Frog of Freedom Boils On

We Are the 98 Percent — The American Magazine

Good article on the continuing slide to greater bankruptcy and socialism. The election is over, some folks from the left are starting to make noises that it is time to move to a wee bit more reality based approach. We are broke, taxing the rich won't do anything to fix it, and if you are a "Progressive", you don't believe that government can spend less -- thus, sharpen up those tax knives and start going after the rest of the folks!

Surprisingly, many progressive pundits are moving away from their traditional complaint that America’s tax code is too regressive, favoring the rich. They are starting to tell us, albeit only after an election mainly contested on these issues, the truth: to fund the European-style social welfare state which they advocate, we must tax everyone more.

I'd argue that we are already at the point discussed in the next paragraph -- people have been suitably brainwashed to believe that there is really no potential for anything but a european style socialist system in the "modern world". "Give us our STUFF!!". 

What happens historically when benefits are bestowed without a bill also coming due is that we get hooked on them. Then, even when they become disasters not worth their cost, people are terrified to change them, as giving something up is indeed quite frightening

Political Storms

Mona Charen: Democrat Hurricanes versus Republican Hurricanes | WashingtonExaminer.com

Why is everything so political? Mostly because the MSM makes it so -- each "event" is a chance to create the mood in the public that the MSM feels is "right".

It turns out that big storms are ALWAYS bad if you are in the path of the storm -- Katrina, Sandy, etc.  BUT, for those that don't experience the storm, how it is viewed is more a function of how it is reported that the reality that "storms always suck".

So, for Katrina .... in a city below sea level, hit with an ACTUAL Cat 5 hurricane, with terrible local and state preparedness, ANY level of problem was INSTANTLY "Bush's fault".  Fighting 2 wars after 9-11 didn't really take Bush down, it was actually the reporting of Katrina that did him in.

Sandy wasn't even a hurricane technically, it dropped below Cat 1 before it came ashore, and the Feds were no better than they were in Katrina -- staging foul ups, red tape, looting, etc. Same stuff as Katrina, **BUT** the reporting was all positive -- INSTANTLY. Bloomberg apparently believed the press and thought he would just run the NY Marathon anyway, until his folks let him know that bodies still needed to be recovered and millions were still without power, heat, water etc. Who knew??? Wasn't a story worthy to be reported.

So the vast majority of the people just listen to the MSM story and the country continues to sail to destruction while whistling happily.

Des Moines Register Threatens NRA, Republicans, Gun Owners

Kaul: Nation needs a new agenda on guns | The Des Moines Register | desmoinesregister.com

Let's call this what it is, a direct threat of violence. The Register decides who to publish and who not to publish. If these statements were made relative to Blacks, Gays, Muslims or Democrats, they would be PROSECUTABLE HATE SPEECH! Gun owners, white men, Republicans, "the rich", and Christians are groups in the US that can be attacked like this without legal action.

Here is one of his "proposals":

Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. (I would also raze the organization’s headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that’s optional.) Make ownership of unlicensed assault rifles a felony. If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.

Here is another:

Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

Oh yes, I'm sure it is "all in good fun". Right?  If Rush Limbaugh said this? If this was on Fox News? and the targets were any of those mentioned above?? Come on, we know the truth. 

If you are a member of any of the targeted groups ... white male, Christian, gun owner, NRA, Republican, etc. ARM YOURSELF!!! You are being warned sternly and directly by the Statists that they want to take you down and they are VERY willing to use violent means. Your ONLY small defense is to be armed, prepared, trained and hopefully organized. The time that this can be written and communicated openly in this country is fading VERY fast. The guy that did a video that was less critical of Islam then this column is of it's target groups IS IN JAIL! 

If you are an "undesirable" as I list above, how direct must threats and selective treatment of groups be before you ACT! 

Selective Justice

MILLER: Two systems of justice - Washington Times

This is how Totalarian Statist systems work. First countless laws are passed, then they are SELECTIVELY ENFORCED. If you "support the right people", "say the right things", then the laws won't be enforced on you. Get on the other side of "the ruling powers" though and you must be punished.

This is why it is nearly impossible to find a Democrat that has a clean record with the IRS. Today, that still counts before they are going to take a high ranking position in an administration (witness Daschle and Geitner), but it won't be long until the payment of tax and many other things will be optional for the  ruling Statists.

Hating the Constitution

A Liberal Comes Clean: We Hate the Constitution | Power Line

The PL summary is good. Lots of folks are ready to just throw Rule of Law away and go the way of the French Revolution or worse -- GIVE US OUR STUFF!!!

