PGI 2014, Blow Away Fireworks

We took in the Pyrotechnics Guild International (PGI) convention finale at Mason City IA this past Friday evening. As I say, the video is so misleading that I hesitate to put in in, but MAYBE along with some words it will give a TINY clue.

The video is nigh on useless -- like "getting" a space shuttle launch, an iceberg calving in Glacier Bay, mountains, or a zillion other things that fall similarly short on pictures and video, but MAYBE it gives SOME idea. My favorite part is at 5 min in, set to Pink Floyd "On the Turning Away" -- I like the tune and that was the first one they did the giant "flame flashes"on which I thought were especially impressive.

What they do is essentially create a "virtual screen", roughly 300yards wide and like 1K' high plus something like 30 yards deep, with computer controlled launching equipment and TONS of fireworks. In front of that screen are big speakers for the music.

If you have seen "Illuminations" at Epcot in Florida, that is the idea -- in some ways that is maybe "better" in some abstract sense, since their "stage" is the whole lake, huge water fountains, fireworks launchers around the lake, lasers, video projections on the water screens, etc --- BUT, you give up the sense of immediacy. "Illuminations" is "stadium full orchestra" ... PGI finale is ZZ Top live in your living room -- you are RIGHT there.

I sat with my mouth agape for most of the show -- the scope is incredible, the immediacy is simply riveting. $20 per ticket, no parking cover -- the bargain of a lifetime for unforgettable entertainment.

Next year Gillette WYhttp://www.pgi.org/convention/sites.php

If you have never seen Illuminations, do. If you get a chance to see PGI anywhere close to you ... WELL worth the trouble!

Ferguson, Brown, Wilson, Good Summary

Thoughts on the Ritual Now Taking Place in Ferguson, Missouri | Power Line:



Short, well thought, well written.



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How The Party Uses Legal System to Suppress Opposition

Rick Perry is latest 2016 GOP hopeful to face legal trouble - The Denver Post:

See any pattern here? Christie, Walker, Perry -- all with "legal trouble", and one doesn't have to look very deeply at all to find that various left wing groups have taken to filing lawsuits and supposed "criminal" investigations on matters political.

This is not new. Tom Delay was pushed from politics over a bogus case relative to his transferring of political money to other Republicans in a "supposedly illegal" manner -- he won the case http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/09/19/224070833/tom-delays-conviction-overturned-on-appeal ... eventually, and too late.

Ted Stevens of Alaska lost his seat due to a corruption case that was later thrown out as bogus http://www.npr.org/2012/03/15/148687717/report-prosecutors-hid-evidence-in-ted-stevens-case ... the 60 vote Senate that allowed BOcare to pass would never have happened without Stevens being forced out and Franken "winning" by less than 300 votes in Minnesota. Note that 6K of MN same day registration ballots, heavily weighted to Franken, turned out to not be verifiable -- no such address, no such person there, etc.

I'm sure some on the left will complain that "Republicans in Congress are pressing a legal case against BO".

Yes indeed -- CONGRESS, not some right wing advocacy group. Over specific CURRENT and ONGOING policy questions -- re-writing major laws like BOcare on the fly, usurping specific congressional powers via executive order. CONSTITUTIONAL questions that are to be handled in the courts.

Rick Perry is facing his "indictment" over a dispute as to providing more funds to an Austin DA convicted of drunk driving http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/austin-texas-district-attorney-rosemary-lehmberg-resign-dui-21159650

See, if you are a member of THE PARTY, you ought to get off from whatever offence you may commit ... murder in the case of Ted Kennedy, sexual harassment in the case of Slick Willie -- if you are a member of the THE PARTY in good standing, you are to be completely protected!

THE PARTY is heavily composed of and funded by lawyers http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=K01. While it is not yet directly illegal to oppose THE PARTY, we see clear pattern of legal system attacks against those who are brave enough to oppose THE PARTY -- out and out illegality of opposition is the path we are on.

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Terminating Abortion

Stop calling abortion a ‘difficult decision’ - The Washington Post:

It is hard for me to imagine that the woman writing this exists -- and if she does, it is positively chilling. I'd like to believe that she is just making up bluster because she knows that is what she is supposed to do -- maybe some woman's studies class or other left wing cheering section has shamed her into acting the part of a creature more fearsome than the mother of the "Alien" in that popular move -- at least that creature had maternal instinct.  I'll forget any Christian perspective, since she definitely never mentions any higher power. 

