Burwell, TP, Screw You GOP!

Is GOP finally getting nervous that the Supreme Court might gut Obamacare? - LA Times:



If more Americans were somewhat awake and observing, TP (The Party-D) would be useless to elect. No matter what, NOTHING that they do is ever really their responsibility!



As I covered here  they wrote the ACA and EXPLICITLY put the "only the states that set up exchanges" will get subsidies! The idea was that they would FORCE the issue by PUNISHING those states that didn't comply.



But then 37 states didn't do exchanges and they realized their program was not going to work without those states involved, so they STILL gave people signing up in those states subsidies -- and now 87% of the people signed up get kickbacks.



But, as they make clear in the article, if the SCOTUS calls their bluff, IT IS THE REPUBLICANS FAULT!



Got it? You write a law with a specific intent to screw over your political enemies and reward your friends, it backfires and you get totally caught, but you STILL WIN!



That is what it means to be a ONE PARTY SYSTEM! "Heads I win, Tails you lose". You are the MINORITY, we own the media, most of the legal system, education, all the government workers, etc, so SCREW YOU!



We live in a corrupt regime, and TP is arrogant enough to just lay it all out there.





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Chicago, Running Out of Other People's Money

Exclusive: Chicago nears fiscal free fall with latest downgrade - Yahoo News Canada:

Progressivism and socialism are great systems until you run out of other people's money. It's a lot like the Rock N Roll lifestyle -- booze, sex, drugs. Looks pretty glamorous for awhile, then, sometime around their 30s if not before -- they either wise up or die. Event he "wising up" often incurs a good deal of collateral damage.

If most people didn't have to work and everything from food, housing, clothing, entertainment, education, healthcare, etc could be provided for free, life would maybe really be like hanging around the university for a month between semesters with no job and 10 grand or so you inherited from your grandmother and decided to blow like a "responsible" 21 year old.

Unsurprisingly to those over 21 without 10 grand inheritances and a greater sense of realism than rock stars, Rahm Emanuel, BO, or the NYTs -- places like Chicago, Detroit, NYC, DC, CA, etc run out of money. You can read about Chicago's current woes in the linked article.

Nobody is looking now of course (D in the WH), but the US debt is over 18T, and the unfunded liabilities for FICA, Medicare, etc are $60T and rising.

Party on.

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Frozen Slush Waves, 81 Years

Four photos of slush waves that'll chill your bones | MSNBC:

Those of us who are alive and able to read and see things, ought to be able to read and see things about WEATHER -- hot or cold!



Denver has broken a 102 year February record for snow.



Nantucket is having the coldest winter in 81 years. That is newsworthy -- people are living through it, there are interesting phenomenon associated with it. It is just DATA -- like CA having had a drought that was supposedly the "worst in 1200 years" ... which is kinda funny if you look at the "pattern" on the chart that supposedly shows that. It certainly does show that CA has a climate that is prone to deep drought. One might be able to find a statistical way to claim the last drought was "worst", but it ain't by much! (like pick out the NEXT worst from the chart ... )

Naturally, we have heard A LOT about the CA drought, because it fits the current narrative of "Global Warming" ... since Nantucket and Denver do not, old records going by the board there get little coverage. Thus, why many people "believe".







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Kickback Neutrality

F.C.C. Net Neutrality Rules Clear Hurdle as Republicans Concede to Obama - NYTimes.com:

I happened to be listening to MPR this AM when they must have let the wrong caller through to a program on BOcare. She had a family of four, made too much for BOcare subsidies, but was well short of "comfortable".  She had thought BOcare would be a good thing, but discovered that her old $800 monthly bill for insurance went up to $1200 and the deductibles went from a couple hundred to couple thousand. In summary, her  health care cost went from a bit less than $10K to $20K -- it doubled and she was aghast. The show moved on with no comment -- not their kind of caller. You lost lady -- next question.

That is pretty much what is happening to most folks -- the folks that are benefitting from BOcare are those at a lower income level. It "works as expected" -- it transfers money from working people to those non-working or at least low income, and provides a kickback (more money) to the people that supported the program -- insurance companies and big medical providers like Mayo. TP's friends are rewarded and it's enemies are punished -- success! Next topic.

The linked article indicates that the FCC is going to pick up a whole new domain from where appropriate kickbacks can be garnered for itself and suitable friends. Want to certified as "neutral" -- well, here is how you do it, send so much here, contribute to this, pay this person / foundation / organization, and wala, you are "neutral"! Oh, wait -- I see that you are on a list as one of THOSE people -- "conservative", "Tea Party", "Christian" ... whatever. Do you want to cause yourself problems? or do you just not know any better?

I believe the IRS "scandal" is a watershed moment for America. We CAUGHT the Federal agency that we ALL have to deal with operating by punishing it's political enemies. And we did NOTHING! Note I said CAUGHT -- that is the equivalent of "seeing a rat". By the time you SEE a rat, only the most insane would think "oh, there is probably just one"!

Corruption is endemic to ALL human institutions! The church, business, private organizations, government, etc. ALL ORGANIZATIONS! The bigger they are, the more powerful, the more isolated by "disclosure rules", the worse the corruption is. When politics become involved -- as in Government UNIONS which are servants to ONE PARTY, everyone that has a brain knows what is happening. "Catching" someone is really beside the point. You hopefully have never witnessed a fatal car accident happen personally -- that does not mean that they don't happen!

Saying anything about the obvious gets more and more dangerous however. Letting the government run the Internet is no different from letting the Mob run the truckers union -- only all of us are like produce shippers in the trucking example.

Perhaps the entire country can just operate on kickbacks of one form or another? That is how things work in "One Nation Under the Administrative State"!

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If McCarthy Was a Democrat

I am Under “Investigation” | The Climate Fix:



Since this story will likely hit only the "right wing media" (underground media?) I better introduce it. A DEMOCRAT Congressman from AZ, Raúl Grijalva, has sent letters to the universities of 7 US academics informing them that they are under investigation under the suspicion of climate denialism -- "are you now, or have you ever been a denier of AGW?" (Anthropogenic Global Warming)"? 



For any with a rudimentary understanding of US political history, this is pretty much an exact analogue for what is commonly screamed of as "McCarthyism" if the political right comes anywhere close to it. 



The reason that this isn't of interest from the left is that from the left, this is what is called BAU -- Business As Usual. What part of "You MUST agree" is it that these 7 have failed to understand? "Gay marriage"? You must agree, or we will put you out of business! You are think your group can be tax deductible but  you don't agree with TP? No, you can't be and the IRS will prove it -- oh, and BTW, likely audit you and those on your contributor lists as well for good measure! Ditto AGW. 



The reason that "McCarthyism" is called "McCarthyism" is because McCarthy had the total unmitigated gall to go after THE LEFT -- Communists! He seemed to think that being called a Communist was somehow a BAD thing, when in fact the left has always made clear it is supposed to be a GOOD THING! 



The real definition of McCarthyism is "Someone on the right getting enough power to seem to be able to question the left, which results in the person on the right being demonized, losing their position and ultimately being destroyed". 



