Indoor Aerial Robot

Pretty impressive. Suppose this is the most advanced thing that exists? Maybe, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. Make this a little smaller, give it Bin Ladin recognition capability, "sleeps" by day and re-charges with solar power and hunts at night? Little C4? Little nerve toxin projectile? Audio of a BO speech? (no wait, that last one would violate the torture prohibition, I apologize)

Mass produce a couple 100 thousand and make a lot of areas of the world "less terrorist friendly". True, countermeasures might be "netting", strong fans on openings to buildings, etc -- but putting a little window breaking firepower on something seems like a potential, as well as maybe a bit of a "swarm capacity"? "Hey, I've found him, all units converge!!" ... say each one of them carry's a few oz of C4 -- 100 of them going for a building/vehicle/etc in unison should be impressive.

Yes yes, it might be tough on tall skinny guys with beards in the assumed area, but how many tall skinny guys does the planet really need?

Reality Speaks At Boston Globe?

Obama’s soak-the-rich mentality - The Boston Globe

Wow. The Boston Globe, deep in the heart of leftville. THEY are looking at things an starting to wonder??

High taxes can have unwelcome, and unintended, consequences.

Governments delude themselves when they imagine they can easily raise all the money they want by soaking the rich. The rich always have other options. When taxes grow too onerous, high earners can adjust their economic behavior. Some move to Spain to play soccer for La Liga. Others, less glamorously, cut back on their investments, forgo new business opportunities, seek out tax havens, or work fewer hours. The impact is felt not only in lower-than-expected tax revenues, but in lower rates of growth and productivity and job creation. Jobs are disproportionately created by those who have money to invest. “You can’t have employment and despise employers,’’ Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas used to say. “No goose, no golden eggs.’’

Holy Moly Batman! You think? Folks with more money, more skills, etc have more options? Tell me it isn't so! I thought they were stationary money cows that could be miked at will. Perhaps the Globe needs to bulk up on some frothy BO rhetoric:

“While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not,’’ charges Obama’s 2010 budget. “There’s nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few.’’ Accordingly it vows “to restore a basic sense of fairness to the tax code’’ and to ensure “that the wealthiest pay more.’’

There you go, how can you argue with that? Well, if one was reality based (not that we will be accusing the BO administration of any of that), one might look at the following:

By any reasonable standard the rich pay far more than their fair share. According to the latest (2007) IRS data, the top 1 percent of US taxpayers earn 22.8 percent of adjusted gross income but pay 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes. By contrast, the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers, who earn 62.5 percent of the income, pay just 39.4 percent of the income tax burden. That bears repeating: The income tax burden of the top 1 percent, who comprise just 1.4 million taxpayers, now exceeds that of the bottom 134 million combined.

One doesn't have to think very long to realize why the BO Administration and the MSM tend to be very fact averse. They are such "stubborn things". You go to all the work of devising a brilliant class warfare strategy, and much like your Afghanistan strategy, the rich just don't cooperate. Go figure. Why don't your targets ever sit still?

Lion of Leinenkugel

iowahawk: "Lion of Leinenkugel" Norm Snitker, 62, Laid to Rest

Any resemblance to drunks living or dead is intentional -- forget moderation, just enjoy it!

BO Breaks A Non-Spending Record

Op-Ed Columnist - The Obama Slide - NYTimes.com

The result is the Obama slide, the most important feature of the current moment. The number of Americans who trust President Obama to make the right decisions has fallen by roughly 17 percentage points. Obama’s job approval is down to about 50 percent. All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but in the history of polling, no newly elected American president has fallen this far this fast.

Hey, who says BO isn't special? His popularity has fallen the farthest the fastest of any newly elected President!! Wow! It seems that from '05 to '08, falling Bush poll numbers were being trumpeted from front pages with regularity. I wonder why it is that our unbiased press feels so differently about BO?

Oh The Morality!