This was in the mid-1980s, when abortion was about women having control not just over their bodies but over their destinies. An unwanted pregnancy would have derailed my future, making it difficult for me to finish college and have the independent, productive life that I’d envisioned.

So she believes that billions of years of evolution left the human female with absolutely no attachment to the idea of carrying the child within her to term. Our species evolved to a form where there is no maternal instinct to be dealt with -- the death of a new life within her is absolutely devoid of moral and emotional content. Her own life is ALL that is of importance. Like some form of Lemming, the human race reached a place where species suicide became an evolutionary mandate.

OTOH, I'll bet she is passionate about Global Warming. If we asked her about the morality of some oil company that cared only about profits so they could be "independent and productive", rather than the idea that the planetary temperature might rise a few 10ths of a degree in 100 years, she would most likely be outraged!

The left would like us to believe that evil does not exist and that humans are "basically good". How are we to believe this?

A typical leftist human female is trained to be 100% selfish next to what those without God would assume to be the prime function of the species -- reproduction. From an atheistic evolutionary perspective, it is indeed ALL that counts -- we are the product of what atheist evolutionist Richard Dawkins called "Selfish Genes", end of story, full stop. How could those genes create this woman?

Western Civilization is proof that such non-genetic selfishness can happen -- we have aborted or controlled away so much of our future generations that our populations are in decline. The "White European descent" population has found itself too guilty, narcissistic or just clueless to bother itself with continuation of it's particular strain of the species. The Muslims, Indians, Africans, Hispanics and a few others will inherit the earth.

While the article is chilling in the sense of the moral and emotional black hole that now sucks in 100's of millions  of innocent lives in the decaying west, it does give us a glimpse of God's Wisdom.

Modern secular thinking is self-terminating! 

Christ's Kingdom is growing in Africa and South America -- some of which is washing over the borders into the declining America. This article gives us a little glimpse into the soulless abyss that we allowed to become the fruit of a once-great Western civilization.

It will surely die ... and God is obviously just!

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Our Cities, Our Future

Who Lost the Cities? | National Review Online:

Well done article that covers the costs of wishful thinking in key American cities -- and gives some good hints as to what we can expect for the country as a whole in the coming decades.

The following paragraph is what has happened to our cities, but they are only in the lead, the most "progressive" -- the pathology is well at work across the nation:

1. Higher Taxes (on the productive) -- we are actively taxing work and subsidizing sloth with predictable result. 
2. Defective Schools -- with active measures to limit school choice and private schools. 
3. Crime -- Less outside the cities, but back on the rise everywhere. 
4. Declining economic opportunity -- With the exception of a few bright spots, North Dakota, Texas , Oklahoma, we are in steep decline -- where we are not, the federal government is seeking to damage the progress.

For years, our major cities were undermined by a confluence of four unhappy factors: 1. higher taxes; 2. defective schools; 3. crime; 4. declining economic opportunity. Together, these weighed much more heavily upon the middle class than upon the very wealthy and the very poor. In the case of Philadelphia, the five counties in the metropolitan area have had a mostly stable population, but the city itself lost more than a quarter of its population between 1950 and 2000 as some 550,000 people fled to the suburbs or beyond. How many people matters, but which people matters, too: They were the ones with the means and the strongest incentive to relocate. Over the same period of time, Chicago lost a fifth of its population, Baltimore nearly a third. Philadelphia is one of the few U.S. cities to impose a municipal income tax (one of the taxes Mayor Rizzo raised), creating very strong incentives to move across the line into Delaware County or Bucks County. This is sometimes known as “white flight,” but that is a misnomer: In Detroit, the white middle class got out as quickly as it could — and the black middle class was hot on its heels. Upwardly mobile people and those who expect to be — i.e., those with an investment in the future — care a great deal about schools, economic opportunity, and safety. And they know where the city limits are.

The cities are the vanguard of the "progressive" movement -- expect those results to swallow our once great nation, soon to be the equivalent of Detroit.