For those who are not in "THE PARTY (TP)", "McCarthyism" is "Being in a position of some level of power and questioning TP".



For Democrats (TP), "McCarthyism is simply business as usual.



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Mourning Winston, Last Lion, Defender of the Realm

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345548639/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

After now having finished 1800+ pages of Last Lion over the last few weeks (Alone, then Defender of the Realm), last night, with a glass of brandy in hand to honor his memory, I reached Winston's death shortly after his 90th birthday and the end of the defender book. I love to read. Given retirement and the weather over the last couple weeks, it feels a bit like I lost an old friend today.

 His birthday was on Nov 30th and he celebrated 90 as he liked to with family and friends, roast beef, oysters, Pol Roger champagne, brandy and cigars late into the early morning hours. Over a decade prior he had commented to Jock Colville on another January 24th that "today is the 24th of January, that is the day my father died. It is the day that I shall die too."  On the night of the 9th of January he refused to take either brandy or a cigar -- very rare. He had a stroke and went into a coma that night. He passed on the 24th.  I believe the image above is of the crowd outside on his 90th and him giving them the V for victory.

I don't think there is any question that he was the greatest man of the 20th century. Without him, we may well be all speaking German today and being forced to revere Hitler as that man. Next to Winston, FDR, Stalin, Truman and Eisenhower are just "other statesmen".

He was great because he was always Winston. Here he is calling socialism want it was and is:

"I hope you have all mastered the official Socialist jargon which our masters, as they call themselves, wish us to learn," he said in 1950. "You must not use the word 'poor'; they are described as the 'lower income group.' When it comes to a question of freezing a workman's wages the Chancellor of the Exchequer speaks of 'arresting increases in personal income'....Homes are in future to be called 'accommodation units.' I don't know how we are to sing our old song 'Home Sweet Home.' 'Accommodation Unit, Sweet Accommodation Unit, there's no place like our Accommodation Unit.'"

The level of tyranny and millions of subjugated and dead at the hands of Stalin and the USSR could likely have been significantly reduced if not nearly avoided had FDR been willing to listen to Churchill and had not had the idea that "he could talk to Stalin". Here is a little glimpse of comparison between Churchill and FDR:

... Roosevelt "always enjoyed other people's discomfort." Harriman recalled. "It never bothered him much when other people were unhappy."

Churchill did not rise to the bait until Stalin proposed to shoot at least 50K German officers after the surrender in order to ensure Germany's docility well into the future. "I would rather," Churchill replied, "be taken out to the garden here and now and be shot myself rather than sully my own and my countries honor by such infamy." Roosevelt then chimed in with a compromise; he suggested that only 49K officers be shot". 

There are a number of places that one realizes that FDR often gave weasels a bad name -- siding with Stalin and reducing his number by a thousand allows you to understand the REAL FDR vs the "Fireside Chat" fake.

In reading the book, one is shocked by how much FDR and others in his cabinet sidled up to Stalin and the USSR while taking a decidedly anti British Empire stance. For some strange reason, FDR had massive concern for what he saw as "injustice" to people in India, but was completely sanguine about many millions of Poles, Slavs and Germans being butchered, raped starved, and eventually imprisoned or virtually imprisoned as the machine of the Red Army blugeoned it's way west.

Or perhaps FDR just didn't like Britain and what he saw as her "interests". When there was a huge famine in Bengal and the demolished Brits had no ships, but 350K tons of wheat in Australia, FDR dithered for a month when he had the ships, then sent "regrets". At least a million more Bengalis died in the next twelve months. The book makes it very clear that American politics were what FDR cared about -- whatever it took for him to win elections was what he was committed to -- not matter what the cost in lives or the risk of loss to Hitler.

Churchill's life is a drama that exceeds any that could be imagined -- made more dramatic by being real. He heroically fought the monster Hitler, and won without becoming evil himself. And then his people turned him out of leadership because they wanted the "free stuff" promised by socialism less than 2 months after VE day. How is that for gratitude?

But he persevered, the socialists were a disaster as he had predicted, and he returned to the Prime Minister position in '51, laying it down in '55. His last 10 years were spent writing, painting and sailing the world on Aristotle Onassis' yacht.

His son Randolph was a source of disappointment, it was said that he inherited all of his fathers bad characteristics and none of the good.  -- as Winston once said with a tear in his eye "I love my son, but I don't like him".  Randolph died in '68 at the age of 57. His first wife, Pamela bore a son Winston who was a joy to old Winston. Pamela, eventually Pamela Harriman was is a study in herself -- it was once remarked that she was the worlds foremost expert on rich mens bedroom ceilings.

His daughter Sarah had success as an actress, struggled with alcohol her whole life and died at age 67, apparently having relapsed to alcohol.

His wife Clementine remained his love to the end and outlived him by over a decade.

I wish he had been a Christian -- I like to believe that God had a long talk with him from January 9 to the 24th and convinced him that he had one critical error in life. Inside Westminster there is supposed to be a fairly large block on the floor that says "Remember Winston Churchill" -- I certainly will, and I intend to see that marker in about a month!

Everyone Must Agree ...

Everyone Must Reject Giulianis Comment:



A rather longish but important discussion about the current Giuliani "loves America" flap and how such things affect our selections of appropriate and inappropriate thinking. The article fails to point out that BO himself questioned W's "patriotism" when W was trying to raise the debt limit. It also doesn't mention that calling W "liar", "torturer", "idiot", etc when he was in office by Democrats at all levels was rampant. Nobody really cared.



The main points made by the article is that these things are "staged" -- first it is demanded that the person that spoke apologize, then it is demanded that people who are "on the same side" as the person "distance themselves" from his comment, and then there is a demand that ALL of the "opposition" sign up to apologize for this "affront".



When we used to have "decent Christian people", we used to be able to say that "all decent Christians need to come out against X". Since "decency"and "Christians" have become rare, we are now into approving and denouncing statements based on our willingness to accept or reject the ideological rules of TP (The Party - D). When W was in office, any disparaging statement was completely legitimate -- no apologies required.



We know there is nothing "decent" or "patriotic" or "honorable" here -- BO himself effectively called patriotic Americans "bitter clingers". As the article discusses, "patriotism" itself is considered a tiny step from jingoism and something that any intelligent intellectual would only allow themselves to be associated with at arms length at best!



What we have is thought control -- a power play as to what you may or may not say about a TP leader in power. Any level of fighting back against throught control -- even just recognizing it is progress, but the fact that TP believes that a power play for thought control can work in their favor shows we have a long way to go.



Take the time to slog through the article, it IS worth the time!





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Iraqi WMDs Continue to Leak

C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons - NYTimes.com:

The main point of this article is the fact of a single cache of 400 sarin munitions that would have been lethal if used being bought by CIA.

I chronicle it only because the story that has been burned into the American mind is "Bush lied, people died" -- by literally THOUSANDS of repetitions.

For 80-90% of the people, it CAN'T be changed -- it is part of TP controlling the media and what I consider to be a lack of combativeness on the part of W and company. They were however at war -- as we still are,  and W's concern was after 9-11-2001 focused primarily on keeping America safe.

