress and which has been one of the leading and most effective organizations involved in the fight to cut off federal funding to Planned Parenthood.

During the 2010 elections the Susan B. Anthony List engaged in a campaign to identify and call out a group of allegedly anti-abortion-rights members of Congress who provided the margin that allowed President Barack Obama's reform of the nation's healthcare system to get through the U.S. House of Representatives. The Susan B. Anthony List said their vote in favor of the law, which did not include any pro-life protections, amounted to a betrayal of their pro-life principles.

According to Driehaus, who was one of that group, what the Susan B. Anthony List said in its public communications amounted to a malicious lie that contributed to his defeat. Amazingly, rather than laugh the suit out of court U.S. District Court judge Timothy S. Black, an Obama appointee, is allowing it to go forward. ...

Driehaus's suit is breaking new legal ground and may already be having a very chilling effect on political speech. It goes directly at the heart of our First Amendment protections and criminalizes what is at least a difference of opinion. And it's curious that the case has not received more attention from the national press.

What is equally curious, however, is why Judge Black has allowed the case to move forward and why he did not recuse himself from it since, as Barbara Hollingsworth reported Friday in The Washington Examiner, he apparently is the former president and director of the Planned Parenthood Association of Cincinnati. As seeming conflicts of interest go this one is a real humdinger.

As I posted, "Democrats to America: Just Shut Up!"

It's no surprise that Judge Black decided to hear the case. Democrats on the bench are neither appointed nor sitting to apply the laws fairly and impartially. The "progressive" agenda does not allow for it. Instead, the entire progressive array embraces "anarcho-tyranny."

The late Samuel Francis coined and defined the word "anarcho-tyranny":
What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through "sensitivity training" and multiculturalist curricula, "hate crime" laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny. [...]

The laws that are enforced are either those that extend or entrench the power of the state and its allies and internal elites ... or else they are the laws that directly punish those recalcitrant and "pathological" elements in society who insist on behaving according to traditional norms—people who do not like to pay taxes, wear seat belts, or deliver their children to the mind-bending therapists who run the public schools; or the people who own and keep firearms, display or even wear the Confederate flag, put up Christmas trees, spank their children, and quote the Constitution or the Bible—not to mention dissident political figures who actually run for office and try to do something about mass immigration by Third World populations.

There is on the whole not much to admire about Francis's body of work, but he hit the 10-ring here. Considering that he died in 2005, it is impressive how he was a precursor to much of today's criticism of the political class.

Republicans want you to die, part 5

2011-12-14T22:35:00.000Z

Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.:

The Republicans "have attached a poison pill -- literally, colleagues -- because it will kill 8,100 more people more than would have otherwise been killed from pollution," Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Cali.) said on the Senate floor today about Republicans trying to roll back a Clean Air Act provision.

Republicans included a measure to kill an EPA regulation in their payroll tax cut proposal.

"So have that for a Christmas gift," Boxer said after she scared people with the 8,100 number.

Video at the link.

Cluelessness defined and displayed

2011-12-14T19:02:00.000Z

I don't even need to add a comment. Just watch.

It's just "fantasy theater."

This what $5 Trillion has bought

2011-12-14T17:00:00.000Z

Obama v. Clinton for "first black president" title

2011-12-14T13:30:00.000Z

Which is the real "first black president?" Douglas Wilder ponders the question.

L. Douglas Wilder was governor of Virginia from 1990 to 1994. He was America's first elected African-American governor. On Politico he asks whether Obama is better for blacks (politically) than Clinton was. And Wilder doesn't think so.

I asked back in August, "Is Barack Obama a black president?"

I trust the reader will see that the question posed by this post's title is unrelated to President Obama's ancestry, but, rather, with his American ethnic identification.

That Obama is an African-American is not the question. The question is, Is Barack Obama a black American? And to this question, I think the answer is at best open.

Consider the president's biography. He has no ancestor who was part of the historic black experience in America. His mother was white and his father was Kenyan. What do I mean by the "black experience?" I'll let black Americans answer that.

And I quoted some prominent black Americans on what it meant to live the black experience in America. This is an experience that Obama never lived.

The black American "two-cultures" environment, which was (and still very much is) so central to their lives, was absent from Obama's upbringing. He lived in Hawaii from birth to high school graduation, where the racial friction has always been between Hawaii natives and whites rather than between whites and blacks. Second, he spent ages 6-10 in Indonesia. This is not the childhood the the black experience in America, in which blacks grow up in and spend adulthood in a black culture that "is heavily southern American," even for northern blacks.

The experience of being raised in a distinct black culture, surrounded by whites and significantly controlled by them, is to be immersed in a culture with its own historic baggage of slavery and subsequent racism and Jim Crow, a culture with its own music and coded jargon and Southern Gospel religious heritage. This is a culture that has never been part of Barack Obama's experience. It is literally alien to him.

Even in 2007, this disparity led Time Magazine to ask, "Is Obama Black Enough?"

And so Gov. Wilder now ponders,

Yet here we sit, more than three years after Obama’s win, and too many people are pulling me aside in private to ask why his standing in the African-American community has softened since his Inauguration. They also question whether the reduced excitement among young and new voters — with that lack of enthusiasm from African-Americans — might hinder Obama’s 2012 campaign. ...

Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening in the halls of power as had never been seen before by black America.

Has that happened? I am forced to say, “No” — especially when comparing Morrison’s metaphorical first black president to the actual first black president.

Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening in the halls of power as had never been seen before by black America.
Has that happened? I am forced to say, “No” — especially when comparing Morrison’s metaphorical first black president to the actual first black president.

Like I did in my post, Wilder cites Toni Morison's claim that Bill Clinton was America's "first black president." But Wilder, while understanding her point, does not embrace it. Nonetheless,

By birth and life experience, Clinton cannot lay claim to the title of first black president — as Morrison knighted him. But Obama needs to work harder to make it less obvious that Clinton, in governing deed, actually deserves it more that the 44th president does.

A lot of whites voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because he would be the first black American president. But as Gov. Wilder implicitly acknowledges, he's not in any respect except skin tone, and this has done nothing to improve the lives of black Americans economically or politically. Will this make a difference in 2012? I think it will, and not only among whites.

Hurricane predictors hang it up

2011-12-13T21:04:00.000Z

Hurricane predictors admit they can’t predict hurricanes:

Two top U.S. hurricane forecasters, revered like rock stars in Deep South hurricane country, are quitting the practice because it doesn’t work.

William Gray and Phil Klotzbach say a look back shows their past 20 years of forecasts had no value.

The two scientists from Colorado State University will still discuss different probabilities as hurricane seasons approach — a much more cautious approach. But the shift signals how far humans are, even with supercomputers, from truly knowing what our weather will do next.

So, these two men, acknowledged leaders in their field, admit that they cannot predict mere weather - and only a specific kind of weather at that - only a few months ahead. And yet, global warming alarmists claim they predict with flawless accuracy what the entire global climate will be many decades from now.

In fact, the mask was lifted off hurricane prediction a long time ago. No one ever paid attention to hurricane forecasts anyway.

Democrats to America: Just shut up!

2011-12-13T18:21:00.000Z

It seems that the administration and some of its allies in Congress simply want you and me to just shut up on certain topics - a range that is sure to be expanded if they get their way.

"Shame on you! Shut up! Just shut up!"

First, Politico reports that the Hillary-headed State Department is coordinating with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation - a cartel of 56 Islamic states - to stifle Americans' rights to talk or write about Islam as they want to.

The State Department began a three-day, closed-door meeting Monday to talk about U.S. free speech rules with representatives from numerous Islamic governments that have lobbied for 12 years to end U.S. citizens’ ability to speak freely about Islam’s history and obligations. ...

The more realistic explanation for the three-day event, [activist Andrea] Lafferty said, is that administration officials, progressives and OIC officials are tacitly cooperating to gradually stigmatize speech that is critical of Islam.

Lafferty pointed to a July statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in which she said that free speech will be protected, but the U.S. government will “use some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming, so that people don’t feel that they have the support to do what we abhor.”