Once you try to take all the "rich" have via semi-legal means, why not just kill them and take ALL that have!!

When the golden goose is dead, it is dead -- and we are very intent on killing it COMPLETELY dead -- and eviscerating the body in search of "the secret".

Underway On Raspberry Pi

http://www.raspberrypi.org/ Welcome to the world of a $35 computer!! This post is being done on the Midori browser on the machine seen here. Not blazing speed, but for those of us that lived with machine with K of memory and speeds in K instructions per second, it is pretty amazing!!

My Raspberry Pi

Tax Fairness

Soak the Rich? | Power Line

The chart shows it well. We have no fairness when the top 1% of the people pay in much in taxes as "the bottom" 95%!!!

There needs to be SOME more connection between voting and amount of taxes paid!

The World Is A Beautiful Place

The great divide: Little common ground with pro- and anti-gun forces - CNN.com

This article in CNN was less biased than some, but I was struck when I hit this paragraph:

"I think that people are hard wired differently. If you look at the world as a beautiful place and I'm in the arts, I'm a composer, I write music, I write poetry, if you believe the world's a beautiful place, your viewpoint is different than if you feel 'I have to have my guns to protect myself,' " said Hollis Thoms, 64, from Annapolis, Maryland, as he protested outside of the Willard InterContinental Hotel just after the NRA's press conference.

Huh? Don't ALL sane people agree the world is BOTH beautiful and ugly? I love music, poetry, natural beauty, etc as much as the next guy, but doesn't this guy shit? Was he on another planet for 9-11? Hasn't he ever seen Michael Moore? 

So unlike the supposed "divide" in this article created by the "progressive mindset" that believes that all need, want, violence, waste, ugliness, sweat and fallen arches can be removed from the world with just a little more regulation, taxing the wealthy, borrowed money, or some other elixer, there are people that believe that the world has a bit of "Ying and Yang". Evil exists and has to be controlled by force, life ends in death, party nights lead to hangovers, producing things requires that SOMEONE works ... sometimes at something that isn't even "pristine". That IS life for some folks -- I guess the Troglodytes in this guys universe, but Earthlings in mine!!

BUT, we DO have a HUGE divide in this country because CNN and the vast bulk of people going berserk over the NRA suggestion (also made by Billy C in 2k) believe in a world where beauty can be legislated, rather than created by God and the sweat of man's brow, and evil can be "cured" by drugs, education, laws, or some other human mechanism. 

We have a gulf because we ALL used to accept that man was flawed and needed written and unchanging legal and moral codes in order to survive, but that the "Leviathan" (government) was also managed by man, so therefore had to be LIMITED, thus the Constitution, Checks and Balances, and the final check, the 2nd Amendment. 

Yes, Hollis, there ARE people "wired differently" from you, and for that you ought be grateful, lest you die. While music and poetry are great, they are ONLY great when we are a few notches up the needs hierarchy from food, clothing, shelter and safety. 

Cornball Brothers Racism, RGIII

RGIII, ‘Cornball Brothers,’ and the Blackness Code - National Review Online

When these two articles showed up on the web within a couple of days of each other it was nearly more than my old brain could handle. Seems that RGIII turns out "not to be black"!!! Thanks to the Web ESPN and Urban Dictionaries, we can learn that "Cornball Brothers" are guys that look black, but "act white" ,.. as in date or marry white women, live with no "street cred", dress and act "white", and in the lowest of the low situations, dare I say it?? Vote Republican!!

Does that sound at all racist ?

Try this http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/opinion/the-puzzle-of-black-republicans.html?_r=0

He doesn't say "Uncle Tom", but it is pretty clear. Tim Scott just isn't allowed to think the way he does --- that is leaving the "Democrat Thought Plantation"!! The Democrats used to keep the blacks on a real plantation, then they moved them to the more virtual "Segregation Plantation", but now they are locked up solidly in the "Thought Plantation".

Guys like Thomas Sowell, one of my intellectual heroes? Well, they just don't exist -- or they doing nothing but "serving as sop to a white man's racist guilt". Sowell has more intelligence in his little toe than this columnist could muster in a year of good days.

A little quote from the end, but it needs to be read to be truly sickened. If you don't sign up for "advancing black interests", then you simply aren't black. Got it?? Get out there and commit a couple crimes for "street cred", wear your pants around your ankles, join a gang and for Gods sake, get on welfare! THOSE are "black interests"! Enough of this stupid white man's education, talking like a white person, staying out of prison, etc -- that isn't being "authentically black"!

