Who Will Watch the EPA?

Animas River fouled by 1 million gallons of contaminated mine water - The Denver Post:



So the EPA -- the guys that classify the CO2 you breathe out as a "pollutant", tell you how much water constitutes a flush in your toilet, and if you get to use plastic bags at the grocery or not (to just name a very few of the myriad of things they "regulate"), made a MILLION GALLON toxic waste mistake!



If they were a mining or oil company that ACTUALLY PRODUCES SOMETHING, what do you suppose the national media reaction would be??



Come on ... you know ... OUTRAGE! ... for days and weeks. "Put them out of business", etc



The age old question of big government (and all "watcher" groups)  is "Who will watch the watchers??" ... the watchers are not some super race, they are just plain old people, often less competitive people since they choose the safety of a government bureaucracy over the hurly burly of the private sector, but certainly "nothing special". Oh, possibly with the exception that they especially like having POWER over others based on POSITION rather than merit!



The myriad of alphabet agencies (EPA, IRS, NSA, FBI, etc) are a classic example of bureaucratic obfuscation of responsibility. The agencies have no official "party" affiliation even though the people that work in them are 99% Democrat. The executive branch has direct day to day "control" over them -- but as we have seen with the IRS investigation of conservative groups, that supposed chain of command is nebulous at best. Congress supposedly controls the funding and has "oversight", but one needn't look very hard at the budgeting operations or attempts at said "oversight" in the case of the IRS to realize that this is also toothless.



Giant incompetent hugely expensive bureaucracies running roughshod over productivity and individual freedoms without any real supervision.



And some people wonder why America died.







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Least Hurricanes "Ever"

No Major Hurricane Has Made Landfall In the U.S. In More Than 9 Years -- and That's a New Record - weather.com:

Like most current climate data, "ever" is from the carefully selectected end of the Little Ice Age in 1860. Perhaps warming climate caused the Civil War?

This is now the longest streak since hurricane records began in 1851. The previous record was a little over nine years, set from August 11, 1860 to September 8, 1869.

I've been blogging for 10 years. When 2005 was a record year for major hurricanes, especially after Katrina, scientists and the media were even more certain that their predictions on warming and large increases in the number of hurricanes were completely proven -- and we would definitely see more major storms every year. Here is a blog post from '06 pointing out that we had no major storms that year even after those confident predictions ... it is also funny to see what a broken record I am on thinking for yourself! 

Here we see a quiet little article from 2013 saying that we almost broke a record for latest hurricane in the season that had been set in 1851 ...

Or we can go back to a post from 2013 when the lack of warming finally fell completely outside of even the lowest possible predictions of the IPCC warming model. 

I wasn't blogging when the "certain truth" on oil went from "the world is out of oil" in the late '70s to "huh"? by 1983. I also wasn't blogging when "generally accepted public / media opinion" went from "OMG, Reagan is NUTS!!!!, he thinks the USSR can be defeated"!!!! in 1980, to "Well, the USSR is gone, we all knew that was going to happen and Reagan slowed it down" in 1989 (Berlin Wall falls) - 1991 (USSR officially ends).

I wasn't blogging -- but I was alive. I've seen how "certainty" turns to "the memory hole". Once confident front page news becomes articles buried or just not discussed.   People who once passionately told you that any disagreement with their dominant position was "crazy", "being a denier", "foolishly following right wing media" or some such, now basically just stare as cows at the passing train if their own formerly passionately held positions are mentioned.

It turns out that their passion was and is for being a sheep in lock-step with the current standard Party (D) and Media position -- and it is IMPOSSIBLE for them to conceive that people could think differently from that position and be correct. Therefore,  if necessary, history must be forgotten or rewritten so the standard Party/Media position is seen as correct -- always. Orwell covered this all long ago -- their minds are imprisoned in what they are told to believe. 

There is an alternative ... actual skepticism. My belief is that the strongest earthly reason for religious faith is that it provides a grounding for the human psyche allowing one to look at everything else in the world as being less than certain. If you don't have faith in SOMETHING as being unshakably true, you are going to create something and invest your "faith neurons" in. The old saw "everyone has to believe in something, I believe I'll have another beer" is true -- beer is just a very flip alternate faith. Our brains our wired for belief and morality -- we need to put something in the "belief slot", or something will fall in that slot without us even realizing it. 

There are a number of books on this kind of topic, but a couple that I have blogged on are "The Righteous Mind"  and "Consilience" ... our problem is often that since we have no real idea of what our consciousness and many of our inner drivers really are at the base, so we make assumptions about things like religion, politics, culture, society, etc that while seemingly "rational", fail to realize that humans are NOT "rational", but rather RATIONALIZING beings. Our real drivers are feelings -- but we will often go to great length to try to convince ourselves and others that they are not.