He made the (probably correct) determination that given the level of media bias and attack mode, putting out information about what was being found would not have helped -- it would have not been covered, and if it was, it would have been covered as somehow "not valid weapons" -- too old, not enough, etc.

Enough time has now passed that as this information comes it the media covers enough of it so that if we get hit with a weapon from Iraq it can be firmly identified as a "failure of the W administration to find the weapons".

Much like the end of the USSR -- the idea of which was firmly considered a "dangerous Reagan fantasy" in the early '80s, suddenly became a fait accompli know by all, impeded by Reagan and brought to completion by Gorby. All those pronouncements from the early '80s? Down the memory hole!

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Cholesterol, Connections, Causality

Big Fat Surprise

I got to hear the linked story on MPR yesterday and the host, Kerry Miller -- if you go out and listen to it, it is at about 4min that Kerry gets worried about "science denialism" because it seems that although "science" told us that they KNEW what we ought to eat, it turns out that they were WRONG!

The attempted response of dietary science being "fragile science" with some prevarication about "prestigious schools like Harvard" is kind of fun to listen to. "It is hard to find causality" -- yes, now there is something we can agree on!

Say your computer crashes "some of the time" when you are browsing the web -- or just "randomly". You can meticulously keep track of when it does it, what you are doing, keep charts, etc, etc. You (unless you are a programmer / maintenance person) build up a lot of information ABOUT the  problem, but it takes someone that can "look behind the curtain" to find the causality and FIX IT. Causality is HARD -- and that is in domain where we KNOW everything in your computer was designed and constructed by human minds / hands.

For the human body, most food, and the climate, NOTHING was constructed by human hands -- we can only postulate an ultimate causality of "God" or "random chance", and if we want it to be somehow "predictable", we better lean pretty hard to the side of "something with "order" created a reliable order around us that we can count on and find rules / patterns / etc.

Unsurprisingly -- for those that have some contact with what thought means , Kerry has stumbled into an epistemological problem -- what can/do we know and how do we know it? (a link to some cliff notes on that).

Hmm, and another link that might help on the issue.

Kerry seeks to BELIEVE in science -- so she is very concerned that what she sees as an "error" in science will spread and encourage "science deniers". But science is a PROCESS, and in fact an inductive process which  means that no matter how many times your experiment was repeated, that is NOT "proof" that it will not fail the next time.

 I call the induction problem the Thanksgiving turkey problem -- the little turkey develops a hypothesis that humans are benevolent creatures that feed and take care of turkeys. Each day of it's life this theory is "inductively proven". On the day the turkey has the greatest certainly of the correctness of it's theory, (having had the most successful tests), it is Thanksgiving. The turkey has discovered induction -- and epistemology.

We don't know what we don't know. The set of what we don't know is INFINITE!

"Progressives" believe in the Whig theory of history -- the latest knowledge is better, and generally believe in "logical atomism" -- each event can be studied in isolation to gain meaningful knowledge.

Another  mistake Kerry made is to drift toward a holistic view -- that things are related. For a moment the SHOCKING thought crossed her mind that if one kind of science could have an error, then how could she know in her heart that other science was not less than holy and true? She has been carefully taught that "it's all particles and progress", and each event is separate -- but something in her soul is wondering about that.

Progressive thought is founded on "the latest is greatest" and "believe the experts, not your own stupid mind". Plato, Christianity, Burke essentially claim the opposite -- there is a transcendent grand plan and everything is related to that plan.

Kerry is a transcendent, purposeful, related universe "denier" -- intellectually. She wants to isolate nutrition science from climate science. She wants to raise cigarette taxes to curtail smoking, but doesn't see raising income taxes as reducing income. She wants the universe to work in the way she wants it to work, with no reference to the "I AM".

To put it in the words of Mannheim:

"One must make one's choice between two views: on the one hand that there is a reason working in and through men's minds which can lay hold of a timeless structure of things: on the other, that thinking is a series of temporal events determined, like all other events, non-rationally"

There is either a God and a purpose so that everything is part of an ordered and related plan,  or it is is "a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing". 

Kerry clearly WANTS to believe in SOMETHING, and nutrition science has just been show to have feet of clay

Either it all makes sense ... or it doesn't, and that is a matter of faith! 

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Women Make 75% What Men Do

The Gender Pay Gap is a Complete Myth - CBS News:

As a regular listener to NPR, the "fact"  in the headline is well known. In fact, we are one of the WORST of the developed nations in that area. They cover the story (a very apt word) quite frequently.

This "fact" needs to be drilled in  -- like racism, a lot of the strength of TP (The Party-D) depends on it! It is a great spur to use in "The War on Women". Who wouldn't be angry about getting 25% less pay than someone else for the same work! It's like some groups were taxed 25% more than others ...

Oh wait, the top bracket DOES take home 25% less than a married person making $74K -- but there are less of them, so we don't care how they are affected. Never mind.

The "fact" of the women pay gap is a myth. The whole linked article is short and worth the read, but the following us the punchline:

Despite all of the above, unmarried women who've never had a child actually earn more than unmarried men, according to Nemko and data compiled from the Census Bureau.

Women business owners make less than half of what male business owners make, which, since they have no boss, means it's independent of discrimination. The reason for the disparity, according to a Rochester Institute of Technology study, is that money is the primary motivator for 76% of men versus only 29% of women. Women place a higher premium on shorter work weeks, proximity to home, fulfillment, autonomy, and safety, according to Nemko.

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GOP Frontrunner Easy to Find!

Scott Walker is officially the GOP frontrunner, and the media is out for blood « Hot Air:



It reminds me of a bitch (female dog) being in heat in the country neighborhood when I was a kid -- every male dog within a couple miles was around for a visit, often with one dragging a chain that was supposed to keep them home.



The usual drill in '11 was as a new face hit the top we heard about their husband maybe being gay (Bachmann),  the old divorce re-marriage with wife (Mitch Daniels), the racist rock (Rick Perry) ... Herman Cain women, Romney was a "bully" -- like I said, "bitch in heat".



One thing about having an R next to your name, the media LOVES to do opposition "research" on you! Only problem is that they already went berserk on Walker in the recall and then again in the last election, and even after shaking down friends and associates so hard they ended up getting court orders against them, they really didn't find anything.



So we are on "he didn't graduate from college", "he was in a room when somebody said something uncomplimentary about BO" and "you, can we ask you if you think BO is a Christian?".



Seriously, in the media mind is somebody being a Christian good or bad???



The predictability of the MSM gives banal a bad name!



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Al Gore and Michael Mann Penniless

Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher - NYTimes.com:

I'm often struck by the "denier researcher got paid"! articles. The people that push the warming agenda don't get paid? Are Al Gore and Michael Mann street people? Are government, university endowments and other foundations, grants, etc provided by wealthy donors, the UN, etc somehow "not money"? Is a Nobel Prize for taking a certain position not an award?

We all need to maintain awareness of bias on every front -- the very way our senses and brains work is a giant "fish studying wetness" bias that goes with us every second of every day. To be human is be motivated by money, influence, status, intellectual validation, security, popularity, and a whole host of other subtle and not so subtle items.