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Shooting, Robbery, Looting, Race

Police: Brown suspect in robbery before shooting - CNN.com:

The "standard model" of "white" -- or rather "non-black" as in George Zimmerman, and in the case of some of the officers in the Rodney King case, "not truly black" -- shooting, beating, sometimes killing of a young or younger black man has repeated yet again.

The first portrayal of the "assumed victim" is always complete innocence, almost beautification. Then, inevitably we find a little robbery, a little gangsta activity, some drugs, some booze, some whatever -- and the equally inevitable charge from the black community that whatever the previous history -- or even the actual facts of the incident, "it doesn't matter, it is an attempt to blame the victim".

Then we have the looting. For some cultural reason, black communities always need to do some looting. Somehow a few flat panel TVs, jewelry and maybe some custom rims are a good way to show your solidarity with the victim dejour.

This is a major cultural difference that I'm quite certain that sociologists have fully explained, but it never seems to happen in white, Jewish, Korean or even very much in Hispanic communities. Some white kid can take a wrong turn and end up beaten, shot, raped or otherwise damaged or dead in some altercation with blacks and nobody ever seems to say "Hey, let's go loot the neighborhood Best Buy".

I have this backward idea that culture drives human behavior far more than race, economic status or even education. I don't believe that soccer hooliganism in certain stadiums in Britain or the wearing of the cheese in certain stadiums in WI are racial at all -- I believe they are cultural. But then I'm so foolish as to be a conservative, so what do I know.

So we will have another standard scripted "discussion" made up largely of talking past each other. The cops are racist, circumstances are beside the point, the kid is dead.

Am I the only one that finds it all way way too predictable? I have no idea what happened between the cop and the kid, hopefully some obvious evidence will show up. I CAN imagine that determining someone is armed or not in an encounter where physical pushing and shoving ensues with an officer is not as easy as even reading an NFL defense with a 300lb lineman bearing down on you. Robbery or not, if he was unarmed, it is a tragedy he is dead -- as it is that the guy that Tony Stewart hit is dead, or a friend guy from IBM I knew is dead because someone failed to see him and made a left turn in front of him when he was on his Harley.

Tragedy, bad decisions, death -- they all happen with way too much regularity, and sometimes we can even do something to reduce future ones -- like NASCAR deciding that there should be a rule on the obvious, stay in your car. Left turns in front of nearby oncoming motorcycles are already illegal -- maybe look twice?

I wonder if getting in any kind of physical altercation with an armed police officer will ever be perceived as a bad idea?

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Siberian Craters, Methane, CO2, Vostok, Profit

Siberian craters are worrisome (Opinion) - CNN.com:

The chart is from the Vostok ice core data drilled from Antarctica. It goes back no farther because the ice melted there between 400-500K years ago.

The last time there was this much atmospheric CO2 was 3 million years ago, when seas were 80 to 100 feet higher. Since the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric methane has more than doubled, and the amount now gushing from the seas alone is 34 times what we thought just seven years ago.

The top squiggle on the chart is temp, the next one is CO2, the bottom is methane. So the article from CNN is either misinformed or lying on C02 ... it was higher 120K years ago, not 3 million, and there is an obvious pattern. Carbon dioxide and methane both rise as we hit peak temperature prior to the onset of the new big cooling cycle. It has happened 4 previous times in the last 500K years and we are clearly rising to the 5th.

Second, we admit that this loop began with us. By now, the link between fuel that jet-propels our industrialized civilization and excess CO2 and methane in the atmosphere is challenged only by those who profit obscenely from it.

Did the previous 4 rises in Co2 and methane "begin with us"? Can you look at this chart and say that this link is ONLY challenged by those that "profit obscenely from it"? I can't believe that the purveyors of the climate scare are not aware of this data. I believe that they saw these patterns and were smart enough to profit from what they knew was a natural phenomenon -- but they miscalculated how close we were to the peak -- I suspect we are now on the cooling side of the peak.

WHY do we continue to see article after article like this when the information that I have posted is publicly available on the web, easily accessible by a simple Google ... published by NOAA and other government organizations?