Watching the AGW (Anthropomorphic Global Warming) theory slink off to oblivion gives another great opportunity to see how "what everyone KNOWS to be true" very often isn't ... the cholesterol shift is another recent one.

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Schumer, Republicans and Iran Hardliners Make Common Cause

Full Orwell - WSJ:

It gets very hard to make any sort of rational sense of the noxious emanations from BO's teleprompter these days. One thing is completely clear -- since he said the following, there are truly no standards left for the office of US President after the BO debacle (Trump has an open field):

Just because Iranian hard-liners chant “Death to America” does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe.

In fact, it’s those hard-liners who are most comfortable with the status quo. It’s those hard-liners chanting “Death to America” who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican caucus.

First of all, that is politically partisan calumny of the most rancid type typically only spewing from the far reaches of the left or the right crazy crowd, not from the Oval Office. What is the difference between "hardliners" and the leaders of Iran? You know the ones that signed the deal and gloated because they know what appeasement is and they like it better than sanctions, having $100 Billion frozen, military strikes on their facilities, and yes ... possible war??

Name a leader in Iran that has never said "Death to America". I sincerely doubt if there is one -- but certainly many of those involved in the "deal", including President Rouhani, DO so chant! and why not? Read BO "Dreams From My Father" -- BO himself seems in agreement with them! (he considers America as taking the mantle of colonial power from Britain, as do the Iranians!)

So what he says is false and rancid -- he is asserting that Republicans and "hard liners" prefer war. OK, so by that logic (as covered in the linked article), the Japanese and the US Congress were "making common cause" after Pearl Harbor, because they both clearly preferred war to peace. BO's "reasoning" is of the form "Hitler was a vegetarian, you are a vegetarian, therefore you are making common cause with Hitler".

But then we now see that Chuck Schumer, third ranking DEMOCRAT Senator from NY is also "making common cause" with "hardliners", Republicans, and possibly Hitler as well -- once you go down the BO sort of lying weasel rathole, the kind of vermin you get associated with is unpredictable.

BO's nutcase rhetoric notwithstanding, it IS actually possible for people that have rational minds to prefer sanctions, not giving supporters of terrorism over $100B, and even targeted military strikes to appeasement. Only in BO's fevered strawman imagination are "war or appeasement" the only options!

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Moby Dick, Melville

I finally finished my lengthy slog through the actual sea soaked tome in hardcover with some fine illustrations. It is a book that one has heard so much of, read in excerpt, heard quotes from, etc that it often seems that we all might have read it. The very symbol of obsession, vengeance and the scapegoat.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

 In the following scene from "First Contact", my far favorite of the Star Trek movies, Picard with the bearing and voice only a Shakespearean actor could muster embodies the fine line between total dedication to a worthy cause and obsession to the exclusion of reality. It is a bit long, but wait for it ... it is worth it.

That fine and often questionably discernible line might well be the gossamer thread on which hangs the destiny of all humanity. We must have motivation and meaning -- but obsession is too far.  I often feel that "progressivism" is the "Borg" of our time, relentlessly assimilating the individual, the sacred, the human, into a "collective" of bleating sheep controlled by "The Party". Ah, the White Whale!

Moby Dick is a long book, and to some degree it has to be in order to convince both the dogged intellectual and the common man that within it's pages you will understand vengeance, obsession and the scapegoat in one not very tidy package. I'll give you a hint -- you will not, and you will also not really enjoy much of it as an entertaining memorable tale. Like converting "Titanic" to "Boy meets girl on ship, they fall in love, ship sinks, boy dies", Moby Dick can be summarized as "Storyteller goes on ship, meets captain whose leg was  taken by white whale, captain chases whale, whale gets captain and whole ship except storyteller". But isn't a page-turner, it is an epic of sometimes tortured symbolism and metaphor.

Or perhaps one needs to be an obsessive to read it through -- and the white whale is the book itself ... or age, time, wisdom, life, love, God  ... "A Six Blade Knife" ... one of my favorite Dire Straits songs.

The book is rife with maritime and whaling terms as well as whale lore and biology circa mid 1850's. The conjecture about the earth being riddled with sub-sea passages which allow whales to dive in the Atlantic and come up in the Indian Ocean by taking a shortcut through one of these portals is amazingly similar to the modern science fiction conjecture of the "wormhole". While the prose often just seems obtuse and ponderous, there are a fair amount of beautiful and thought provoking allegorical allusions such as the following.