Cheney’s dark side - and ours - The Boston Globe

As I read through this column I'm struck by a certainty that goes well beyond the farthest reaches of the "religious right" in the US and heads directly into Islamic Fundamentalist "morality". The horrid moralizers of the religious right are only trying to work with the law to control things like infanticide in the service of convienience and to prevent the conversion of a rite that has been between a man and a woman for all of human history into "something new". Those discussions are about using a political system that was supposedly suggested for exactly what it was intended for -- what exactly is the "mechanism" that might be suggested by the columnist below to deal with Americans "not getting their polls right"?:

The rot in our national morality is evident in a June poll by the Associated Press, which found that 52 percent of Americans said torture was sometimes or often justified to obtain information from terror suspects. An April CNN poll found that even though 60 percent of Americans thought harsh techniques including waterboarding constituted torture, 50 percent approved of them. A Washington Post/ABC News Poll was almost evenly split between Americans who say we should never use torture (49 percent) and should use torture in some cases (48 percent).

Whether it is because of the politics of fear that defined the Bush-Cheney years, the recession engulfing the Obama administration, or simply an indifference to foreigners languishing in jail, Americans have displayed scant curiosity about the dark side. A May McClatchy poll found Americans to be almost evenly split on having a “bipartisan blue-chip commission’’ on interrogations, and the CNN poll found nearly two-thirds disapproving of either a congressional investigation or independent panel.

This is a level of apathy, even civic debasement that makes it no wonder Cheney can spout off despite leaving America in a disgraceful place. He feels empowered to defend the dark side, because we have yet to shine a light.

Nobody on the Christian right that I know of expects that the minds of many of those who support Gay Marriage or Abortion on Demand are somehow going to get "educated" to "get it right". The politics is about getting people who SAY one thing (like 70%+ against Gay Marriage and later term abortions) to stand up and be politically counted. We don't expect Planned Parenthood and or the folks that march in the parades in San Francisco to suddenly "see the light".

When faced with people that fly planes into buildings to kill as many civilians as possible with their minds firmly fixed on 72 virgins in paradise, many Americans suspect that prissy Boston Globe columnists might not be the final moral authority on "what's fair in love and war". If they manage to put together some inquisition that puts a bunch of CIA folks and maybe even Dick Cheney in jail, is that going to change their minds.

Maybe. The reality that puts the numbers where they are today is that while the MSM and the Democrats have told us REPEATEDLY that "The policies and methods of the Bush Administration have made us less safe", there hasn't been any obvious evidence of that, such as an attack equivalent or greater than 9-11. If what the MSM and Democrats have said had any foundation in fact, we ought to have been attacked repeatedly during the Bush administration or shortly thereafter. The old low point for the security policy environment left to an administration was 2001 as Clinton handed off to Bush. Eight months later, 9-11. I write this on Sept 1, 2009 -- while BO and the MSM were so very certain that we were made "less safe" by Bush, the Clinton administration saw the first WTC bombing, Kovar Towers, 3 African Embassies and the USS Cole, the Bush Administration saw NONE after changing security policy on 9-11-2001.

We have now changed our policies sufficiently that we ought to be able to see over the next 4 years how much safer we have become with the great and powerful BO at the helm.

Grim Fairy Tales

RealClearPolitics - End to Two Grim Fairy Tales

Short and sweet, just read it. Teddy and Michael -- without all the false sugar coating.

Parsing Change

Michael Kinsley - Health Care: Americans Want Change While Keeping Status Quo - washingtonpost.com

Kinsley is a very smart guy, but the effect of being part of the "anointed elite" is somewhere between sad and humorous. Like the fish that finally thinks it is getting a handle on being wet, Kinsley is so unable to smack himself in the head and say "oh, it's all around me!" that one feels sorry and giggly all at the same time. It is the feeling that I suspect that Christians might get at the moment of death -- "Oh Wow, it's been obvious the whole time".

The reason Americans have turned against health-care reform, after
electing President Obama in part for promising it, is simple: Despite
protestations to the contrary, Americans don't like change.

As he discusses later, "change" is abstract. People LOVE "change" when it is "whatever they are dreaming it is at the moment" -- it gets to be less positive if it is "change underwear with the guy on your right".