As we age and experience the myriad motivations and biases of people, at least many of us learn to at least be a LITTLE careful of the "hey, the other guy is BREATHING over there"! sort of little kid taunt. Does the NYTs really not realize that ALL sides of EVERY issue have at least many of the same motivations? For people with a TINY level of intellectual maturity that are not complete zealots on an issue, it would seem completely incredible that they could not realize that, and in fact not realize that BILLIONS of dollars around the planet are being spent, granted, tax incentivized, etc on wind, solar, batteries, etc on the hypothesis that the planet is warming due to human causes.

Or are they actually aware of that reality and are consciously attempting to smear the "other side" for having the very same motivations.

How many times have you seen the "hockey stick" chart or some other version showing "massive warming" ... along with predictions of "many feet of sea rise in 100 years", "droughts, storms, heat waves", etc, etc 

How often have you seen this chart of what temperature has been doing for the last 10K years? The far right of the chart is where we are -- it indeed might be warming.

If you REALLY want to worry, notice how much shorter the warming periods are getting and how much longer the Little Ice Age was than the previous cooling periods! Hmmm ...

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No Religion Supports Terror

Obama refuses to acknowledge ‘Muslim terrorists’ at summit | New York Post:

In the linked article, BO confidently asserts "No religion is responsible for terrorism, people are responsible for terrorism".

That must mean that people are NOT motivated by what is in their heads nor hearts, since religion certainly involves both. This is the inverse of the truth -- IDEAS motivate people, and religion is certainly at least in part a powerful idea.

Is it not strange that BO is confident that guns, an inanimate object, DO cause violence, but that religion, does NOT!

Remember that BO is a confirmed Statist -- he believes in the advance of state power which ultimately means the subjugation of people by FORCE. What does or does not motivate people really matters not once they have no property, no means to defend themselves (right to bear arms), or no method to speak out. Statists don't believe in motivation, they believe in CONTROL!

The other fact to remember is that Statism **IS** a religion -- it is just godless. The godless religions of communism and socialism killed over 100 million in the 20th century -- THAT is certainly a religion that kills!

The use of words by a Statist are purely a means to power -- as are all their political activities. See Orwell or Hayek books like "Road to Serfdom" to understand this in more detail. Always look with much suspicion at any label choices of a "liberal" or "progressive" -- the words are quoted because even the names they call themselves are lies and misinformation.

The commonly used (stolen) name "liberal" is a complete lie -- Statists are bent on having controlling power over others and false naming is one of the weapons they use to gain control. After which they use violence, imprisonment and death. In their desire to gain control, Statists are fine with aligning with any other totalitarian form of ideology -- no matter how evil.

BO and the MSM find themselves drawn to defend Islamic killers because they find common cause with at least the ultimate totalitarian control aspect of the Islamic State, if not total agreement with specific methods like beheading and immolation in cages. Does it ever seem the least bit odd that the people who make the CLAIM that they are "liberal" find no problem with a religion that treats women as personal property, kills homosexuals as well as women who have sex outside marriage? Perhaps the libertine nature of it's founder in "marrying" a 9 year old "wife" (Aisha) is what impresses them?

Violence has and likely always will be a tenet of Islam, because the founder was a warrior that approved of using force to gain converts and land and wrote violent action against any holders / attackers of "Islamic Lands" into his "holy book", the Koran as a guaranteed ticket to eternal sexual favors. It is the ultimate "works righteousness" for angry young men.

Statists have no problem naming their friends and enemies in ways that suit their cause. They really never did find a "Racist Tea Partier" although they sure tried -- making up a "spitting incident" in DC as well as others. "Tea Party = Racist" was an excellent association. Back in the late '80s-'90s, "Religious Right" was a favorite label. "Right Wing Militia", "Christian Right", "The 1%" ... the Statists always have their enemies, and they completely enjoy applying negative labels to them with extreme frequency. In fact, the BO administration ranks "Right Wing Extremists" as a major terrorist threat!

Note how they totally avoid applying ANYTHING negative to their friends in ISIS -- the ones that cut off heads! Getting "terrorist" in the same sentence with "Islamic" causes their tongues to freeze. Statists ultimately seek raw centralized power and they seek it by ANY MEANS. Which is why it can be confusing as to how they choose friends vs enemies, UNLESS you realize that "Left" means CONTROL, and "right" means CHAOS (it's a Get Smart World). The US was founded as a CENTER RIGHT nation and we have consistently drifted leftward.

The USSR, National Socialist Germany (Nazi) and Sharia Law were/are all based on highly centralized control with "motivation" being at the point of a gun. People tend to defend those that agree on their most basic values, thus BO defends Islam.

Walker, The Coward In the Room

Scott Walker’s cowardice should disqualify him - The Washington Post:



Somehow I really don't think that Dana Milbank EVER considered Scott Walker to be REMOTELY qualified for the presidency.  Thank, goodness -- if Milbank had thought such, then I certainly would NOT want to consider Walker for president either!


So Walker was IN THE ROOM when Giuliani, the former New York mayor, said “I do not believe that the president loves America.”

Not defending Obama makes Walker a "COWARD"! ... and worth a full WaPO column! 

I'm going to waste any time going out and trying to find the likely 100's of cases where lefty politicians were in the room when far far nastier things were said about W or some other Republican president. We know that Milbank would not even notice, since to him they would be FACTUAL statements, and 90% of the MSM would feel the same way. 

One can know of someone's character and potential by their enemies. The amazing early level of hatred for Scott Walker from the left shows that he is likely someone that has great prospects as both candidate and president.

We can point out Obama saying that W was unpatriotic and maligning a W record on deficits that BO would take a sefie of himself with were he to come within a few TRILLION of doing as well! 

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Thou Shalt Worship Green

Holman Jenkins: Oregon Is Greener Than Thou - WSJ:

I grew up in a fundamentalist church where someone could always find a way to be just a bit more righteous -- no TV, movies, rock music, dancing, Christmas ornaments -- and of course no smoking, drinking, gambling. Skirts could always be a bit longer, dresses a little drabber ... less jewelry, no makeup. The many manners of reaching total self righteousness shift a lot, but they have been endemic to the human condition since well before the scribes and the pharisees.

It matters not what religion we are, your natural desire is toward self righteousness by the manner of the creed that we choose or fall into.

The environmental "church O the Green" (no doubt with Irish heritage),  in this case, the Oregon Diocese (to have just a bit of word fun) is profiled a bit in the linked article.

In the end, the Kitzhaber-Hayes conflict-of-interest scandal may prove small potatoes (organic), but a general point needs to be made. In our republican system of government, we don’t assume virtue. We insist on checks and balances. We require competitive bidding and similarly transparent procedures to reduce discretion and the chances of corruption. We subject regulations to cost-benefit analysis to make sure the public is really being served.