Second: Democrat US Representatives Theodore Deutch, Peter DeFazo, Alcee Hastings, and Jim McDermott, and Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders are introducing resolutions for a Constitutional amendment that would take scissors to the First Amendment. Eugene Volokh explains, also here.

But nothing is new about all this. Consider the administrations new fascination with bullying.

Suddenly bullying in schools, which has been with us for as long as there have been schools, has been elevated to a "crisis." When this happens, people who were not born yesterday look for the agenda. And we find it written in large capital letters, in a scheme to impose "gay-straight alliances" on unwilling Catholic and private Christian schools, and otherwise extend the reach of "LGBT" propaganda into places where it is especially unwelcome.

This political method is itself a ripe example of bullying. Victimhood status is declared on behalf of a favoured group, emotionally-loaded examples of apparent victimizing are publicized, and the "crisis" is declared. Powers are sought by activists on behalf of such victims.

Those who resist their power grab are demonized. This is the way every "progressive" cause is advanced. It works, because no one could want to be publicly tarred.

And so New York Democrats have announced that the First Amendment is a privilege (presumably, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution should now be called, "The Bill of Privileges").

AND YET, PROPONENTS OF A MORE REFINED FIRST AMENDMENT ARGUE THAT THIS FREEDOM SHOULD BE TREATED NOT AS A RIGHT BUT AS A PRIVILEGE – A SPECIAL ENTITLEMENT GRANTED BY THE STATE ON A CONDITIONAL BASIS THAT CAN BE REVOKED IF IT IS EVER ABUSED OR MALTREATED.

(All caps in original)

These processes are all examples of Leftist mind control at work. Remember that Leftism is the ideology that people have too much freedom with which to make too many stupid choices. And so the Left's fascination and natural affinity with absolutist Islamic governments. They both want to decide what we proles may think and say.

More examples:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/overkill-on-internet-piracy/2011/12/11/gIQA9TK6nO_blog.html

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/198687-internet-piracy-bill-a-free-speech-kill-switch

Newt Gingrich takes third no-adultery pledge

2011-12-12T20:11:00.000Z

Angel Michael - not running for president

An Iowa social conservative group called The Family Leader asked presidential candidates to sign a "sweeping pledge on marriage and abortion over the summer." At the time, Newt Gingrich declined to sign it. However,

Now, Gingrich has answered the pledge with a lengthy written response, vowing to support a federal marriage amendment, reinstate the Mexico City policy -- and, per the stipulations of The Family Leader pledge, to be faithful to his wife:
I also pledge to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others.

This is the third such pledge Newt has taken. The first two went like this:

Officiant: Name, will you have Name to be your wife, to live together in holy marriage? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?

Newt: I will.

Obviously, I do not know Newt's marriage vows exactly, but this excerpt is very mainline. So this is his third no adultery vow, the first two having been during his two wedding services.

However much infidelity repulses, though, I have to echo Milton Friedman's question, "Where do we find the angels" we would all like to hold the offices of our land? They ain't running.

Update: Okay, it's really his fourth pledge.

Pepper spraying woman may sue Walmart

2011-12-12T19:51:00.001Z

The woman who pepper sprayed other shoppers in a Walmart on Black Friday is considering a lawsuit again the giant retailer for failing to provide security.

It was widely reported that Elizabeth Macias, whose name was unknown at the time of the incident, had pepper sprayed other shoppers to move them out of her way so she could grab an item before it sold out. However, she says that she was trying to rescue her two children, who were being attacked by shoppers as they tried to obtain video games.

Elizabeth Macias, 32, said she fired the stinging spray after shoppers attacked her two teenage children as they tried to obtain X-Box video game consoles for purchase, attorney Michael Champ, Macias' lawyer, told CBS News' Los Angeles station KCBS Friday.

At one point, her son was on the ground, being punched by a man and her daughter also was being punched and kicked, Champ said.

The teens were traumatized, he said. ...

Det. Mike Fesperman of the Los Angeles Police Department told the Los Angeles Times it's possible that Macias used the pepper spray in self-defense.

"I'm not saying it was right. It could have been a situation that she was in fear for her safety, that she would be crushed," Fesperman said.

Seems like pre-emptive lawyering to me.

Thoughts from Father Abraham

2011-12-11T12:26:00.001Z

If the shoe fits ... .

If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Any society that takes away from those most capable and gives to the least will perish.

Few can be induced to labor exclusively for posterity. Posterity has done nothing for us.

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other man’s consent.

You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence.

Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws ... become the political religion of the nation.

If ever this free people, if this Government itself is ever utterly demoralized, it will come from this incessant human wriggle and struggle for office, which is but a way to live without work.

We have to distrust each other. It’s our only defense against betrayal.

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and, hence, is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus, by example, assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.

It has ever been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

Source

And:

There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no one independence quite so important, as living within your means. – Calvin Coolidge

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing. - Thomas Jefferson

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. – Thomas Jefferson

Never spend your money before you have earned it. - Thomas Jefferson

Things do not happen. Things are made to happen. – John F. Kennedy

Could tougher gun control laws lower the violent crime rate? « Wintery Knight

2011-12-10T21:04:00.000Z

Could tougher gun control laws lower the violent crime rate?

The short answer is, No. The long answer is, No No No.

Europe's bobbing head

2011-12-09T15:20:00.001Z

"Hey, Europe, Great Job With The Smoke And Mirrors, Too Bad You Didn't Fix A Thing"
http://www.businessinsider.com/europe-deal-did-not-fix-problem-2011-12

Europe is like a drowning man whose head keeps bobbing above the water. But the drowning continues all the same.

47 percenters

2011-12-09T15:00:00.000Z

WE ARE THE 47%: “A recent Gallup poll found that 47% of American households own a gun, up from 41% just a year ago.”

Let's see:

47 percent of American households own a firearm
47 percent of American adults pay no federal income tax at all.

Coincidence?

That figure of 47 percent paying no federal income tax dates from 2009, btw, and is almost certainly at or even over 50 percent now.

President Nowhere

2011-12-09T14:57:00.000Z

Does he even know who is looking back?

Works and Days » The President Who Never Was:

What are we left with in the end? Empty soaring rhetoric of the day, as the president without an identity desperately searches for one about every three months. In the old days the masks were a Bill Ayers for revolutionary fervor, or a Rev. Wright for black fides. Now they are dead presidents.

Where does this lead? Nowhere. ...

The next year will be nothing but more teenage petulance. The world has disappointed Barack Obama. Like any adolescent, he will keep reinventing himself, endlessly trying on new presidential masks and blasting “them” who were not so charmed. What else can a man without an identity do, a president who never really was?

Read the whole thing.

America an ally no more

2011-12-08T19:51:00.000Z

Caroline Glick :: An ally no more:

Under President Obama, the US government has become hostile to Israel's national rights and strategic imperatives. Under Obama, the US is no longer Israel's ally.

And not merely "no longer an ally." Under this president, his secretary of state and secretary of defense, America is actually Israel's opponent.

A train set beyond belief

2011-12-08T19:34:00.001Z

It cost eight million euros and took 500,000 man-hours to build - so far.

Did Romney fact flub attacking Obama?

2011-12-06T15:41:00.001Z

The question has two answers, of course, one political and the other factual. GOP candidate Mitt Romney laid into President Obama for his prospective departure for Hawaii on Dec. 17 for a 17-day vacation. The vacation plans were splashed across The Drudge Report on Dec. 2. Here is a grab of the photo Drudge ran:

And the text accompanying:

THE WHITE HOUSE TRAVEL OFFICE

Trip of the President

to

Honolulu, Hawaii

December 17th, 2011 to January 2nd, 2012

Trip Overview

On Saturday, December 17th, 2011, the President will travel to Honolulu, Hawaii. He will return to Washington, DC on Monday, January 2nd, 2012. ...

...no public events are scheduled during the trip. ...

This would seem to attribute the vacation information directly to the White House. That became the occasion for Romney's rip:

"I have to feel that this President has been a failure," the White House hopeful said during a tele-townhall Monday evening with potential Iowa voters.