Why does this happen? Some people (including me) say the voters are immature. Politicians (and those talk radio fellows again) are always telling them that they are wise and those folks in Washington are fools. Pollsters seek and validate their opinions on subjects they haven't bothered to learn anything about. Politicians drown them in benefits with no thought of how the bills will be paid. No wonder that
citizens turn out like spoiled children.

But "immature" is a label, not an explanation. It's just a guess, but my own suspicion is that the raucous town hall meetings that blindsided pols and press alike reflect the voters' true feelings -- misinformed, perhaps, but sincere -- and their previous passionate demands for what they now passionately oppose -- in a word, "change" -- were empty ritual. Discontent verging on anger is almost the price of admission to our political culture these days. You're nobody if you're not furious at Congress and/or the media and/or your health care and/or the president. To believe in your country's institutions is virtually unpatriotic.

Remember how BO ran on what he was specifically going to do? Niether do I ... his platform was "Change!" ... and "Yes We Can!". It is hard to imagine a more vacuous platform than "change" and "yes we can". How about "Different" and "yes"??

"To believe in your country's institutions is virtually unpatriotic". How much ink has been used on Abu Ghraib? "lies" about WMD? the "complete botching of Katrina"? The list could go on, but I believe that we just came out of 8 years of history where the institutions of the government were assailed on a daily basis as being completely corrupt and incompetent. I fully understand that the MSM and the Democrats INTENDED all that ire at the government to suddenly go away on the day the shining BO administration walked in the door, but is that really reasonable? Even the smartest of "smart bomb sniping" is going to have SOME collateral damage. I'd argue that the level of completely ridiculous lefty "carpet bombing" is going to have fallout for years to come!

If the US government was anything at all like the horror that has been portrayed for especially the last 4 years, it would be impossible to turn it around in many years. I happen to think that it was handed over in better shape than when the the semen stained oval office was handed over in 2001 without a whole lot of the furnishings, but I know the press and the Democrats have done all they can to convince us that that things have been in a horrible mess for 8 years.

Kinsley, journalists and the chattering classes in general REALLY believe "it's all in our minds", and "reality IS what THEY think it is". To THEM, on the day that BO took office, the horrible US government was transformed from a decrepit evil broken down hag into a beautiful shining maiden. I suspect to their minds, it looks something like what happens after Belle kisses the beast in "Beauty and the Beast" -- "the spell is broken" and the castle, help and all around is transformed from evil and ugly to good and beautiful in the twinkling of an eye.

Kinsley finds the idea that not everyone shares his view of a Fairy Godmother transformation to be "immature". Now that the evil Bush has been vanquished and we have entered the sunny rule of his lordship BO, why do the common vermin not scrape and bow as is befitting of the royalty that as now deigned to rule their "misinformed" and "immature" carcasses?

How indeed one might ask?

Goodbye Harry?

SHERMAN FREDERICK: Enough is enough, Harry - Opinion - ReviewJournal.com

Seeing the oh so sanctimonious Senate Leader Tom Daschle go down in '04 was a political highlight. One would hope that nearly everyone in the nation would now agree after realizing he skimmed $5million off various groups after his boys the Democrats took control back in '06 and somehow he neglected to pay over $100K of taxes due on the loot!

Could it be that the "power and the glory" has gone to Harry Reid's head enough so that the fine folks of Nevada have had enough? One can only hope.

The Real Lincoln

The subject book by Thomas DiLorenzo brings home one point that is much worth the read. We are taught in school that "Lincoln saved the union" and he was "the great emancipator". Those two items are somewhat true, but vast oversimplifications.

The greatest insight of the book is that "the union" that was "saved" wasn't what used to be called "The United States". The cost of the civil war was that the idea of "rights moving from God to the people to the states to the federal government" was destroyed at gunpoint, and replaced with the idea that once a state, always a state, or we will deal out death until you get it right.