We don't assume virtue? They must mean our FOUNDERS didn't assume virtue and ATTEMPTED to have checks and balances! The Statists from TP (The Party-D) have totally taken over and the virtue of their ilk is assumed at every front. The IRS is run entirely by TP union hacks, as is the media, legal system, education and vast swaths of industry. Of course they assume virtue -- of their own, and naturally assume malfeasance from those not of their flock.

As was covered in the article linked from another blog post not so long ago, today most parents care not what religion their offspring marry into (or none), but increasingly they shudder in horror at the prospect that their beloved children would marry someone from a different political party. My guess is that with 70% of Republicans being religious, the reason their concern is higher is because the child going TP would likely indicate a loss of faith as well, so thus a double whammy if you are not of the TP religion!

There is no more perfect measure that the national religion today is Statism -- with it's stations of the anti-cross:  environmentalism, abortion, "gay" marriage, redistribution, free sex (love has gone out of fashion), and sundry other sects and cults.

Don’t get us started on Google and its callow “don’t be evil” sloganeering. When it comes to proving Mr. Obama’s prayer breakfast point, however, give the prize to Putin's alleged funding of Western green groups to lobby against fracking.Environmentalism, alas, is a church with its reformation nowhere in sight. Jesus provided his followers the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector to guard against sanctimony. The greenies will have to admit corruption is possible before they can do anything about it.

Guess what, Islam has not had it's "reformation" either, and an even bigger problem is that while your most likely really fundamental Christian is something like the Amish, or at least in really dark suits trying to be very loving and forgiving, the fundamentalist Islamic is looking to kill or convert you -- and the is about all the freedom they think you need.

As of now, the fundamentalist TPer is just looking to convert you -- they may fine you, audit your taxes, fire you, sue you for "hate speech" if you don't worship one of their tenets like "gay marriage",  but at least as of the moment they aren't in the killing business, or even generally in the incarceration business unless you get really crotchety. But these things have a way of only going one direction UNLESS you have some tenets like "love your neighbor", "first shall be last", "he who would be first must be a servant", etc, and even THEN, the Reformation was far from civil.

Thou shalt worship -- the issue is really only what.

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Solar Climate

Blog: Bad news for warmists: Sun has entered 'weakest solar cycle in a century':

As readers of this blog know, what I see from many data sources with time scales a lot longer than "warmest since 1880"... periods of many hundreds, or even better, hundreds of thousands of years are a better benchmark for "climate" in my book.

The attached article is a good summary of some of what we know of solar climate -- we have actually been looking to some extent at solar activity since at least the 1600s ... this is a good chart from a site that the Australian government maintains that lets you look at the cycles in some detail and gives you some ideas of how much variation there is ...

Solar Cycles are quite interesting -- the article touches on the "Maunder and Dalton Minimums" and the "Little Ice Age" from about 1550 - 1850. The fact that we warmed from the "1880 on" is not very surprising if you show a temperature chart from say 10K years rather than "100 or so". Somehow the Mann / Gore "hockey stick" just isn't so interesting on THAT scale !

The current popular "settled science theory" is that CO2 created by humans largely drives the planets climate -- or at least has swamped all other effects since 1880. A short glance at a longer term chart will really make you wonder about Roman and Medieval Co2 production, and if you are not a fully "settled" warmist may even make you look at a few of those spikes and ponder if there isn't just possibly SOMETHING else out there that might account for such variations.

Then, maybe at noon some day on the beach, you look up and go EUREKA! THE SUN!!! OMG, the **SUN** affects temperature on earth!!!  ... but then, if you are a "smart person" and want to stay recognized by your peers as such, you take a deep drink of cocktail and say "never mind ...

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Look Before You GIVE!!!

The Right Wing Scam Machine | National Review Online:



Conservatives generally give about 30% more of their income to various sources and I have a strong suspicion that they are both too trusting, AND that watchdog agencies are WAY less likely to do any investigations if someone is sucking money out of conservatives.



IN GENERAL:

• Don't give ANY money to organizations that call over the phone unless you REALLY know about them. A huge percentage of such fundraisers are just "using a name", and a TINY percentage of what they raise actually goes to the organization! 
• NEVER given any money to the "National Republican" anything -- figure out what candidates you like and give it to THEM! 
• Make sure you vet any places you want to give money and find out what percentage goes to the actual "cause / candidate / etc"  

The bottom line is BE SUSPICIOUS -- even if it has the name of a person you like / trust, It's a nasty world out there!



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Applauding What You Oppose, 99 Quads of Energy on the Wall

The High Cost of Energy Illiteracy | Power Line:



Burlington Vermont is powered by "100% renewable energy" -- oops, the ELECTRICITY is all renewable, BUT that is because it is HYDROELECTRIC -- as in DAMS, which in environmentalist speak are DAMNED BAD! -- or to play on words, "Dam Bad".



So why are they applauding? Because they are liberals and they don't know the difference between electricity and energy, and also because ... well, they really don't like to think that much about much of anything.



The US uses about 100 "Quads" of energy a year. As in quadrillion BTUs -- ONE "quad" is 6 BILLION gallons of diesel! Try to pay that bill even at lower prices!



This article has a nice chart that shows how much is solar and wind. Drum roll !! Wind and solar combined are TWO QUADS .... as in 2% !!!



Hydro and Nuke combined are 10% -- but environmentalists want to SHRINK those!



The linked PL article is excellent. Asking environmentalists or NPR to tell you anything about energy is embarrassing -- and scary when you realize how much stuff these people are in charge of!



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Cigarette Taxes WORK!!

Tax hike cuts tobacco consumption – USATODAY.com:

This graphic shows up out on Facebook from time to time -- it makes me wonder if velociraptors are smarter than humans.



The linked article shows that raising cigarette taxes works to reduce smoking, especially in lower income people -- the people who pay the highest percentage part of their income to smoke.

Taxes are the sledge hammer of anti-smoking efforts. The federal tax hike helped push tobacco use down to 18.9% in 2011, the lowest level on record, according to the CDCsurveys. Even smokers who don't quit light up less. In the 1990s, one of every 20 high school students smoked 10 or more cigarettes a day. Today, one out of 71 students smoke that much.

This ought not be surprising -- when prices on something rise, consumption of it goes down -- "how much" is a function of how "elastic" the demand curve for it is. Raise the price for something, people buy less of it, lower the price and they buy more -- to a point, at which the market is "saturated". The "marginal utility" is no longer deemed to be worth the marginal cost.



Income works the same. The marginal utility of the first dollar is high and then goes down as income goes up -- the next $10K of income for a person making $40K is high, for someone making $400K, it is quite low -- the "marginal utility" of the first burger you eat can be quite high if you are hungry, if you were forced to eat a half dozen of them, the last few would be a lot less. If you make $400K, the amount of time/hassle it takes to make another $10K may well not be worth what you could do with that time on your own. NOT even considering the tax effects!



You can of course use "infinite money" better than infinite hamburgers, but you can bet a $100 bribe or a $100 fine is going to have a lot less effect on Bill Gates than on someone making $10K a year. The relative nature of utility still holds.



The simple rule "If you want less of something, tax it, and if you want less of it, subsidize it" still works, and we consciously use the first half of it with cigarette taxes, yet, try to ignore the effect for income.