"I just think it's time to have a President whose idea of being ‘hands on’ doesn't mean getting a better grip on the golf club," Romney zinged. ...

Obama, Romney argued, "told Congress that they need to stay in session and pass his tax breaks for the payroll tax and that they shouldn't leave for vacation until they did. And yet he's going off for 17 days and for golf in the sun."

But things are not always what they seem even on Drudge, according to ABC News.

Despite what Romney may be saying, a 17-day Hawaiian vacation for the Obama’s isn’t actually on the books. ...

Additionally, President Obama has said publicly that if Congress isn’t in recess by the Christmas holiday everyone — himself included — will be in Washington, D.C.

“We’re going to keep pushing Congress to make this happen. Now is not the time to slam the brakes on the recovery… Right now it’s time to step on the gas. We need to get this done. And I expect that it’s going to get done before Congress leaves. Otherwise, Congress may not be leaving, and we can all spend Christmas here together,” said Obama.

Now, it needs be noted that the president and his family vacationed in Hawaii over Christmastime last year and, I am pretty sure, the year before that. So ABC News' insistence that such a vay-cay this year "isn’t actually on the books" seems somewhat overstated.

So did Romney flub it with his rip? Not politically. The Dems will howl and deride, but they'd do that no matter what Romney said. As for Romney's supporters and the Republican base generally, they will think that even if Obama is not flying off for 17 days in Hawaii while issues go unresolved, it's exactly the sort of thing he would do.

Unemployment at 8.6 percent? Nope!

2011-12-02T15:32:00.000Z

The Employment Report Is An Intentional FABRICATION? - MarketTicker Forums:

There's a fairly serious problem with the numbers, and it's not in the headline -- it's in the only number that matters from a fiscal perspective for the government -- and there, it's bad news. Even worse, there is some real serious misdirection going on in here, me thinks.

Let's do the charts:

So click on over to see. Bottom line is that unemployment did not sink by a half-percentage point in only a month. It's actually gotten worse, not better.

Herman Cain: Fork. Stick. Done

2011-12-02T14:37:00.001Z

Roger L. Simon » The Mystery of Herman Cain

This man's record shows he can't be trusted with the highest office in the land. His campaign and personal reputation are both on life support. It's time for him to pull the plug.

Europe made easy

2011-12-01T17:55:00.000Z

Europe made easy - The Washington Post

The Euro crisis made simple. The even simpler version: politicians bought votes with so much borrowed money that they finally could not repay.

Michele Bachmann's ding-dong moment redux

2011-12-01T15:55:00.000Z

Having already pointed out that Michele Bachman is a ding-dong, further evidence of her basic cluelessness is her commentary on the Iranian ~~protesters~~ government seizure of the ~~English~~ British embassy.

ABC News reports,

In light of the British Foreign Ministry pulling all U.K. nationals out of the British embassy in Tehran after students stormed the building in protest, GOP presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann told a crowd in Waverly, Iowa, today that she would close the U.S. embassy in Iran.

One small, tiny note: The U.S. hasn’t had an embassy in Tehran since 1980. Following the Iranian Hostage Crisis, where 52 Americans were held for 444 days, the United States cut all diplomatic ties.

According to reports, Bachmann applauded the U.K.’s move, adding, “That’s exactly what I would do [if I were president]. We wouldn’t have an embassy in Iran. I wouldn’t allow that to be there.”

The campaign tried to backtrack today, but it ain't selling. You can bet, though, that this is being much more widely reported than President Obama condemning Tuesday the takeover of the "English embassy" in Iran. Well, just as there is no American embassy in the country, neither is there an English embassy there - or anywhere else in the world. The embassy is the British embassy, encompassing more than only England.

The "perfect storm" of bullishness - or not

2011-11-30T18:00:00.000Z

By now everyone knows that market indices took off like bottle rockets this morning. The Dow, for example:

The reason is that the most important central banks in the world, including the US Fed, agreed to charge each other less interest in dollar swap lines beginning this coming Monday.

The U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank as well as the central banks of Canada, Britain, Japan and Switzerland agreed to lower the cost of existing dollar swap lines -- or reducing the cost of temporary dollar loans -- to banks by a half percentage point, starting December 5.

The central banks' actions was intended to ensure that starved European banks facing a credit crunch have enough funding as the euro zone's sovereign debt crisis worsens.

Also, China unexpectedly cut bank reserve requirements in hopes of boosting an economy running at its weakest pace since 2009.

Further encouraging investors, the latest economic data suggested the U.S. economy was moving more solidly toward recovery. The U.S. private sector added the most jobs in nearly a year in November, while business activity in the U.S. Midwest grew faster than expected in November surged.

Other data showed pending sales of existing U.S. homes surged in October by the most in nearly a year.

"There's a perfect storm of bullishness. PMI came out better than expected, plus what happened overseas, and ADP was well above consensus," said Donald Selkin, chief market strategist at National Securities in New York, with about $3 billion in assets under management.

It's true that the lates jobs report looks good. Even so, I think the surge will retreat - the move announced today has already weakened the dollar, resulting in higher prices of futures for oil, gold and silver, which are always priced internationally in dollars.

Furthermore, the other side of investment makers don't see what the big deal is:

S&P Equity Futures are up another 3 Percent, Bond Market Yawns

Global equities are sharply higher with this global coordinated action. S&P 500 futures are up another 3 percent and will gap higher.

Meanwhile Spanish 10-year bonds rallied (yields fell) a mere 7 basis points to 6.32%, Spanish 2-year bonds rallied a mere 8 basis points to 5.51%, Italian 10-year bonds rallied 10 basis points to 7.13%, and Italian 10-year bonds rallied 9 basis points to 7.00%.

Whatever the equity markets see, the bond market doesn't. A flight to safety of German bonds is back on, that China needs to cut reserve requirements is a huge sign of weakness (and no it will not stop a hard Chinese landing).

Also bear in mind that on September 15, there was coordinated swap-line action that did nothing.

Here is what happened to the ESI index after the September swap-line action:

The fact is that none of the underlying, weak fundamentals about the Eurozone's or America's economy have changed. The euro is as weak as ever and the dollar is weakening even more. Nothing about the PIIGS' situation is improved. So essentially, today's central banks' action place yet another temporary bandage on a suppurating wound. The markets are reacting to the news that something has been done, but by the beginning of next week, I think that the sane heads on Wall Street will understand that this something isn't amounting to much because basically, nothing has changed.

That's also the assessment of PIMCO's CEO, Mohamed El-Erian, who says that the indices moved so dramatically today because, "Risk markets love liquidity injections, real and perceived." Also,

First, these monetary institutions feel that, again, they have to move because other entities have continued to be too slow and too ineffective; and second, they feel that they cannot, and should not ignore an actual or anticipated need to relieve acute pressures within the banking system.

These two reasons were made even more pressing by last week’s dislocations in the functioning of European financial markets – most notably, the inversion of the Italian yield curve, pressure on government bond markets in core Europe, the growing fragility of the banking system, a drop in market liquidity, and growing hesitation by market participants to warehouse any risk.

The immediate impact on markets unambiguously favors risk assets across the world. The longer-term effect depends on the scale and scope of the follow through from others. This is particularly important as we count down to yet another European Summit on December 9.

The hope is that central banks are acting because, looking forward, they feel confident that other policymakers will finally catch up with a big and spreading debt crisis that has serious implications for growth, jobs and inequality. The fear is that they are acting because they feel that they must again pre-empt yet another set of potential disappointments.

The AP reports that all that happened today is that Europe has delayed "major debt decisions for 10 days." Will policymakers finally catch up to the markets and bankers? To think that is the triumph of hope over experience.

So: Near term: Party! Long term: Head for the hills!

Update, 1:45 p.m.: I predict that there will be a distinct pullback in the Dow by the time the NYSE closes at 4 p.m. today. At Close: Well, I called that the wrong way. The Dow actually closed at 12,029.56, up just under 474 points for the day. Things to look for: Yields on 10-year Italian bonds and the US Dollar Index. If the former drops about a point and the latter rises another three points or so, then the strong market indices will have a longer shelf life because together they will indicate that some sort of real response to the Eurozone's long-term issues has been adopted. But that is pretty problematical.