My view is that the reason is just as simple as the motives applied to those who "profit obscenely" -- the climate change industry has also profited obscenely -- giant fields of subsidized wind turbines and solar cells, 100's of billions in subsidies for "green energy" and countless studies, grants, offsets, etc. People like Al Gore becoming worth 100's of millions of dollars and more by not producing a blessed thing but text equivalent to the linked article.

Anyone who had basic science in school knows that this planet cycles through climate changes with or without humans and that the normal state is much colder than what we have seen in the last 10K years. I believe we are in the early stages of being rudely (and very coldly) reminded of this fact.

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A Bit Of Chill Reporting

The Big Chill | National Review Online:

There has been no actual Global Warming in nearly 18 years and record cool temps continue to be broken all across the US.

I report this because the MSM doesn't. We have seen the reverse -- have a good hot spell or two, a mild winter, a streak of storms, and the MSM is chocked full of headlines breathlessly reporting the "proof of warming" -- when you report only night, it might seem to a media believer that the world has gone dark.

Does a cool summer and a very cold winter "prove" there is no warming or that there is cooling? No, but then neither does the opposite! Does it cast some doubt? Well certainly, which is exactly why it is not reported!

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No Victor, No Vanquished - Ignorance Aligned With Power

Obama’s map of misreading: A comment | Power Line:

If you can stomach reading the linked BO discussion with  sycophant automaton Tom Friedman, the main thing you will get out of it is "no victor no vanquished". BO apparently read a book or got the phrase got stuck in his head somewhere else and keeps repeating it in the interview like he is high or something. Perhaps he is hoping that the rest of the world buys into the self-esteem movement, no grades, prizes for everyone,  and potentially even all the sports teams will go to no keeping score in any of the games and everyone getting a trophy at the end of the year. I guess Vikings fans would be for it -- they would finally get a Lombardi Trophy!

I find the following paragraph to summarize not just BO, but a lot of a generation of Americans to come of age around the millenium :

This was allied with a personal drive for High Moralism, the felt need to build a castle around yourself behind a moat of 12-foot thick walls from behind which you could shoot moral arrows at everyone else to demonstrate your superiority and quickly destroy any emerging criticism of yourself. So from this position of invincible ignorance allied with moral perfection and then allied with power, you could become able to cross a line in history to reach a new world shaped by your conviction of your perfected sensibility.

Certainly there have always been smug people, and many Christians were and still are more smug than they ought to be, however this PERSONAL drive for "high moralism" is largely a very recent phenomenon that I find to be very related to the post-Christian world.
I grew up in a very "fundamentalist" Baptist sect where "goodness" was a game of one-upmanship along the lines of "What is it that you DON'T do" ... no smoking or drinking were mandatory, but no dancing, no movies, no TV, no rock music -- etc, etc were all on the list of potential "moral winners".

Today it is environmentalism, recycling, vegetarian, vegan, no plastic bags, etc, etc -- the kind of moralzing that used to be confined to a few fairly obscure sects has broken out into the general public as a plague a zealotry -- in the ignorant hope that people can PERSONALLY effect a "world shaped by your conviction of your perfected sensibility".

Both "the enemy" in the case of foreign policy, and more commonly considering the current level of ignorance involved, simple reality, definitely get a vote ... no matter how smug someone is.

As I've observed since '08, when the smugly ignorant person is president, we are all in grave danger -- a fact which at least more people are now developing increasing awareness of.

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Not BO's Fault We Left Iraq

Obama: Hey, it wasn’t my idea to leave Iraq « Hot Air:
The Jews have the right term -- "Chutzpa". Just go ahead and say whatever, and if there is a D next to your name, people will buy it! Leaving Iraq was almost as much of a BO promise as "if you like your healthcare you can keep it" ... but truth has never gotten in the way of any BO position in the past, so why start now? The lapdog media will buy anything.

So BO couldn't get a deal with Malaki, tsk, tsk. I'm betting a "negotiation" with Putin and Malaki would have been extremely short ... something along the lines of "Here is what the agreement is, any questions?

We know the real answer -- BO was getting out of Iraq and could care less about the consequences. Then the consequences started looking bad, so he no longer accepts responsibility for his action. Hopefully the term "feckless" now just as a picture of BO under it.