But you might say "you HAVE to have income, you don't have to have cigarettes".  Due to the wonders of subsidy, not even this is true -- the government subsidizes sloth through all sorts of programs, and your standard liberal/socialist believes that everyone ought to have their "basic needs" covered by the government. There is some argument about what those needs are, but food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education are almost always included -- and now usually some level of "entertainment". Cell phone, internet, tv, etc.



A major objective of "liberal/socialist" thinking is that income ought to be "basically level", so they subsidize the low end, trying to remove the "need" to work. On the high end, there is no limit to the amount of taxation they want to put on ... 100% taxes for incomes over a given amount have been suggested many times from the left.



Especially with all it's income leveling desires though, the government really does NEED money. The rational solution would be to have a flat tax on ALL purchases (sales tax)  that covered federal, state and local governments. Right now that would be about 35%, because that is the percentage of GDP in total government spending!  Going off to that link shows "the march to socialism" as the percentage spent by the government continually rises.



What the chart can't show is the effects that income taxes working the same as cigarette taxes have long term on our economy so it's overall output is reduced. The TOTAL GDP is reduced because of the disincentives to higher income earners in the same way as cigarette taxes reduce smoking. A tax is a tax and the effects are the same -- for good and ill.



The ultimate result of socialism has to be slave labor (or revolution/freedom) -- those that would be likely to earn higher incomes start writing books, blogs and rabble rousing rather than creating wealth for the elite to distribute, and the elite gets really TICKED! First they start with little efforts -- use the IRS against groups they don't like, do a little "harassment" with extra regulations / etc on those that make too much money and can't shut up. Eventually though, it's always the Gulag for those that have too much gumption and don't want to  go over to the socialist side.





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Liberal, Conservative, Humor, Jon Stewart

Why There's No Conservative Jon Stewart - The Atlantic:

I love articles like this. A couple underlying "liberal" assumptions come through quickly:

1). I'm a liberal, therefore I'm "better" -- smarter, more in tune, "in the know", etc, etc.

2). I'm very modern -- and the latest information is ALWAYS best (therefore, there is no such thing as "truth", because tomorrow's truth will always trump todays!

A good working definition of Philosophy is "footnotes to Plato" ... something that a "liberal" can't subscribe to because of their underlying assumptions -- it's more modern now, Plato MUST be wrong!

But again, Plato calls the ball perfectly and they even quote it in the article!

Theorists have been trying to explain humor as far back as Plato. The ancient Greek philosopher said humor got its power from the pleasure people get when they feel superior over others, laughing at their foibles and flaws.

"Search your heart Luke, you know it to be true!" So given the assumptions of liberals that I just listed above, and Plato's words, it is easy to understand why "liberals" are a better market for political humor!

Political humor, in particular, might have an inherently liberal bias. Alison Dagnes spent years looking into this question for her 2012 book.  It does have a liberal bias, but she didn't get it.  If she had managed to understand Plato, she would understand that people want to FEEL superior to SOME group. Feeling is definitely not related to any objective reality, and it is irrespective of your actual power state. Satire makes fun of a group you CONSIDER yourself superior to, there is no requirement at all for you to actually be more powerful than that group in any objective way.

I'm pretty sure the British made fun of the Americans during the Revolutionary war, soldiers make fun of officers, prisoners make fun of jail keepers, southern whites made fun of southern blacks prior to "1968", and as evidenced by Jon Stewart, the dominant political and media evidenced by "The Party (D)" makes fun of conservatives today. Americans were objectively FAR less powerful than Britain during the revolution (they quit because we weren't worth the fight), certainly blacks in the south were less powerful that whites, ditto conservatives in the US today. Humor is an equal opportunity thing -- it depends on perspective, but ALL people like to feel superior! 

Seinfeld apparently understood Plato, as have many black comedians -- people LOVE to laugh at groups that they feel superior to -- down through time, Jews, Italians, Blacks, etc. When you are REALLY dominant, as whites were in the south, or liberals are today, you get to make fun of the other group, rather than having to BE one of the less powerful groups to be allowed to make the jokes, as blacks are today in comedy. In this wonderful Seinfeld sketch about a guy that converted to Judaism so he could do Jewish jokes, Jerry isn't offended as a Jew, he is offended as a COMEDIAN!

Certainly, if you are "with your own folks", one can make fun of the allegedly more powerful -- again, it is about FEELING superior, not any actual reality.

Young began to wonder whether this might explain why liberals were attracted in greater numbers to TV shows that employ irony. Stephen Colbert, for example, may say that he’s looking forward to the sunny weather that global warming will bring, and the audience members know this isn’t what he really means. But they have to wonder: Is he making fun of the kind of conservative who would say something so egregious? Or is he making fun of arrogant liberals who think that conservatives hold such extreme views? As Young noticed, this is a kind of ambiguity that liberals tend to find more satisfying and culturally familiar than conservatives do. In fact, a study out of Ohio State University found that a surprising number of conservatives who were shown Colbert clips were oblivious to the fact that he was joking.

"Irony" and "ambiguity" are in the eye of the beholder -- or maybe in this case, they are just uncomfortable cover for the truth.  When audiences felt inherently and securely superior to Blacks or Jews and that was allowable, the jokes were funny to them. When that superiority started to be called into question, the laughs became uncomfortable, then disappeared, and then the jokes became hate speech.

Anyone watching Colbert KNOWS that he is making fun of conservatives, that is the role he plays on the show! There is no "ambiguity" there at all -- to claim it exists is incredible. When people do not clearly "get the joke", they are not amused -- they are confused!   Conservatives, don't laugh for the inverse of the reason that liberals laugh --  conservatives know EXACTLY what he is saying/being.
He is playing the part of a "stupid obnoxious conservative"  --  and the Colbert CHARACTER is "joking" -- AS a conservative. He poking fun AS a conservative (character)!

Real conservatives who are skeptical about Global Warming  DO use the "won't warmer weather be grand"  line, typically during unseasonably cold weather.  Liberals HATE that -- and they consider it to be a sign of stupidity. No matter how cold it is, or how long a "pause" there is in warming, they must believe -- and feel superior to the conservative using the line. So they laugh at the Colbert character -- either naturally because they are real warmist believers, or they laugh because they know they are supposed to. To not laugh would not be appropriate to maintain standing in their belief system.

 Conservatives have yet a further reaction -- they know that humans in reality DO prefer warmer weather!  Given a choice between it being 2 degrees warmer in a winter 100 years from now and it being two degrees colder, humans ACTUALLY prefer the warmer.  BUT, liberals find themselves in a situation similar to people forcing themselves to not laugh at a racial joke, even though everything in the "humor program" of their brain might be firing.

Strangely, "suppressing the natural" is a major part of "liberal" behavior -- most liberals find gay sex disgusting too, it is naturally wired into our brains to react that way -- but they are forced to act like they don't to stay in good graces with their peers.