The trope of the black conservative has retained a man-bites-dog newsworthiness that is long past its shelf life. Clichés about fallen barriers are increasingly meaningless; symbols don’t make for coherent policies. Republicans will not gain significant black support unless they take policy positions that advance black interests. No number of Tim Scotts — or other cynical tokens — will change that.

Facts About Mass Shootings

The Facts about Mass Shootings - John Fund - National Review Online

Just read it. If we ever return to being a rational nation where people are capable of governing themselves, this is the kind of analysis that will be demanded of our media.

Selective Shooting Science

The Media is an Accomplice in Public Shootings: A Call for a "Stephen King" Law - Forbes

This article makes a claim that sounds familiar:

There’s really no useful debate on the point. The consensus of social scientists since David Phillips’ groundbreaking work in 1974 is that highly publicized stories of deviant and dangerous behavior influences copycat incidents. 

I don't buy the "no useful debate" here, in global warming or anywhere, but this is "fact" of a far older age and detailed correlation than Global Warming. In '74, the climate consensus was that we were slipping into the next ice age.

So why is the left "ignoring science"?

Because we ALL have a VERY limited aperture for what we can consider, and we are ALL highly biased in our world view. The best we can do is to pick our biases very carefully -- or if you are a believer like myself,  allow Christ to drive.

My bias says that we live in a very imperfect world that is completely imperfect-able outside of Christ. Even the most OBVIOUSLY important corrections like "ending slavery"  come with costs like 600K dead (including a lot of children), 100 years of Jim Crow,  the destruction of the black family through political graft payments to welfare and the creation of what appears to be a permanent underclass.  That doesn't mean that we ought not try to improve our world, it just means that as with medicine, FIRST do no harm, and then seek to be minimally invasive.

"Freedom" in the human sense has downsides -- as we see here with speech, will be reminded a million times about guns and see constantly with cars and alcohol. Right now from our media view, there are no downsides to legalization of pot, and it is considered horrible in the extreme by our ruling elites to even mention that there may be large and significant downsides to the slaughter of innocents through abortion. We are heavily schooled in selective horror when it comes to the slaughter of innocents.

Our founding fathers found government to be just one more human created mechanism that was flawed at best, and if not controlled was dangerous beyond imagination. The 20th century gave us more than a few demonstrations of just how dangerous; Communism, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, the "one baby rule" in China, Tienamen Square ... But for a greater and greater number of Americans, "this time it is different" ... they rush headlong to replace the God in the manger with government, the god of the gulag.

Freedom is costly. Tyranny is costly. Balancing them is costly. That is what "imperfect" means.  We trade off 10's of thousands of deaths every year on the highway for freedom of transport. We trade off  many of those deaths and millions of ruined lives to alcohol ... a case where we do seem to have come to the valid consensus that prohibition does not work.

Regulation? Sure ... we have LOTS of regulation on Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a juxtaposition that I always find odd and very wrong since Firearms are a Constitutional right and the other two are just drugs, but no matter.

Nobody that I heard called for stiffer drunk driving laws after  the Josh Brent (Cowboys player) accident as they had for stricter gun control after the Chiefs Jovan Belcher murder suicide the week before. Right now the left elite is in a power mode after the election, and they hate guns and gun people, but see no risk in uncontrolled government.

If we all just worked to widen our aperture just a bit, perhaps we could at least get along in this imperfect word just a bit better.

Deadliest School Massacre

http://qz.com/37069/the-deadliest-school-massacre-in-us-history-was-in-1927-why-its-aftermath-matters-now/

The deadliest school massacre was in 1927, 38 children and some adults. In 1927, the guy could have used an automatic weapon, they were legal then. He chose a bomb. Evil tends to find a way ... bombs, knives, guns, planes, gas, poison (remember Tylenol poisons? they never caught that one) ...

Human life has always been about family, culture and perspective. Family is biology. Culture is religion, recognized and understood, or not. We used to be a Christian Nation, now we are "mixed" ... for many, the government is god, for many others it is themselves, or money, or sports, or some addiction.

Perspective is our "model/story" -- it is the narrative that we believe to be true independent of day to day vagaries of life. Like "The American Dream" used to be -- work hard, be thrifty, be honest, etc and some day you will have built a good life and a world where your children's life will be better. We murdered our children's future though, so they are now the greatest debtor generation in history. We want our perspective to be "today", because the future looks pretty dark, and it is considered bad to think about the past. Those people were much less "enlightened" than we are told we are today.