"It's hard to make things foolproof ...

2011-11-30T16:30:00.000Z

... because fools are so ingenious."

Except that the managers of McDonald's, Inc. are not fools.

San Francisco's jackboot government has made it illegal, starting tomorrow, for Mickey D's or anyone else to sell a meal that includes a toy unless the meal complies with the city's draconian nutritional standards. That the city's school systems' meals do not meet those standards is ironic and typical of this kind of socialist authoritarianism, but that's another story, I guess.

The ordinance is directed squarely and specifically at McDonald's Happy Meals. The city's objective is to ban Happy Meals altogether because, you see, Happy Meals and nothing else are making S.F. kids obese.

So McDonald's will tomorrow stop selling Happy Meals there - at least, they will stop selling any kind of meal that includes a toy. You will still be able to buy the exact, same menu items in the exact, same Happy Meal box, at the same price. But it will not include a toy.

A toy will set you back another 10 cents, rung as a separate transaction. And if you want to buy a toy at all, you must buy the toyless Happy Meal to do so.

No, Mcdonald's' managers are not fools. But the dictati of San Francisco are.

Here's the link: Happy Meal Ban: McDonald's Outsmarts San Francisco

Employment good news

2011-11-30T16:25:00.001Z

The National Employment Report says that seasonally-adjusted, non-farm payrolls increased by more than 200,000 from October to November. That figure includes the largest gain in construction jobs in five years. Link.

Brits: Prepare for riots in euro collapse

2011-11-30T13:30:00.000Z

Prepare for riots in euro collapse, Foreign Office warns - Telegraph

British embassies in the eurozone have been told to draw up plans to help British expats through the collapse of the single currency, amid new fears for Italy and Spain. ...

If eurozone governments defaulted on their debts, the European banks that hold many of their bonds would risk collapse.

Some analysts say the shock waves of such an event would risk the collapse of the entire financial system, leaving banks unable to return money to retail depositors and destroying companies dependent on bank credit. ...

Some economists believe that at worst, the outright collapse of the euro could reduce GDP in its member-states by up to half and trigger mass unemployment.

Analysts at UBS, an investment bank earlier this year warned that the most extreme consequences of a break-up include risks to basic property rights and the threat of civil disorder.

“When the unemployment consequences are factored in, it is virtually impossible to consider a break-up scenario without some serious social consequences,” UBS said.

Markets move faster than politicians

2011-11-30T02:23:00.001Z

Which is one big reason why the Euro crisis is not getting solved.

“Financial markets continue to move faster than politicians,” Mansoor Mohi-uddin, head of foreign exchange strategy for UBS, said. “Fixed income investors are betting that either Germany moves towards a fiscal union with its eurozone partners or that, without the ECB willing to buy unlimited amounts of sovereign bonds in the secondary markets, the eurozone will break apart.”

This gentleman also says that the end of the Euro as the single, unified European currency has already been priced into the markets. But I would add that the markets have not priced it in all the way.

However,

The EU process continues and the politicians clearly feel they have ample time on their hands.

EU monetary history is full of delays and Germany giving in to pressure. Merkel’s position is under pressure and the Bund Yield has become our barometer for pro-EU solutions – for now the trend is clear – we are on-route to Germany giving up and soon.

Europe: Apocalypse now?

2011-11-29T16:32:00.002Z

Germany told to act to save Europe - FT.com:

Germany is the only country in Europe that can act to save the eurozone and the wider European Union from “a crisis of apocalyptic proportions”, the Polish foreign minister warned on Monday in a passionate call for more drastic action to prevent the collapse of the European monetary union.

The extraordinary appeal by Radoslaw Sikorski, delivered in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate in the German capital, came as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development called on European leaders to provide “credible and large enough firepower” to halt the sell-off in the eurozone sovereign debt market, or risk a severe recession.

The OECD’s comments came as the organisation slashed its half-yearly forecasts for growth in the world’s richest countries, warning that economic activity in Europe would grind to a near-halt.

If Europe does reach a financial apocalypse and economic activity there grinds to a near halt, the US will topple right behind. A third of the United States' trade is with Europe. Think we can take that kind of hit without crashing ourselves?

More: OECD: euro collapse would have 'highly devastating outcomes' worldwide

The collapse of the euro could send the world's advanced economies into a severe recession, dragging emerging markets with them into the mire, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned on Monday. ... Pier Carlo Padoan, OECD chief economist, made plain in the body's latest six-monthly economic outlook that the greatest threat to global economic health comes from the eurozone rather than from the tax-and-spend gridlock in the US Congress. ... His comments came amidst evidence that the 17 eurozone countries are even wider apart on the measures required to staunch the exit of global investors and prevent a credit crunch on an even worse scale than in 2008-09.

This is Europe. The moment of verticality is only
days away.

There simply is no good news from anyone writing about the Eurozone and its future. The SS Europe is sinking and everyone knows it. But the national governments cannot agree on how to stop it. There is some consensus that Germany has to "save Europe," but the fact is that Germany alone cannot do it.

They say that when a ship sinks and you find yourself in the water, you have to get away from the sinking vessel because the water rushing into the ship will drag you along with it. But there is no economy in the world that can "get away" from Europe's impending and by now almost certain collapse. The recession we entered in 2008 will be like a walk in the park to what is coming. It will be a true depression. Ironically, in the short term America's markets will benefit from an inflow of investors' cash as they run away from the collapsing Euro markets. But that won't last.

How long until the sinking European ship turns vertical? Perhaps less than two weeks.

Falling off the financial cliff

2011-11-28T23:00:00.000Z

John Williams says that when it comes to inflation, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Severely slashing social programs such as Social Security and Medicare would be the only way it could be avoided. I don’t have any problem per se with Social Security or Medicare, but you can’t bring things into balance without addressing them. If you look at the U.S. annual deficit on a GAAP basis—generally accepted accounting principles—with accounting for the year-to-year change and the net present value of unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare and such, you’re seeing a federal deficit in excess of $5 trillion per year.

Putting that in perspective, if you wanted to raise taxes, you could take 100% of people’s salaries and the government would still be in deficit. You could cut every penny of government spending, except for Social Security and Medicare, and you’d still be in deficit.

You can’t escape the eventual hyperinflation if those programs are not addressed. Originally, I was looking for hyperinflation by the end of this decade. I’ve advanced it to 2014, and it may well come before that. I think we’re already in the early stages of going through what has to happen for this to break.

I report, you decide. But those problems will not be addressed quickly, and probably not even addressed at all. The United States is presently financially suicidal.

Consider Spain, for example, which is now falling off the financial cliff.

Spain’s economy is double the size of Greece’s, Ireland’s and Portugal’s COMBINED.

Spain’s total debts, including mortgages and commercial loans, are large enough to bankrupt all of Europe.

Even if the United States manages to escape a direct contagion attack for a while longer, the impact of Spain’s demise ALONE will explode on global financial markets with a mega-tonnage that’s many times larger than anything we’ve seen so far from Greece.

Worst of all, Spain has simply run out of time. Its death spiral is under way; its plunge into default, virtually unavoidable.

Here are the horrifying facts …

Spain’s unemployment has skyrocketed to 22.6 percent; and among workers under 25, to an astronomical 48 percent!

At least one million people are at risk of losing their homes — the equivalent of nearly seven million people in the U.S.

Homelessness and begging are rampant; labor strikes and street protests, endemic.

And now, the final blow: Global bond investors are dumping Spanish bonds like a hot potato, driving Spain’s borrowing costs through the roof.

In fact, Spain is now having to pay three times as much on its three-month treasury bills than it paid only one month ago. Investment capital is fleeing Spain like proverbial rats and the sinking ship.

But it's not better here.

Almost everywhere in the world, especially in the United States and Europe, the pattern is clear:

First, the government spends everything it has.

Next, the government borrows all it can from its people.

Then, it borrows still more from foreign countries and banks.