Conservatives know that the liberals are actually lying -- they are still human, they actually DO prefer slightly warmer to slightly colder temperatures. The scary part is that conservatives also know that "liberals" MUST NOT admit that they actually prefer warmth in order to stay in their group! They are forced to do their best to laugh "heartily and naturally" even though their very being is in disagreement with the position they espouse to stay in the dominant group!

 This is where this fairly simple thing gets more than a little spooky and conjures images of religious zealotry, Nazism, ethnic hatred, etc.  -- covered in a lot more detail in "The Righteous Mind". I won't go to ground on this here -- it comes up quite a bit in this blog. Human nature has a whole set of elements that all have "light and dark" sides --  say "greed / envy". Capitalism works to use greed to achieve good things, socialism uses envy to try to make things "equal".

Part of "civilization" is the channeling of our basic drives and weaknesses -- lust to monogamous marriage, competitiveness to sports, material comparison, wars, ... the list is long. For a couple thousand years, in the West, the Christian religion was the overarching set of morals / values that gave a broad agreement on many of these. We accepted human nature as fixed and imperfect, needing to be moulded by the Holy Spirit on the right hand, and by the state from the left. 

That balance is now gone. The State, and it's party -- TP, seek to cow the masses into following ONLY the authority of TP. THOU SHALT bow before Global Warming, "Gay Marriage", "Government Healthcare", "Government Education" ... and ultimately GOVERNMENT!!   Making fun of people that don't agree with that might lead eventually to some "mirrorish"  image of what happened to Blacks::

 free --> slave -> oppressed minority -> kept minority voting bloc --> ??? free someday ???

Productive free working Christian majority --> productive working Christian minority --> regulated Christian voting bloc --> oppressed minority --> slaves ???? 

In case you need a laugh after all that seriousness, here is some fairly equal opportunity political satire that at least OUGHT to be funny to both sides! (but likely isn't)

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The Linen Closet of Democracy

Crusaders and appeasers - The Washington Post:



A great one from Charles, just read it.



Obama channels Neville Chamberlain -- "Moral relativism in our time" is my quip contribution, but "linen closet of democracy" is better.



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Walker's College Records vs BO's

As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit - The Washington Post:

Isn't it wonderfully exciting to see a media braced for battle, leaving no stone unturned relative to the 2016 race?

Let's do a minor comparison to 2008 using the internet to take a little look at how these veritable Sherlock Holmes of focused detective work made sure that we knew EVERYTHING about the current cipher that occupies our highest office!

First of all, his name when he went to at least Occidental was BARRY -- not "Barack". That fact is one that is not discussed a whole bunch ...

We suspect that BO went to Occidental College because he said so in his book (although some of that stuff turned out to be "composite")  -- however if you do a google on it, all you get are a few right wing, likely nutty stories about if he went as Barry Obama or Barry Sottero and got foreign student aid. The closest you get to MSM curiosity is this, a debunking of one of the right wing stories, and it proudly tells us that his records are sealed, and will STAY THAT WAY! Not going to be any media pressure or sleuthing as there was to expose W's college records.

Then he went to Columbia ... although those records are not available, and there are aspects of it that would be HIGHLY interesting if he was a Republican. As he is a member in good standing of TP, we find VERY little interest in his time there -- so much so that even a not so wingnut publication with at least SOME level of curiosity did an article lamenting kind of "What the hell?" relative to those years. We do however see some of the MSM working VERY hard to say "nothing here, move along", with a complete lack of curiosity about how someone so self centered to write TWO autobiographies prior to turning 50 would fail to say more than a paragraph about 2 years at a major university.

This could go ad nauseum -- most of what is written in "Dreams" might as well as been "sealed" relative to the interest of the MSM. BO's "Choom Gang" weed buddies, doing "a lot of booze, weed and a little blow, but no smack" arouses not a peep from the MSM and most people have a VERY hard time believing it is written in HIS OWN BOOK even when you point out the page to them -- "like cows at the passing train".

The fact of the matter is that Scott Walker will have to deal with constant scrutiny and charges about things real and imagined every step of the way if he chooses to run, and after election if elected. As we have seen now for at least a quarter century, EVERYTHING about a Republican candidate that could even be IMAGINED to be a negative ( Was Mitt Romney a bully in High School?) will be taken out of context, blown up to the maximum, and will receive extremely strong and leading media coverage "Mr Romney, why did you bully kids in HS? ... oh, and have you stopped beating your wife?" ..

We MUST accept that this is just "the way it is". Anyone that wants to challenge the dominance and power of TP MUST go through massive attacks including those that are completely fabricated -- like Rather's "fake but true" memos if they want to reach the White House. A non-TP candidate needs 3x, 5x, or even more money to attempt to counteract the TP media onslaught that is a fact of life for those that are willing to stand up to the TP juggernaut. Any person willing to run for the presidency as a Republican is an exceedingly courageous person with a strong backbone.

If Hillary runs? Rest assured that outside of Fox and a few other conservative sources, things like Benghazi, Whitewater, Cattle Futures, Don't let anyone tell you that corporations create jobs , will be hard to find except in rebuttal form ... in fact, the number one link on the corporations/jobs one is already an MSM attempt to claim " nothing here"!

This is why any freedom loving person needs to fight TP -- even if they WERE good (which they are not), that much power MUST be fought if free men are to survive!

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The Whig Theory of History

Mises Daily | Mises Institute:

A little side-trip to the link can assure you I'm not nuts. There really is a "Whig Theory of History", and it is essentially as simple as the belief that "things are getting better".

You likely haven't thought about it much, but you probably have this theory as an unconscious belief. It is hard not to, it is after all the basis of "Progressivism", the dominant stated political theory of "The Party" (TP-Dem) which controls all our media and educational system. It has LOTS of support! It is also something that seems very nice to believe -- things will be better ten years from now, life will be grand when you retire, your kids will have a better life than you did, etc, etc.

It might FEEL nice to believe, but is it true? If you are a Christian or really any kind of a religious person, you ought not really believe it -- God has a plan, but the goal of that plan is eternity in heaven. The earth will explicitly pass away, and the predictions for whatever time the old ball of rock has left are for wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, floods, famine, etc, etc. So no go for a Christian on the "it's getting better and better for sure" outlook.

Atheist? How exactly would there be a "plan" or "direction" of history?  And why oh why would it be inevitably toward "better"? Not to mention what "better" might mean in a purposeless universe.  The atheist creed ought to believe in NOTHING, as in nihilism. Clearly to them  the universe is some grand accident, and since at least a huge number of atheists claim to arrive at their "faith" (the faith they are soulless) because of "the problem of pain and suffering in the world".

Since they can't accept a God that would allow any pain and suffering, they are stuck with a universe that they admit has pain and suffering, but also has no purpose. I always wonder how they arrive at the conclusion that meaningless pain and suffering is far superior to meaningful pain and suffering that they don't understand?

Or maybe the purpose IS pain and suffering? A number of prominent historical atheists seem to decide that INFLICTING pain and suffering may be at least their personal purpose -- see Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the people that outlawed DDT, etc.