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Saving The World, Hating Your Dad, The Humanist Bootstraps

Ask Andrew W.K.: My Dad Is a Right-Wing Asshole | Village Voice:

This is an excellent article by someone that has a lot of wonderful sentiments but I fear has not studied much of human history and has therefore a naive view of what is humanly possible. It is the ultimate division -- humanities perpetual hope that it can think itself to heaven on earth -- in this case by a "will to love", but no matter, the concept is that man unaided by any transcendent entity or factor can pull itself "up" (assuming man even has a clue as to which way that is) by his own bootstraps.

The basic pulling by bootstraps argument is old and common -- for Nietzsche it was "the will to power", for William James, "the will to believe".  For all our basic problems with human frailty including even getting up, procrastination, organization, weight, drugs, alcohol, etc, we humans really really want to believe in our "will".

The world isn't being destroyed by democrats or republicans, red or blue, liberal or conservative, religious or atheist -- the world is being destroyed by one side believing the other side is destroying the world. The world is being hurt and damaged by one group of people believing they're truly better people than the others who think differently. The world officially ends when we let our beliefs conquer love. We must not let this happen.

The mechanism that has moved masses of humanity in unison and at least for large groups of people converted masses to a common goal historically is religion. There is one world religion that comes very close to the paragraph above, although the author is loathe to mention it.  Christianity. The rest of them answer this basically as follows:

Buddhism -- Ignore the world, don't be attached
Hinduism - It's a big cycle, do good and it will get better eventually
Judaism - God has a plan, follow his rules and it will work out.
Islam - Win Baby win -- convert or kill everyone else and Sharia will be superb.
Secular Humanism -- Essentially the view espoused in this column. We are asserted to be very capable of loving one another (they may have to redefine "love" for you a bit)  ON OUR OWN if we just pay a lot of attention and focus on "love is the answer", "walk a mile in your oppositions shoes", or maybe John Lennon's "imagine".

Or to use the column authors words ...

So we must protect and respect each other, no matter how hard it feels. No matter how wrong someone else may seem to us, they are still human. No matter how bad someone may appear, they are truly no worse than us. Our beliefs and behavior don't make us fundamentally better than others, no matter how satisfying it is to believe otherwise. We must be tireless in our efforts to see things from the point of view we most disagree with. We must make endless efforts to try and understand the people we least relate to. And we must at all times force ourselves to love the people we dislike the most. Not because it's nice or because they deserve it, but because our own sanity and survival depends on it. And if we do find ourselves pushed into a corner where we must kill others in order to survive, we must fully accept that we are killing people just as fully human as ourselves, and not some evil abstract creatures.

The basic flaw in the authors wishful view aside from the insufficiency of "will"  is the existence of evil. Really? ISIS is "just as fully human as you are"? Hitler? Pol Pot? Your favorite serial killer? The authors view requires that man is "basically good". Christianity asserts we ARE all equivalent to ISIS, Hitler, etc -- equivalently evil at heart and 100% in need of a Savior to fix our broken condition.

Rejection of that Savior condemns the world to the condition that the columnist seems to abhor -- but he is clearly not willing to accept that, and instead fervently hopes that SOMEHOW the obvious result of what he recognizes as the characteristics of humanity -- the need for simple answers, the need to be on the "winning side", the apocalyptic view of the world engendered by our own mortality,  the oft proven insufficiency of our "will", our nature to each see our own personal views as "special",  etc can be modified by "will, thought and love".

He fervently wishes and hopes that somehow, good words and intellect can rise above the human condition with no transcendent God or religious practice/framework and manufacture "love".  It would be an interesting trick since we don't  have a handle on consciousness, and one hopes that the authors definition of "love" would require consciousness. We certainly can't manufacture consciousness.

I too fervently wish that children could manage to love their parents even if the parents were so backward to hold differing political, religious, economic or other views, but aside from Christ, it is simply not to be. I've seen it time and time again and way too personally -- children reject God, and very quickly they reject their parents in all but the most shallow of connection. "Honor your Father and your Mother" is just one more tired old doctrine to be rejected.