Finally, the debts become so onerous that they bring on the contagion — the day of reckoning — we’re witnessing now.

Right now investor money is still coming into US markets because even though the game is crooked, it's the only game in town (or the world) that is still a safe haven. But it's only comparatively safe, and the comparison is like saying that a stage two lung cancer patient is healthy compared to a stage four patient.

I am not posting cheerful stuff here, I know. Jeepers, I sound like Jeremiah, but Jeremiah, for all his gloominess, turned out to be right.

Huge Explosion In Iran's Nuke City

2011-11-28T19:34:00.000Z

Huge Explosion In IRAN's Nuke City:

Less than two weeks after a mysterious explosion destroyed an Iranian missile development base, and the same day the Israeli Military reported on the effect of that explosion, Iran's official news agency FARS reported that a loud blast was heard in the city of Isfahan at 2:40 pm local time (6:10am EST).

Iran operates a uranium conversion plant near Isfahan, which has a major role in the nuclear weapons process. first went into operation in 2004, taking uranium from mines and producing uranium fluoride gas, which then feeds the centrifuges that enrich the uranium.

Since 2004 (thank you France) , thousands of tons of uranium flouride gas were stockpiled at Isfahan and subsequently sent to the enrichment plant in Natanz. Search and rescue teams called to the scene confirmed the blast, but as of yet no injuries have been reported.

Iran's uranium enrichment plant is located just outside the city of Isfahan – one of Iran's largest cities.

According to the FARS report, a security official confirmed that the explosion had occurred, but refused to give further details.

Which makes these two pieces all the more relevant:

Why the Israeli Air Force will bomb Iran this spring

Why the strikes are likely to succeed

What to say to the grieving

2011-11-27T20:07:00.001Z

Having corresponded with James Joyner over the years, it was a blow to visit his site early this morning to read that his wife, Kimberly, died suddenly last night from unknown causes. Presumably, the cause will be determined, but now James and his two small daughters are in shock.

Some dozens of readers have left comments of support on the post. They reminded me of a post of mine in July 2003 of what to say, or not, to the grieving. So here it is.

I have had a lot of experience with funerals and people in mourning, both as one whose kin have died and in ministering to the bereaved. Here is a short course in what to say to the next of kin of the deceased.

What not to say
Do not attempt to explain the death. Comments such as, "This is all part of God's plan," or "There is some purpose served here that we don't understand" are not helpful. Just skip them. Grieving parents, widows or widowers are not looking for cosmic wisdom or theology. No matter how helpful you think such things are, or how intensely you believe them, they do not help.

Do not minimize the impact of the death. Deaths of loved ones are consequential, and must be regarded as such. A woman I knew had to bury her three-day-old baby girl. A woman of her church told her, "At least it wasn't a boy." In the recent death of my elderly and long-term ill mother-in-law, several people said to my wife and me, "At least she isn't suffering anymore." These kinds of comments are cruel, not helpful.

Do not talk about the unfairness of life or make the deceased and the family a victim of circumstances. Comments such as, "I don't see why the doctors could not have done more," or "Your wife was such a good woman, I don't see why she had to die" or the like harm rather than help. The deaths of loved ones create chaos in the mental and emotional states of the families. Often, they wonder whether they could have done something more to save the deceased. Don't say anything that could reinforce these feelings.

What to say
Express sympathy and offer support. Be a friend. Be brief and sincere. Here is a template you can use either verbally or in writing a sympathy card:

I am saddened to hear of your loss. Please be assured that my prayers are with you. I know these days are difficult for you. You have many friends who will support you and who are eager to give you aid and comfort. We pray that you will be strengthened through God's grace, and come to find rest and peace. Sincerely, [name].

It is not inappropriate to offer, "If there is anything we can do, let us know," but not many next of kin will let you know. If you truly want to offer more than moral support, just do it. Offer to take their car to be washed before the funeral. Offer to do their laundry or house sit or visit to answer the phone. Be imaginative in discerning what routine tasks you can perform for the bereaved; those are the tasks that tend to be left undone. Never force yourself on the bereaved, of course, but usually a doer is gratefully welcomed while a mere promiser is forgotten.

If the death was tragic (that is, premature, suicidal or violent) then you should understand that support will be needed for many weeks, not just a few days. The level of support required will decrease, but do not expect that after only a week or so the bereavement will just end and the bereaved will get on with life. "Getting over it" is something that may never happen for the families of those who died tragically. Parents who lose children, for example, never get over it emotionally although after a time their routines may appear normal. But they always grieve, even after decades.

Anniversary dates can be particularly difficult. For those who lose spouses, the next Valentine's Day can be very difficult. A card or bouquet on that day will be very helpful. A phone call on wedding anniversaries or birthdays of the deceased will be much appreciated.

It's going to get uglier

2011-11-18T00:15:00.001Z

Quick embeds of three pieces at Business Insider that are more than merely disturbing. The trends are pretty ugly.

See also my earlier post, "The long decline is just beginning."

"Where do you see yourself in five years?"

2011-11-17T23:47:00.001Z

Fortunately, I have never been asked this question by a job interviewer or personnel manager, but Graybeard has, and he gave the best answer I have heard of.

True story: I've mentioned before I work for a big company. Like the majority of the herd, we do annual performance reviews, which is a comparison of goals you submitted a year ago, goals you were scheduled to meet, with what you actually accomplished. This year they asked us to submit a development plan. The first question was, "What do you picture yourself doing in three to five years?". In my mind, I wrote, "In the best case, I'm retired, living someplace with dark skies, on 10 acres I own free and clear, with plenty of recreational opportunities, playing to my heart's content. In the worst case, I'm crouched in the rubble that used to be my house, wearing a loincloth that some animal I killed was wearing, and defending my wife and I with a rifle. With two bullets saved for when all other options are gone". Then I decided not to submit the form until they tell me I have to.

Ah, the pleasures of following back link referrals!

Liberals On Government Healthcare Then And Now » American Glob

2011-11-16T20:18:00.000Z

Liberals On Government Healthcare Then And Now » American Glob

And it's illustrated!

Having fun with gravity!

2011-11-16T17:32:00.001Z

Play this at full screen!

HT: American Digest

PS - "Don's Version" in the grab does not refer to me, but to the poster on Youtube.

Only three Munchkins remain

2011-11-16T17:18:00.001Z

Via Michael Silence, I learn that one of the Munchkins of The Wizard of Oz has died: "'Wizard of Oz' Munchkin Karl Slover dies at 93"

DUBLIN, Ga. (AP) — Karl Slover, one of the last surviving actors who played Munchkins in the 1939 classic film, "The Wizard of Oz," has died. He was 93.

The 4-foot-5 Slover died of cardiopulmonary arrest Tuesday afternoon in a central Georgia hospital, said Laurens County Deputy Coroner Nathan Stanley. According to friends, as recently as last weekend, Slover appeared at events in the suburban Chicago area.

Slover was best known for playing the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins' band but also had roles as a townsman and soldier in the film, said John Fricke, author of "100 Years of Oz" and five other books on the movie and its star, Judy Garland. Slover was one of the tiniest male Munchkins in the movie.

Long after Slover retired, he continued to appear around the country at festivals and events related to the movie. He was one of seven Munchkins at the 2007 unveiling of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame dedicated to the little people in the movie. Only three remain of the 124 diminutive actors who played the beloved Munchkins.

Yes, Michele Bachmann is a ding-dong

2011-11-15T23:51:00.001Z

"Look at me! Please! Look at me!
I'll say anything!"

It's sad to see a would-be national political figure flailing about mindlessly in vain, thoughtless (literally) attempts to get attention. But that is what forlorn Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is doing, and doing it harder every day.

First up: "Bachmann: Media, Not Voters, Picking Winners"

Michele Bachmann just weighed in on "Debategate," telling Whispers that the media is trying to pick the Republican presidential winner, cutting voters out of the process.

"There's always a suspicion of maybe a bias and I guess this just confirmed it," she said of a CBS memo before Saturday's debate, which suggested that the Minnesota Republican congresswoman would be ignored during the foreign policy chatfest.