The right of secession is a MUST in a country where the rights come from the people! The America of our founders and of the Constitution they created would have allowed the South to secede peacefully. Lincoln could not, and in fact pushed the South to war with "The American Plan" -- 1). Central Banking 2) High Tariffs 3). Internal Improvements.

For the South, this meant that they paid all the tariffs and all the "improvements" (which were essentially payola for companies) ended up in the North.

As the author pointed out, slavery was ended peacefully all around the world, and prejudice against blacks was at least as strong and in many ways stronger in the north. Lincoln himself wanted to ship the blacks back to Africa and felt that the two races were never tended to coexist. Were the south to have seceded peacefully, it is quite likely that slavery would have been ended in a decade or two via compensation to owners or a scheme where the children of the slaves were freed on their 21st birthday. Having over 620K Americans die wasn't required to end slavery.

I was personally struck by some of the sentiment that I first experienced when we had some friends from southern Indiana that would have been just south of the Mason Dixon line. Going to public school in the north, the Civil War is cut and dried -- the North is just, the South is unjust, Lincoln is a hero, the war was the only way to end slavery, and everyone ought to be thankful that it was fought. Not so in the South. This book is a more academic look at the kinds of sentiments that many of the folks of the South still carry over 100 years since the war. Being on the losing side makes a difference.

In reading the book, one realizes how expensive the Civil War was not only in lives and treasure, but in the loss of liberty and autonomy of the states that may well have been an irrecoverable blow that will eventually completely destroy the liberty that the country was founded on.

Healthcare Protest

Went over to a health care protest in front of the local offices of Klobuchar and Walz (Senator, Representative) Friday. 50-100 folks, no chanting, very civil signs, one guy across the street doing a "counter protest". Ran into a guy I used to work with whose wife died of cancer a couple of years ago -- he has spent a good long time studying the issue / Canada / England and was what I would call "quietly passionate". He had gone over to Owatonna for a town meeting and said they had come in with a couple of union buses of folks. Folks were pretty angry that anyone that disagrees is "a nut" -- thought that seemed to be different from what the war was at this time last year, although the war seems "all better now" for some odd reason.

A few of us walked into the offices and just asked "where were the Senator/Representative, when might they be in town?" we were told that information was not being given out due to "security". No coverage at all in the local paper on Saturday -- I recall a few years back that if they could get a couple of war protesters out, it was very newsworthy.

The media powers are doing their best to make anyone that disagrees with federal takeover of health care seem somewhere between "nuts and dangerous".

How Disaster Happens

RealClearPolitics - Can Dems Rescue ObamaCare?

It is hard to say whether the BOcare debacle will be ended quite the way Krauthammer suggests here, but it will likely have similar results in any case.

(5) Promise nothing but pleasure -- for now. Make health insurance universal and permanently protected. Tear up the existing bills and write a clean one -- Obamacare 2.0 -- promulgating draconian health-insurance regulation that prohibits (a) denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, (b) dropping coverage if the client gets sick, and (c) capping insurance company reimbursement.

What's not to like? If you have insurance, you'll never lose it. Nor will your children ever be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The regulated insurance companies will get two things in return. Government will impose an individual mandate that will force the purchase of health insurance on the millions of healthy young people who today forgo it. And government will subsidize all the others who are too poor to buy health insurance. The result? Two enormous new revenue streams created by government for the insurance companies.

This "plan" is WAY more detailed than "Coverage for all, cheaper, better with more choice"!! This "plan" actually has something about HOW!!! But, like all things in this world that are "only pleasure" ....

Isn't there a catch? Of course, there is. This scheme is the ultimate bait-and-switch. The pleasure comes now, the pain later. Government-subsidized universal and virtually unlimited coverage will vastly compound already out-of-control government spending on health care. The financial and budgetary consequences will be catastrophic.

However, they will not appear immediately. And when they do, the only solution will be rationing. That's when the liberals will give the FCCCER regulatory power and give you end-of-life counseling.