No, there is one division that counts. Christ. Those that have Christ have love, those that do not will always both hate Christ and his followers -- no matter how much they may claim to have "open minds", "love", "enlightenment", or some other high sounding thought or emotion, the reality of their relationship to those with Christ will always be something along the lines of hatred, avoidance, condescension, discomfort, etc, while those with Christ will continue to fervently love, hope and pray -- with a deep sorrow for those that they love that have been lost.

The world isn't BEING destroyed -- it WAS destroyed, by sin, and Christ and Christians have been trying to save as much of it as possible for two thousand years. There have  been long periods with a lot of success, and there are periods such as now when darkness seems to be ascendant, but ultimately the end will be according to plan -- not our plan, but Gods. Thanks be to God.

The author of the column would likely protest, "See, there is the problem" -- which is what humanists have been protesting for at least a few hundred years. The 20th century was a century of extreme optimism in the secular community. Their perceived historic foe of religion was seen to have been finally vanquished -- "God is dead" as Nietzsche shouted (although he was well aware of the terror involved in that phrase).

Communism, Fascism and Socialism were all seen as related and nearly certain to be successful utopian plans by the elite. Hopes were high -- human confidence for social and political science was as high as engineering confidence was in the early century for the unsinkable Titanic. By mid-century it was obvious to all but the most doctrinaire peddlers of "isms" that after 100's of millions dead, the project was at least going to be much more expensive in lives and treasure than any had imagined. The fall of the USSR near the end of the century might have given some social science alchemists pause in their plans to turn human nature into the embodiment of love -- but as we see in the column, such is not the case.

Secular Humanism, the religion ashamed to claim it's faith, continues as optimistic as ever in spite of the cosmic body count.

Humans WILL cleave to a religion -- one that explains their universe and transcends the day to day informational noise that seeks to pound all meaning from their existence. As we see above, it will be a religion like the great world religions listed (or some thinly updated variant), or it will be the modern biggie -- some variation of Secular Humanism  -- man as god, earth as heaven, with only a little more fervent wishing and appropriate education (or sometimes RE-education) required to close the deal. Let's call it "love".

Christianity begins from the other side -- with humility. "The Fear of God" -- acknowledgement that what the author of the column believes that we "ought to do" -- love those that hate us, realize that the world is WAY to complex to be understood by man, and accept there may well be more that exists than what we can even perceive  -- is just not possible without something that transcends our existence. Pulling ourselves by our bootstraps is futile, so God humbled himself to human form, died on a cross and rose as the first fruits of a life that is what the columnist dreams of. We ALL dream of it -- we are homesick for heaven, and many -- politicians, media people, self-help charlatans, and even the columnist in his own way -- prey on our souls yearning with false promises.

Christ is the side of love. Christ is the side of the ultimate open mind -- of belief in more than this mortal coil, which is the only way to rise above the constant noise of thousands of viewpoints demanding equal attention -- the authors desires for man are reachable, but not by man without Christ.

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BOcare, Get Poor, ASAP!

Articles: More Bad News for the Middle Class and Their Health Care:

Good article that explains what I've explained a few times. The primary purpose of BOcare is to move more middle class, and even "rich" ( if you make $120K, you are RICH!) into either the real or just income based "poor".

In the new world of BOcare, if you are not "poor" (something around $40K or less), then you have to pay for a now more  expensive insurance plan, PLUS a $5 - $10K deductible. Often a swing of well over $10K a year from what the "middle class" had prior to BOcare.

BO doesn't much care if he succeeds in destroying middle class Americans just financially, or if they die trying to avoid paying deductibles. If they are destroyed financially, they will likely vote D -- if they are dead, due to the magic of "The Chicago Way", they will vote D as well! The BO version of "win win"!

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Haiti, Poverty, Corruption, Culture, Voodoo

Why Is Haiti Poor? [With comment by Paul] | Power Line:



I've always been struck by the stark difference between Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the very same island, and naturally wonder "why". This is a rather academic little column that doesn't reach a real conclusion -- to the extent it does, it is "corruption' and possibly "early exit from colonialism".



I'm not going to go do the research this AM on specifics, but I believe that the history of Haiti is French Pirates, French overlords, lots of slaves, Voodoo, and being the first black republic at like 1800.



I'm a big believer in CULTURE being the big determinant, with RELIGION being the main determinant of that. I'm of the opinion that Voodoo is a poor base for a culture!