The memo, she said, "demonstrates that the media wants to choose who our nominee will be and who the next president of the United States will be."

Well, you know how it is.

Okay, you have to say that aloud to get it, I guess.

Yes, Michele, the media are going to do everything they can to sway the election the way they want it to go. It's called the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Get used to it. And it's been going on since, oh, John Adam's administration.

Exhibit 2: Bachmann wants to make Iraq pay "millions of dollars" for each American life lost toppling Saddam and stabilizing the country.

"I believe that Iraq should reimburse the United States fully for the amount of money that we have spent to liberate these people. They're not a poor country. They're a wealthy country."

That comes to more than $700 billion, plus, she said, "millions of dollars" for each life lost (troops who were merely gravely wounded apparently get no consideration from her). This is just nitwittery. I mean, I think Great Britain should pay us for burning the White House in the War of 1812 and Japan should pay us for the hundreds of thousands of Americans killed and wounded kicking their Shinto government out.

And pray, Ms. Michele, just how do you propose to make the Iraqis do that? Her answer? Click here (but come back!).

There is no way to do it. She has proposed a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, offered an answer to a question no one is asking. This isn't policy, it's not analysis, it's certainly not political conviction. It's just straw grasping on national TV trying to get campaign traction from a headline - and failing.

Good night, Rep. Bachmann. You are the only Republican woman I can think of in the national media who makes Sarah Palin look good. It's lights-out time for your campaign now. And it was lights out for your potential for national leadership quite a long time ago.

The long decline is just beginning

2011-11-14T16:27:00.001Z

Here is a real bright ray of sunshine over at American Digest about The Ship of State:

The jobs are not coming back. To know that you need to get off the inter-states; off the scenic blue highways that lead to your summer beach retreats. You need to get into the towns that have been passed by; the towns whose main industry has become food stamps and "assistance." These towns are growing in number daily and will continue to grow.

There is no work in these towns. The factories that supported them are long dead or dying. They, like the people they supported, are carbon based life forms and the strange insects that govern us seem to be united in making sure they never return. The checks and the food stamps come, but that's not enough to paint the houses or put in the gardens or do much more than eat too many pizzas and drink too much watery beer. The young would leave but more and more there's no place to go. They spend their time instead deciding on what sort of new tattoo will go well with the previous twenty.

The building of new houses and malls and condos and other large construction projects are not coming back. And even if they did where would we find the workers trained to build them? Old carpenters have moved on to making a living at something other than construction. There's not enough work to bring young ones onto the job and help them to master the skills needed. When a nation stops building it stops having the jobs that can train the next generation of builders. Mexicans, working cheap and off the books, are still in some demand, but there's a limit to repainting and the kind of minor brickwork that makes for a pleasant garden.

The money isn't coming back except at something worth less with every passing day.

No, it is not, and here's the demographic-tsunami reason why.

There are 79 million baby boomers like me. The oldest boomers, born in 1946, have started turning 65 just this year and many are entering retirement. There are 17 years worth of boomers left to retire, on average, 4.3 million per year. (Actually, since boomer births did not peak until 1957, the number of boomers retiring will steadily rise by more than that average. Boomer births passed more than 4 million per year in 1954 and never fell below that number; 1965 was fewer than 4 million, but '65 was not a boomer birth year. See here.)

It will not be until 2025 when median boomer's age will be 70. But boomers' longevity will be years longer. That means that boomers' mortality rate will not start diminishing boomers' numbers significantly for several years, probably at least 10 years. Since for many years now the death rate per 1,000 population has been declining, the margin of error is wide in just when the number of boomers will start falling steeply, probably only when the median age has gone significantly higher than 70.

So: boomers are starting to retire and will do so in accelerating numbers for at least 18 more years - 1964's boomers (the last of the cohort) won't start to retire until 2029. We are living longer. And we are selfish people who are not very much inclined to leave a sizable estate to our kids. The huge wealth transfer we enjoyed from The Greatest Generation has been spent, boyo, because man, do we boomers love our lifestyles.

Don't expect a big inheritance from your boomer parents -- even if they are rich. Less than half of millionaire boomers say that leaving money for their kids is a priority for them, according to a 2011 U.S. Trust study. But 64% of boomers say they plan to use their money to travel and more than one in three say they want to use it to "have fun."

Now, where is all the money to pay for our retirement centers, medical care and vacations in Costa Rica going to come from? It will come from the equity investments we made before we retired. In short, we are going to sell stocks, bonds and mutual funds like crazy starting very soon. And because each successive year adds millions more to the retired ranks, the selloff will accelerate every year into the late 2030s and almost certainly well into the '40s.

The fate of traditional equity markets, beginning, oh,
next year. Found at Boomer Cafe.

The plain fact is that tens of trillions of dollars are going to disappear from the value of the DJIA and other stock indices over the next 20-30 years. And with each year, as the selloff accelerates, the decline in equity-companies' market value will drop even more - because each successive year, boomers will sell more equities than the year before, both as a group and individually, just to stay even.

In fact, if the near-term retiring boomers cash out only $1,500 of equities per month, starting with zero retired boomers and adding about 360,000 every month, then in only six months more than $3 trillion of sold-share value will be reached.

Read this slowly: Three. Trillion. Dollars. Sold off every six months. That's in addition to the previous semiannual's sum. That's $18 trillion of equities sold in just the first 18 months. And it only goes much higher from there. Folks, we are looking at possibly hundreds of trillions of dollars of equity sales over boomers' retirement years.

There are two huge problems with this. First, the total world market's valuation is only $37 trillion. So boomers' simply cannot cash out enough equities to maintain their standard of living because there is literally not enough money in the world to do it, assuming that boomers need only about $1,500 of sold principal per month to make up a shortfall of dividends and interest. Even if you halve the figure, the numbers can't be sustained.

So - we boomers simply are not, as a population group, going to enjoy in retirement the high standard of living we are accustomed to.

The second problem is that Generation X, boomers' successors, doesn't have nearly enough money to match as inflow into equities what we boomers are going to take out. Gen-X is the generation hit hardest by the multi-year Great Recession. Enormous numbers of them have already sold out just to stay afloat financially. And even before the recession hit, they were piling up debt like madmen.

The Gen Xers, generally defined as those born from 1965 through 1980 — now 27 to 43 years old — have even less assurance than the boomers of receiving company pensions and projected Social Security benefits.

In 1979, when the oldest Gen Xers were teenagers, the sole retirement plan for 62% of workers was a traditional pension, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). By 2005, when most of the Gen Xers had joined the workforce, that number had flipped: 63% of employees found themselves covered only by voluntary 401(k) plans. So much for the corporate safety net.

On top of that, the Gen Xers' life expectancies, and thus their retirements, will likely exceed even the boomers'. They'll need to save more aggressively. Yet, burdened by high housing costs, stifling college debt, stagnating wages and outsize health insurance and gas prices, Gen Xers are saving too little for retirement, just as workplace benefits have shrunk.

According to the EBRI, more than one in three workers ages 35 to 44 aren't setting aside any money for retirement. Among those ages 25 to 34, 45% aren't saving.

In short, the traditional US equities markets - the Dow, the S & P and the NASDAQ - are heading over the falls and there is nothing they can do about it. Anyone younger than 50 today is going to get clobbered if they keep investing for retirement with the old "buy and hold" method of investing in funds or stocks.

The US economy is not coming back even to the 1980s level of performance, and as for that of the '90s and middle Oughts, only in your dreams.

What we boomers have done is left an incredibly bollixed up legacy to our children, and we captain the ship of state happily off the falls because, hey, we'll be dead by the time it crashes onto the rocks, so what's it matter? But our kids and grandkids will be crushed by what we have done. Fact is, we never grew up and we never will.

Drudge sticks it to Cain

2011-11-11T18:20:00.001Z

Exactly what is Matt Drudge trying to communicate here?

The most brutal Perry/Paterno comments | No Silence Here | knoxnews.com

2011-11-10T17:56:00.000Z

The most brutal Perry/Paterno comments | No Silence Here | knoxnews.com

Examples:

"Rick Perry to drop out of race "to spend more time w/my wife Anita and 3 children Griffin, Sydney and... Griffin and..."