Morality used to be something divine, and was about eternity. Now we murder unborn children by the millions and expect that the carnage will have no effects on our valuation of life. Many more are confused if human life is any different from animal life -- we are just "other animals". Man deserves only as much respect as animals -- and so inevitably, human life is devalued yet again.

Death is as much a part of life as birth. Killing any children is senseless, the born, the unborn, the "defective", etc,  but if life is cheap and morals are relative, it really can't be all that unexpected that "going out in a blaze of insane glory" appeals to some deranged soul after the joys of being "Gothic", video game killing or who knows what other pleasure dejour no longer thrills.

Who are we to judge?? Certainly we are unable -- as Niche lamented, since "God is Dead", or at least it is the fervent hope of many in our nation that he is. Somehow death seems both more meaningless and more tragic in the face of the currently popular imagined abyss of annihilation rather than the strong arms of a loving saviour.

We have a huge problem with evil. Human's can't really be evil can they? If they could, then maybe there would be a reason for God to come to earth in a manager to save them from evil. We used to have a religious holiday called Christmas around this time that celebrated just such a birth many believed in and did their best to live their lives in relation to. Now though we have "Holiday's" -- generic, consumption oriented dates on a calendar.

Why does it seem that there is evil? Certainly just a few better drugs, or treatment, or maybe regulations on guns, or magazines, or ammunition -- or? what? would "solve it".

We need to go back to that babe in the manger. "The problem" isn't "out there" ... with the guns or the media or the shrinks or the video games or the movies. Those are just mechanisms and symptoms. The problem is the human soul needing a saviour, and the more we deny that, the more Satan shows us the face of evil with glaring clarity that is impossible to ignore.





'via Blog this'

Klobuchar&Franken, Tax Fighting Dynamic Duo!!

It appears that the MN Senators finally read the BOcare bill! Congratulations!!

Suddenly, for at least a couple of companies with deep campaign contributions in their state, they are able to see that "taxes kill jobs". Wow, what a concept!!

Other subtle little message in here are good to see in the open as well:

The industry has been skeptical of the argument behind the tax -- that devicemakers will benefit from the health care law through increased demand for their products.

Klobuchar and Franken fight planned tax on medical devices | StarTribune.com


Hmm,  The authors of BOcare ASSUME that it is going to INCREASE the amount of money going into the medical industry. I could SWEAR that we were told that BOcare would DEcrease the cost of medical care AND increase the people covered. 

Bush Tax Cuts Now Good??

The Left’s Flip-Flop on the Bush Tax Cuts — The American Magazine

Wow, who knew?? Every Democrat and MSM person has said for over a decade that "The Bush cuts were tax cuts for the RICH!!". Now, suddenly BO wants MIDDLE CLASS people to call their congressmen and tell them they must agree with BO and raise JUST the taxes on the "rich" or THEY will have to pay up to $2K more a year??

Apparently Americans actually are gullible enough to go for this.  They hear the tax cuts called one thing for over a decade, suddenly, the story changes and "presto chango", the $3T over 10 years of tax relief for the middle class is really good (at least now) ... but the $800B over 10 years, 8 DAYS of spending each year, of tax relief for the top 10% that pays 70% of the taxes already (by these calculations, many have that number even higher for the top 10%), THOSE taxes have to be raised, or BO is going to force the taxes to be raised on everyone.

Let's see. The Bush tax cuts only benefitted the wealthy, and now going over the Fiscal Cliff and raising taxes on everyone  is all the Republicans fault!!

Yup, information you can believe in!

Why We Fight on Budgets

Bargaining and Its Limits - By Yuval Levin - The Corner - National Review Online

We fight because there is no shared view of America. The Democrats have built a fully formed "United States of Europe" with cradle to grave welfare assistance, protective laws, regulation, now medical care, and a massive old age medical and income security.

Wonderful. Except for the small fact that as in Europe, it necessitates UNlimited government, which was what made the US "exceptional", highly successful, and a world leader.  Sadly, as well, as in Europe, even UNlimited government is insufficient to supply all the "needs", since as been known forever, "needs" are infinite, but means are not.

However, my view is that the last election says that we have crossed this rubicon. We are no longer the America of the Constitution, Rule of Law and the therefore LIMITED Government with the rest of the liberty reserved to the PEOPLE.

We now need to wait for messy reality to take both the US and Europe back to some much sadder plane where MAYBE the wisdom of the US founders can be re-understood and the prospect of a brighter future to work for can once again be seen through the ashes of what we once had.