But by then, resistance will be feeble. Why? Because at that point the only remaining option will be to give up the benefits we will have become accustomed to. Once granted, guaranteed universal health care is not relinquished. Look at Canada. Look at Britain. They got hooked; now they ration. So will we.

Government is a lot like drugs, smoking, gambling or other vices. When you "start", it seems "all good" -- it is just after you have been in it for awhile, realize how dependent you have become, how few other choices you now have, and how much power you have given up to your addiction, that you realize "they've got me". Then, as intended in the beginning, it is too late!!

Healthcare

Kennedy's dream is our inspiration :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Mary Mitchell

Working in a technical job and from time to time with people who have emigrated from Canada, England or other places to GET the health care they need, I'm often reminded of the difference between reality and emotion. Our feelings have very few limits -- reality has a good deal more.

It is pretty simple.

As a country, we either believe that health care is a right or we don't.

So what is "health care"? Were Kennedy in England and on their "universal" plan, the only treatment that he would have gotten for his brain cancer would have been hospice and pain relieving drugs. I'm assuming that the author of this column would consider that to be health care?

The raucous debates over a "public option," so-called "death panels" and "taxpayer sponsored abortions" are designed to obscure the real issue:

We live in the richest and most powerful country in the world, and we can't find the will or the compassion to ensure that all Americans receive quality health care.

It is a disgrace.

So the "real issue" is simply "ensure that all Americans receive quality health care"?  So which ones don't? The uninsured? I don't think so -- if they show up at clinics, they will get health care just like Teddy. What exactly is it that makes it "a disgrace"? In England, a person of less than Kennedy level extreme wealth would get hospice care only for the same cancer that felled Teddy. Is that decision a "death panel"? Yes and no. Hospice care only would have been $100's of K cheaper for Teddy, but he might not have been able to speak at the Democrat convention, or see BO elected. As a nation, we paid $100's of thousands of dollars for a very rich man to have a few more months of life. In England, **HE** would have had to pay, but 99% of us would not have gotten those months, because we could not afford them. I'd tend to argue that is reasonable -- but that is a major part of the shape of a REAL debate on health care.

That thought process seems like it is on the way to how we might reform health care in this country. Right now we ALL expect "Teddy Kennedy care", and indeed we all pay so even Teddy gets that level of care without having to take it from his own pocket. I like to call it "Private Jet Care". Virtually none of us can afford to have a Private Jet, yet all of us now expect to have health care that is the equivalent of a Private Jet. Unsurprisingly, providing everyone with that level of care -- insured or not, is EXTREMELY expensive. We complain about it pushing 20% of our GDP, but in many ways, it is surprising it isn't more.

Frankly, some of the arguments against health care reform that are made by ordinary people sound hard-hearted.

How did we get to the place where so many of us think that health care reform boils down to paying the medical bills of "those" people who are "shooting each other" or who are "immigrants."

Ironically, it won't be "those" people who won't get treatment when they need it.

Being liberal means being "morally pure" where it counts for liberals. The fact that some conservatives and Christians may have "morals" about whom one can sleep with, drowning your secretary, helping your nephew get away with rape and other mundane things like that is "chilling", "full of hypocricy" or "turning the clock back to tghe 19th century". If one espouses liberal principles, one can hold the wealth of a Kennedy or a Kerry and be 100% free from the charge of hypocracy. Being liberal is a "matter of the heart", and only foul conservatives would somehow imply that not all matters of the heart can be conjured in the real world.

My "goals" may be "simple". "Health care for all that is cheaper, higher quality and provides more choices". How can anyone disagree with that? How about with an investment plan that "has less risk, higher returns, and only invests in sustainable business"? Of say, a diet, where you can "eat the foods you want, when you want, and excise only when convienient to you and reach your target weight in less than a year".

The "simple" problem is the complete confusion of ends with means. I heard Amy Klobochar on MPR today from at the fair repeat more than once "covers all, less expensive, higher quality and adds to the choices that people have today". She said not a single word about "how", since in the real world were MEANS are a MAJOR part of reality, the devil is very much in those "details of how".