"Now hoping Nebraska beats Ped State this weekend."

What about saving souls?

2011-11-10T17:45:00.000Z

The 'Christian socialist' clergymen praising the Occupy protests are more socialist than Christian. What about saving souls? – Telegraph Blogs

The religious Left doesn't believe in saving souls. They don't believe there are any souls to save in the first place, and that there is nothing to be saved from in the second.

The British Left was surprised but supportive when Canon Giles Fraser quit his position at St Paul’s Cathedral in protest at its handling of the Occupy crowd squatting on its door. Fraser’s rebellion was a rather confusing one: he didn’t think that the occupation should stay, he just opposed the use of force to move it on. Nevertheless, the anarchists in the street welcomed what looked like a revival of radical Christian witness. The eloquent Canon Fraser said: “I think that, in a sense what the camp does is that it challenges the church with the problem of the Incarnation – that you have God, who is grand and almighty, [who] gets born in a stable, in a tent. You know, St Paul was a tent maker. I mean, if you looked around and you tried to recreate where Jesus would be born – for me, I could imagine Jesus being born in the camp.”

But Fraser’s benediction of the occupation should be qualified by the fact that he is a very odd Christian. For a start, judging by one of his Thought for the Day broadcasts, he doesn’t seem to believe in life after death. The hope of “life eternal” is really Christianity 101: it’s the hope that defeats suffering and keeps us all from dying in despair. What does Fraser say to his parishioners on their deathbeds, one wonders? Obviously not, “We’ll meet again”. Working on the basis that if there’s only one life you may as well live it to the max, Fraser also endorses gay marriage. He promotes his views through The Guardian, The Socialist Worker and Radio 4. Not that he does any of this for the money! He doesn’t need to: until recently, Canon Fraser lived in a 17th-century grace and favour house.

Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, "radical Washington DC cleric Fr Thomas Reese" has called for the “redistribution of wealth and the regulation of the world economy by international agencies.”

To which I respond the same as Milton Friedman: "Where do you find the angels" to do that?

If there is anything that we know about international agencies, it is that angelic they ain't.

Fork. Perry. Done.

2011-11-10T14:08:00.001Z

» Most Brutal Debate Video and Tweets Ever - Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

Here's the video:

Comment from the Youtube site:

"At approx. 0:05 in the clip, you can see where Ron Paul is using the Jedi Mind Trick.

"These are not the agencies you are looking for..."

You have just witnessed the death of the Perry campaign, although the funeral will not be held for some time yet. Meanwhile, Newt's star is rising.

Grade inflation and higher education

2011-11-10T13:55:00.002Z

The Volokh Conspiracy » Reforming Higher Education: Incentives, STEM Majors, and Liberal Arts Majors – the Education versus Credential Tradeoff.
The pernicious bubble in higher education is not the near-runaway attendance costs, but average undergraduate GPAs that approach 4.0.

Chart from gradeinflation.com

While there is no grade inflation in the technical courses (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, or STEM), it's shot through the roof in the humanities. Why one and not the other?
Basically, STEM schools or departments are in worldwide competition with each other, and their reputation rests on their top-performing graduates. Hence, introductory STEM courses are designed to weed out the poor and average performers, and that means the classes are conducted at a pace that students with merely above-average math skills can't keep up. (I also wonder whether STEM professors know they can't curve grades for people who might be designing long-span bridges, power plants or airliners.)

This is not to say, however. that STEM schools have been immune to grade inflation over time.

As for humanities departments, there is no inter-school competition. Harvard's history department does not compete with Oxford's, or for that matter with State U's. If a student wants to get a BA in history - or philosophy or English Lit, whatever - it really is not much relevant what the name of the school is. The reason is that humanities departments have become almost useless for graduating bachelor holders who are immediately employable in their major. So undergraduate humanities schools are really just prep schools for Master programs or law schools.
That explains the grade inflation in humanities departments. Grade inflation has not corrupted the system, grade inflation is the system. And the more comparatively worthless a bachelors humanities degree is for postgraduate employment, the higher its average GPA is. That's how those departments justify their existence to the larger university and how they attract students to select those departments as majors.
Grad schools don't care where their applicants matriculated. Grad schools consider nothing at all about a student except his/her GPA. A 4.0 at State Cow College in global civilization studies is far more credentialing for admission to a grad school than a 3.5 in physics from MIT. Grad schools don't care where the 4.0 came from or what its major was. They just want the high GPA.
So a college student choosing a major should determine real quick whether he is grad school bound, and if so, select a major with the strongest record and reputation for grade inflation. That such a major is almost certainly going to be worthless for job seeking and will usually be free of intellectual content (like, oh, womyns studies) is irrelevant. Just get as close to a 4.0 GPA as possible. It's all that matters.
That's a short summary, of sorts, of prof. Volokh's assessment. But it's not altogether in line with a more in-depth study online here. However,

The author believes that the resurgence of grade inflation in the 1980s principally was caused by the emergence of a consumer-based culture in higher education. Students are paying more for a product every year, and increasingly they want and get the reward of a good grade for their purchase. In this culture, professors are not only compelled to grade easier, but also to water down course content. Both intellectual rigor and grading standards have weakened. The evidence for this is not merely anecdotal. Students are highly disengaged from learning, are studying less than ever, and are less literate. Yet grades continue to rise.

Then there's this:

To avoid getting an "incomplete" for the course, Ms. Zhou withdrew before the lab ended. Since switching majors she has earned almost straight A's instead of the B's and C's she took home in engineering.

Students who drop out of science majors and professors who study the phenomenon say that introductory courses are often difficult and abstract. Some students, like Ms. Zhou, say their high schools didn't prepare them for the level of rigor in the introductory courses.

Overall, only 45% of 2011 U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT test were prepared for college-level math and only 30% of ACT-tested high-school graduates were ready for college-level science, according to a 2011 report by ACT Inc.

Women marrying down

2011-11-10T02:33:00.001Z

Intelligent women forced to 'dumb down' and find a less-educated man to marry | Mail Online

A lot of this going around. And since most women are hypergamous, it's a problem.

See also: "Sex, marriage and exchange of value"

"Why "man up" isn't working"

Say goodbye to the EU

2011-11-09T21:30:00.000Z

The thing is that the European Union is doomed financially. And that means it is doomed politically. CNBC reports.

Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, warned Europe's debt crisis risked plunging the global economy into a "lost decade," and said it was up to rich nations to shoulder the burden of restoring growth and confidence.

But the rich nations are only rich relatively, not absolutely. They are facing the same demographic and monetary challenges that the off-the-cliff countries have, but the rich nations are not as close to the cliff. But they are headed there and they know it. And there is no one to bail them out.

Christmas tree tax: About, face!

2011-11-09T21:16:00.001Z

That Drudge man, he be powerful! When you get 100 million hits or so per month, you sway opinion whether you are trying to or not. Remmeber this morning's Christmas Tree Tax?

The administration has folded. Obama Administration to Delay New 15-Cent Christmas Tree Tax.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is going to delay implementation and revisit a proposed new 15 cent fee on fresh-cut Christmas trees, sources tell ABC News. The fee, requested by the National Christmas Tree Association in 2009, was first announced in the Federal Registry yesterday and has generated criticism of President Obama from conservative media outlets. ...

White House spokesman Matt Lehrich told ABC News that despite some media coverage, “I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama Administration is not taxing Christmas trees. What’s being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign, similar to how the dairy producers have created the ‘Got Milk?’ campaign.”

Nonetheless, the criticisms have apparently had an impact as the program is now being delayed.

“USDA is going to delay implementation and revisit this action,” Lehrich said.

If members of an industry group want to assess a 15-cent fee upon each item they sell, no problem. What I don't understand is why the federal government needs to be involved at all. Of course, that's a dumb question to ask when it concerns this administration.

Where is the ACLU when you need it?

2011-11-09T19:22:00.001Z

Officially promoted by the Obama administration!

Heritage's blog, The Foundry: "Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax"

President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).