"Progressives"? We might refer to these as people that decided to ignore most of the 20th century, where the leading "progressive" ideologies of Socialism and Communism (including National Socialism - Nazi) managed to murder something over 100 million and cause a good deal of property damage while doing it. I suppose it would truly be a "Progressive world" today had Hitler won -- in which case I would dare not be writing this, thus proving (to some) that history had "gotten better".

So, most of us run around believing a theory that has no philosophical or religious grounding, and is absurdly false based on empirical evidence (see middle ages, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, 9-11, lite beer, etc, etc).

Why?

The biggest reason is that we WANT to see history that way and there are certainly a goodly set of people that would like to take our money to tell us that they are making "progress" (See Hitler, Stalin, BO, etc). What's more, they are very happy to indoctrinate us with a specific way of teaching "history" that makes it SEEM like the Whigs produced holy writ -- doubly dangerous, because it is what we "feel" might be right. It is like someone taught you day after day that the sun goes around the earth, and since it looks that way, you are VERY CONFIDENT that you KNOW the right answer!

Only you don't know the right answer!! You need MORE DETAIL. Which is where books like the Churchill biography come in. If you sit down and read DETAILED history about virtually anything, the "inevitability illusion" fades like morning mist at sunrise. You see that history is made up of individuals, countries, events, ideas and "fate" interacting in highly unpredictable ways. It is completely the opposite of "inevitable"!

In fact, what appears to be inevitable even moments before it happens OFTEN turns out to not even happen as it is OBVIOUS minutes, hours, days, etc before that it MUST happen!

The French could have ended Hitler by having one soldier march across the border to into the Rhineland, nearly everyone but Hitler thought that was "inevitable", but they failed to act.

Same with Britain making a treaty with Stalin prior to Poland being invaded -- it was OBVIOUS, only they didn't make it and the opportunity was missed.

Had Hitler not called a halt to offensive panzer operations on the 24th of May 1940, rather than 330K British and French troops being evacuated from Dunkirk, there could have been 330K allied forces killed or captured, enough at that stage to likely swing the war to Hitler.

I could go on and on from this book -- but there are A LOT of options -- Six Frigates, 1776, and Coddington: The Gettysburg Campaign  are a trio I would personally recommend ... and the linked reviews can give you a little ammo to take on the Whigs!

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Eggs More Complex Than Entire Planet

The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol - The Washington Post:

“There’s been a shift of thinking,” he said. But the change on dietary cholesterol also shows how the complexity of nutrition science and the lack of definitive research can contribute to confusion for Americans who, while seeking guidance on what to eat, often find themselves afloat in conflicting advice.

No, actually there tends to be ZERO "conflicting advice" among at least government funded "experts" ... they weren't in ANY doubt about cholesterol being bad! The rule of the "expert" is "Always certain, frequently wrong". Often, they are even willing to tell you "it's settled" -- not that we ever hear that in these "enlightened times".

No doubt this will go the way of "wait an hour before swimming or you will get cramps" -- absolute gospel back when us Boomers were kids, forcing us to sit on the shore for the mandatory full hour after lunch!

The list is a long one -- parents being told their babies MUST be on their BACKS ... an especially sore point for our family since 25 years ago it was every bit as COMPLETELY CERTAIN that kids MUST sleep on their STOMACHS! Naturally, our first son HATED to sleep on his stomach, so we had rolled towels alongside him to keep him on his stomach.

Crib death ... like autism and vaccines, or like early heart attacks is something that we believe "there must be a reason for", so we are very suggestible when someone gives us one. Our brains are wired to "look for solutions / rules of thumb" and IN GENERAL that is a highly adaptive trait.

A place it breaks down however is dealing with rare events, or events that take place over long periods of time.

Crib death is (thankfully) rare ... like plane crashes. Any new parent is afraid of crib death, so very suggestible. They want to do "everything they can" -- so they are prone (as we were) to believe what the "expert" tells them. BTW, there is some evidence that SIDS may be caused by the same gene that makes one susceptible to dying in sleep apnea.

When something is rare, it is harder to pin down a "cause", and indeed, the incidence may be so low as to not allow a "cause" to be found. The theory at the time we had our son was that the baby spit up and choked on their vomit when they were on their back ...

The danger of "the expert" like all con artists and confidence men is greatest when one assumes their own ignorance -- the idea that "the expert", MUST know more than "poor little me".

ALWAYS look for alternative views, historical wisdom, "laws of large numbers" , ie if the condition is very rare, then any attempt to "fix it" is highly questionable. If something like climate is known to shift over many thousands of years, then someone making claims of "climate shift" in a period of 100 years or less is lying to you for certain.

We could go on ... but for now, enjoy those eggs in good health -- turns out we are back to being as smart as we were 45 years ago.

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TP: Think By Numbers

Obama’s Goldilocks Approach to Terrorism [Updated] | Power Line:

I suppose those old paint by numbers pictures may just be a figment of my youth -- they put numbers on little parts of the picture that indicated what colors you ought to use.

TP (The Party-D) through their own instruction and especially given the megaphone of the media does much the same with the minds of the easily led. The linked article gives a few  examples which I'll touch on, but then continue for a bit. My sample will be minor -- really the whole landscape of modern thought is carefully and oppressively created and numbered by TP.

• Terrorism -- NOT a serious problem. It is like "random crime". NOT to be worried about! (Pay no attention to that young woman just killed!) 
• Climate Change -- SERIOUS PROBLEM -- everyone needs to get wildly excited about this! RIGHT NOW ... why, in 100 years, it could be as much as a degree or two warmer!! ( the fact that it hasn't moved in 18 years is meaningless) 
• Vaccinations -- Anti-Science! ... er, well now it is. Pay no attention to Marin County, noted liberal enclave having vaccination rates like Somalia ...
• GMOs? Now THAT is some science not to be trusted! Oh, and fracking isn't safe no matter what science might say -- get your mind right!  TP CHOOSES which science is "settled" and which is not. 
• Oh, 50 million lives lost to malaria due to DDT ban? Never mind -- those are black lives that DON'T matter, just like the 6K young black men that shoot each other in our TP socially engineered inner cities every year! 
• 18 Trillion and debt and rising -- No biggie. Remember back prior to 2009 when any deficit at all ... including the W $175 B in '07 was a HUGE issue? Wonder what changed? 
• "1 out of 5 women raped" ... this is a MONSTER issue, it even needs BO to break into the Grammy's to cover it, of course it is completely false, but see Global Warming -- trust in TP!  
• The US is out of oil! ... Oh wait, it has a lot of oil -- and it is all due to the policies of TP! 
• The Keystone Pipeline is bad, Fracking is bad! Oil is bad! ... oh wait, TP is good! You might have to kinda fudge that mental square ... oil and everything to get it is bad, but $2 gas is good and due to the TP policies -- "somehow". 

If you listen to NPR and follow some right wing media, this is pretty much what the mental landscape looks like -- including HUGE gaps like 50M and 6K a year lives lost that nobody talks about!  TP presents the pieces of the picture they want to present, AND tells you what to think about what they choose for you to see.

It is easy to understand why TP believers hate Fox News, Talk Radio and Blogs so much!

'via Blog this'