So the left this is a simple moral issue. Other countries that have only 10-30% of the population of the US  "have it" (although there is precious little study of what "it" is other than the lable "universal health"). But they say that "we don't" -- because there are 47 million people without insurance. But wait -- insurance is a MEANS to PAY for healthcare! It isn't healthcare at all! Teddy Kennedy could have paid for his treatment out of pocket with EASE had he been uninsured! Had the poorest 77 year old in the country walked in to the same hospital as Teddy, they too would have gotten the same care. Only in a country with "universal health" would Kennedy have received care, but another 77 year old of less than top 1% wealth would not have.

We live in a supposed democracy where it is immoral to discuss how we pay for out health care because the left had decided so. Welcome to BO America.

Sorry, Not Safe

Marc Thiessen: Obama Versus the CIA - WSJ.com

We are 16 days away from knowing for sure that the Bush policies made us safer than the Clinton policies. We know what happened on September 11, 2001. Our MSM and the Democrats told us over and over that "The policies of George Bush make us less safe", yet there as not been an attack on US soil since 9/11/2001. If the MSM and the Democrats were correct, there needs to be an attack at least as significant as 9/11 in the next 16 days, otherwise, they "lied" (in the same way as Bush "lied" about WMD).

Is BO making us less safe? I think so, the only thing I disagree with in the paragraphs below is that we will be sorry in 10 years. I'm sorry already, I think we all will be sorry in less than 4 years.

Now Attorney General Eric Holder, a political appointee, is overruling the decisions of career Justice Department officials and appointing a special prosecutor. If the Bush administration had done the same thing to its predecessor, the mainstream media would be howling.

The decision to prosecute will have a devastating effect on the intelligence community—pushing the agency back into a risk-averse, pre-Sept. 11, 2001, mentality. Indeed, the IG report itself indicates that agency officials knew this day was coming. "One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some 'wanted list' to appear before the World Court. . . . Another said, 'Ten years from now, we're going to be sorry we're doing this . . . [but] it has to be done.'"

Can you even IMAGINE the outcry had the Bush administration started investigations into the Slick Willie WH?

ONE ... Single Payer System (Video)

BO Like Which President? Carter

Fouad Ajami: Obama’s Summer of Discontent - WSJ.com

Good article here is the section that points out that BO clearly isn't some great heroic figure as the MSM and a bunch of folks in his spell held him out to be:

The Obama devotees were the victims of their own belief in political magic. The devotees could not make up their minds. In a newly minted U.S. senator from Illinois, they saw the embodiment of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Like Lincoln, Mr. Obama was tall and thin and from Illinois, and the historic campaign was launched out of Springfield. The oath of office was taken on the Lincoln Bible. Like FDR, he had a huge economic challenge, and he better get it done, repair and streamline the economy in his "first hundred days." Like JFK, he was young and stylish, with a young family.

All this hero-worship before Mr. Obama met his first test of leadership. In reality, he was who he was, a Chicago politician who had done well by his opposition to the Iraq war. He had run a skillful campaign, and had met a Clinton machine that had run out of tricks and a McCain campaign that never understood the nature of the contest of 2008.

He was no FDR, and besides the history of the depression—the real history—bears little resemblance to the received narrative of the nation instantly rescued, in the course of 100 days or 200 days, by an interventionist state. The economic distress had been so deep and relentless that FDR began his second term, in 1937, with the economy still in the grip of recession.

Nor was JFK about style. He had known military service and combat, and familial loss; he had run in 1960 as a hawk committed to the nation's victory in the Cold War. He and his rival, Richard Nixon, shared a fundamental outlook on American power and its burdens.

Now that realism about Mr. Obama has begun to sink in, these iconic figures of history had best be left alone. They can't rescue the Obama presidency. Their magic can't be his. Mr. Obama isn't Lincoln with a BlackBerry. Those great personages are made by history, in the course of history, and not by the spinners or the smitten talking heads.

I suspect that by the time we are done here, Carter will seem like a MUCH better President than BO.