To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees

But wait! It's not actually a tax, you see:

Acting Administrator Shipman had the temerity to say the 15-cent mandatory Christmas tree fee “is not a tax nor does it yield revenue for the Federal government” (76 CFR 69102).

The 15 cents, you see, goes to a board, established by the SecAg, that promotes Christmas trees by "carrying out the program established by" the SecAg. No wonder OTB headlines it, "A Christmas Tree Tax? No, Just Good Old Crony Capitalism."

The problem here isn’t that the Federal Government is imposing a “tax” on Christmas trees, but that it’s doing so to finance a program that it shouldn’t be implementing to begin with. The reason that the Christmas Tree growers want a program like this is because natural trees have been steadily losing market share to artificial trees in recent years. ... It’s a choice consumers are making in increasing numbers apparently, and the natural tree industry obviously doesn’t like it.So, they decided to get the government involved in “promoting” natural Christmas trees. ...

Why, then, do we need a government program to promote their sale?

We don’t, of course, and in reality the government shouldn’t be involved in product promotion of any kind. That’s not their job, it’s the job of the industry itself. If tree growers want to create a promotional campaign, then they can do so through their trade association. This simply isn’t something that the government should be doing, especially for a product that is sold primarily in a domestic market. Instead of doing that, though, they lobbied the government to create a program to do it for them.

What we’ve got here, then, is another example of crony capitalism, with the government putting its finger on the scale to benefit the natural tree industry at the presumed expense of the artificial tree industry and, most likely, the taxpayers (that 15 cent a tree fee is unlikely to be enough to fund the program completely). That’s crony capitalism, folks.

This administration hardly originated crony capitalism but Obama et. al. have perfected it to a high art.

However, clearly this program is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment! As we all know, the government with its partner, the ACLU, has been waging a War on Christmas Trees.

Okay, snark off. Actually, there are all manner of industries that use the government to promote their businesses and this sort of fee is by far from uncommon - as even DefendChristmas.com reports, "Akin to similar programs that promote milk, beef and cotton, the new Christmas tree program will impose on U.S. domestic producers and importers an initial fee of 15 cents per tree." However, it is still accurate to describe the fee as a tax because it is remission of revenue to the federal government by force of law, spent for purposes that are spelled out in law and regulation, carried out by an executive department.

The ACLU's web site is not terribly informative about its stance on Christmas trees per se. It does say that the government must not be in the business of promoting one religion over another or of promoting religion at all.

I hardly think that a program to strengthen the natural-tree growers is an endorsement of Christianity itself. So no Constitutional line has been crossed. That doesn't mean that the program is wise or desirable. That no one in the government had a second thought about implementing it only shows how deeply rooted these back-scratching programs are in our polity. That's the problem, not 15 cents.

Wal-Mart math

2011-11-09T01:06:00.001Z

Okay, first there was the Volvo dealer who thinks you discount cars by raising the price. Now Wal-Mart shows its corporate math and marketing skills:

I blame George W. Bush.

Europe's problems explained in four seconds

2011-11-09T00:56:00.000Z

It's simple, really.

Flight 1549 3D Reconstruction

2011-11-09T00:47:00.000Z

An amazing computer-3D reconstruction of the flight and river landing of the fabled USAir Flight 1549, smoothly piloted by Capt. Sullenberger ontothe Hudson River after bird strikes shut down both engines.

Let's lie about college Republicans

2011-11-08T14:50:00.000Z

Vandy College Republicans Demand Apology from Tennessean | Blue Collar Muse:

Reporting on a visit to Occupy Nashville by Vanderbilt College Republicans (VCR), it included four photos, in an 11 photo gallery, of inflammatory signs presented so as to suggest the sign holders are part of the VCRs. In two of the photos, it actually stated the signs belonged to VCR members. As it turns out they were displayed by persons trying to discredit the VCRs. The Tennessean got it wrong – very wrong.

And not by accident, I am sure. It was a hit job, pure and simple.

Can't pass up a deal like this!

2011-11-07T19:06:00.001Z

Some discount (click image for larger view):

Not standing with the 99 percent - at least not downwind

2011-11-06T14:30:00.000Z

Mark Steyn, as usual, just nails it:

I don’t “stand with the 99%,” and certainly not downwind of them. But I’m all for their “occupation” continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes. At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement’s aims: They’re anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life — just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What’s happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: The government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class, and the criminal class in order to stick it to what’s left of the beleaguered productive class. It’s a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest — the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the “scholars” whiling away a somnolent half decade at Complacency U — are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about “social justice” and whatnot. ...

At heart, Oakland’s occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it.

get that? Only the criminal class is actually honest about what it is up to.

The .001 percent

2011-11-05T23:40:00.002Z

It makes me think of how many of the OWS frauds are of an age where they could enlist in the military, or for the college graduates crying about their loans, could apply for officer candidacy. Quite a few, I bet.

I scorn them even more when I recall that Friday, my second son drove 180 miles round trip to take his US Air Force entrance physical in exploration of attending medical school under the Air Force's medical-school scholarship program.

Photo found on American Digest.

"Where do we find the angels?"

2011-11-04T02:46:00.002Z

Milton Friedman tutors Phil Donohue in 1973. Milt speaks directly across the decades to exactly the issues troubling us today. This is the long version, more than 10 minutes. A 2-1/2 minute snippet is here.

Europe’s free ride on the back of Nato is over - Telegraph

2011-11-02T19:14:00.000Z

Europe’s free ride on the back of Nato is over - Telegraph

Time for NATO's countries to start to look inward and prepare for a post-American alliance.

... In 2000, America’s share of Nato defence spending was around 50 per cent. Today, it has risen to 75 per cent. With peace at home, many European nations have redirected spending towards other priorities, free-riding off the US when it comes to threats overseas. And this problem is set to get worse, since every European Nato member is set for severe defence cuts – including France, whose own equivalent of Britain’s defence review begins next year.

This decline in capability has come about not just because we are spending less, but because we continue to spend badly. Military funding is channelled through dozens of separate national programmes and structures, creating enormous duplication and failing to achieve economies of scale. While Europe has half a million more military personnel than America, it can deploy just a fraction of them overseas.

Nato is also being weakened by changes in US foreign policy: as the then defence secretary, Robert Gates, said earlier this year, his country is starting to look west as much as east. What America sees in Nato is yesterday’s vision of the future: allies with declining capabilities, reluctant to put troops in harm’s way, and an institution ill-suited to addressing US interests – especially with defence cuts looming in Washington as well.

NATO has become militarily worthless not only to the United States but to itself. And it is past time to ask ourselves, "What has NATO done for us?" Well, not much.

And this should make the Brits sleep well at night: The Royal Navy has not even one warship to spare for emergency response within Britain's territorial waters.

Why does Obama believe weird things?

2011-11-02T16:44:00.000Z

I get the title of this post from dueling headlines found on my morning surf.

First, from RCP: "Obama Pushes Jobs Bill: God Wants To See Us Put People Back To Work"

Second, on Science and Religion Today: "Why Evangelicals Believe Weird Things"

Put 'em together and what do you get? Although I do have to admit that I know that Obama has never characterized himself and an evangelical Christian.

Remembering not to care

2011-11-01T22:52:00.002Z

Sums it up rather well, I think:

Labor secretary sexually harasses protesters

2011-11-01T19:34:00.001Z

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis personally called conservative protesters a sexually derogatory term at Florida Democratic Convention over the weekend. But the media will be exclusively concerned with what Herman Cain is said to have done about 15 years ago, with no attribution or confirming evidence. Of course. As we learned during the Clinton administration, only conservatives can commit sexual misdeeds or crimes.

What Washington really thinks about you

2011-11-01T19:25:00.000Z

It's simple, really:

Writing over at National Review, Josh Barro of the Manhattan Institute makes the horrible mistake of writing what he really thinks: Washington is smart, and the rest of you people are imbeciles.

Yep.

The scariest Halloween photo ever!

2011-10-31T17:27:00.000Z

The scariest Halloween photo ever: a scene from January 20, 2013:

The electorate reacts!