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Welcome Back Vietnam, Can We Way-back to 1775?

Consider the magnitude of a U.S. general killed in a war zone | Dallas Morning News:



BO is on new ground now, beyond even Jimmuh in the '70s -- even then we never had a General KIA in a war zone!



Democrats always accuse Republicans of "wanting to turn the clock back", but Democrats are the Mr Peabody of politics with the Way-back machine!



We are back in the '70s on work force participation, back to prior to May 5, 1961 when Alan Shepard made it into space -- no longer able to put a human in space, back to WWII on national debt, soon to be back to pre-WWII as in no longer the worlds largest economy -- if we can leave Democrats in charge we will likely be back to prior to 1776 in a decade or so and a colony of the Chinese!



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Trek, Politics, Truth, Hypocrisy

In the middle of political firestorm, Trek Bicycle rolls on:



Mary Burke is running neck and neck with Scott Walker in the WI Governor race.



The Burke family is Trek, Mary has been involved and has benefited from the success of Trek. Have to applaud that! A Democrat that at least has had SOME experience in business! (rather than just inheriting the money, as in Dayton, Kerry (through wife), the Kennedys, etc, etc)



Richard Burke, the brother that is the real business guy sounds like a stand-up guy. Voted for W, so clearly not a doctrinaire D. His comments seem generally reasonable except for this one very large whopper that is never the less the kind of rationalization that is very human.

"I make my decisions on what is in the best interest of the employees," he said.

No, he does what is best for the BUSINESS -- because keeping that going is in even the medium term what is going to provide ANY jobs for any employees at all. Moving the jobs off-shore, or even moving some between communities in WI often stinks for SOME employees, but it is in the interest of the business, so it is the right thing to do.



One us stuck of what the world might be like if media outlets treated Romney in the same way as they are treating Burke here. The article is a study in being seemingly even handed but subtle. Specific numbers are used for how many employees are in WI, how long, payroll growth, etc, but while the "charge" that Trek manufactures 99% is listed as if it COULD be refuted, it never is. It is also softened with the statements that they "build bikes in Germany and Holland ...".



The article is a nice little microcosm of business, truth and hypocrisy in politics.



It is a global business world. It is absolutely impossible to compete in many many areas without using "The China Price" for at least some of your production. This article is very kind in making that soothingly clear. When it was Mitt Romney, there was no explanation, merely the in your face "he shipped jobs to China", with a few ex-employees to explain their pain and no soothing discussion of how everything is global and if you let the business die, then NOBODY in the US has jobs ...



Republicans are not against outsourcing to keep your business alive, or even to make it thrive,  but the calculation of politics is that you have to hypocritically define the hypocrisy of your opponent -- something like BO decrying "the 1%" at a $30K a plate fundraiser. It would be nice if the media would do it for you, but if you are a Republican, they are not, so you better do it yourself.

Democrats constantly make blanket claims against ALL outsourcing, so it is certainly fair game to call them on it when one of their own is connected to it -- it is one of the reasons that Democrat candidates tend to have no association with business at all, which is counterproductive to their side having any sensible position on business issues! Such problems are rife in the world of politics -- which is in many ways the definition of hypocrisy itself, which is one reason that our founders wanted to LIMIT government. On balance, truth is a far better basis for dealing with reality than hypocrisy.



The article is an excellent example of how media bias operates. For Romney, just never do any article at all -- let the opposition hammer away at him on outsourcing and maybe even pile on with some specific stories about workers hurt or poor conditions in China. As close as this article comes is "$2 an hour". For Mary, have the nice vision of the "Red Barn", busy workers and lots of accolades about her work, coupled with hard numbers of "all the good employment in WI", while nothing very specific about the validity of the "99% of bikes overseas" -- one can tell that neither Mary, Rochard nor the Journal Sentinel like the charge, but they are clearly not going to show us "total Trek Bikes manufactured, number manufactured offshore".



And so it goes. Business requires real hard decisions to be made correctly with limited information. Politics and the media are like blood brothers -- it can all be smoothed out with the proper wording and visuals, we don't REALLY need to get all specific like the real world. So the deficits build, the political trumps the real, the businesses die or flee, and eventually it all tumbles down because we refuse to see.



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