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seems to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams,  somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

You know the story of Moby Dick, you no doubt have at least nibbled the edges of obsession, vengeance and entertained a scapegoat or two in your life. My advice, which like all likely good advice is very hard to take, would be to read it while young -- there is a chance that the experience of "bearing with" Melville on this long voyage of a book would impart a level of wisdom beyond the years of say a "twenty-something". Otherwise, if one of your whales is an obsession to write, Moby Dick will certainly help you avoid Dr. Johnson's charge ; "Never trust a man who writes more than he reads"!

I have to leave with the the other quote of Star Trek fame ... this one not credited directly in the movie dialogue.

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.

There is a very good reason that vengeance is mine saith the Lord ... lest we be consumed! Deuteronomy 32:35

To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.

Royko, Mencken, to Stewart, Journalism to Cronyism

Articles: What Mike Royko Knew that Jon Stewart and the Mainstream Media Don't:



A good article that documents just a little of the incestuous relationship between today's media and the ruling political class. In the days of Mike Royko, H.L.Mencken and Mark Twain, journalism was a hardscrabble profession made up of people from the lower class with little education -- learned by apprenticeship and hard knocks.



Still, they had to remember not to fraternize with the inmates! Royko's advice to young journalists;  “if you get too close, then you're going to feel uncomfortable when you have to stick it to them.”



Indeed -- imagine if how "uncomfortable" it would be for someone like George Stephanopoulos, who was a spokesman for the Clintons and continued to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to them after he was supposedly a "journalist"!



The BIG problem here is that the "mainstream" media is effectively an arm of the government -- NPR  is the only one that directly receives payments, but NBC, CBS, ABC, NYTs, HuffPo, etc follow the same piper -- back in the '00s we were treated to the fact of that with the "Journ -O- List" story being released showing a couple hundred reporters, columnists and other media coordinating activity to take down Republicans.



Fox news plays this game on the other side to varying degrees -- and the left is completely unhinged in their hatred for Fox. Their view -- and increasingly the Democrat Party view, is that it ought to be ILLEGAL for anyone but the left to do "collaboration" -- shades of the USSR and "Pravda" (Russian for "Truth").



While our nation is not a "Democracy" (yet), it has democratic input -- which requires an informed populace, which requires an INDEPENDENT and ADVERSARIAL press.



What we have now is Fox News and talk radio generally siding with Republicans, while all other news outlets are mouthpieces for the dominant left view of Democrats, education, government agencies, unions, and amazingly, WALL STREET (their only allegiance is to money, and the Democrats give them more of it!).



Possibly liveable if the general populace was aware of the situation, but since most still see the general media as "unbiased", a very negative state of affairs.




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Don't Screw The Ayatollah

Kerry warns Congress: Don’t screw the Ayatollah « Hot Air:

The Secretary of State of the US actually said "The ayatollah constantly believed that we are untrustworthy, that you can’t negotiate with us, that we will screw them. This will be the ultimate screwing."

REALLY? How many times did we hear about "misunderestimated" or whatever relative to W?

THIS is what constitutes "diplomatic language"?

Forget that the whole "deal" is a delusional nightmare for the US ... abject surrender.

Kerry has always been a very dim witted narcissist tool ... just more proof.

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Zebras, Jack, Cecil -- "I'm Glad You're Dead!"

A little humor and perspective. For some strange reason Jack Nicholson seems to have a very good handle on playing a character a few cards short of a full deck. I liked his Joker better than Heath Ledger's. 

Think of a nasty Zebra commenting on the death of Cecil kind of like Jack! 

Dead Officers, Dead Babies, Dead Animals

The Memphis police officer was the 18th officer shot and killed so far this year - The Washington Post:

What makes humans different is a moral soul. Suppress or corrupt that and we are mere ciphers -- nothing more than the computers we calculate on. Figures on paper -- aside from emotional attachment, moral feeling, grief, outrage, anger, shock, media manipulation, political movements, etc, lives lost are mere numbers. (eg. National Socialism killed 6 million Jews in WWII Germany)

Last summer at this time we were immersed in "Black lives matter" because of Michael Brown in Ferguson MO and Eric Garner in Staten Island. We were inundated by the media and The Party (Democrat) by this story for months. We were told complete lies about the actual situations, designed to make the "victims" (young men shot by police) seem innocent and the police seem like racist thugs. A courageous BLACK reporter for the liberal WaPo covered the fact of the Michael Brown lies here.

We have been manipulated nationally to be on an emotional hair trigger relative to young black men being shot by white officers. (but totally unconcerned when they shoot each other) The Memphis shooting - killing of a white police officer by a black man has no such national emotional content. The linked article gives some numbers -- 18 officers shot and killed in the line of duty this year, slightly down from last year, we have been seeing about 50 shot and killed every year for quite awhile, down from where it used to be. No media presented emotional content to the officer being killed -- not part of TPs narrative!

Numbers -- if the officer was your father, brother, husband, friend, etc, that would make a GIANT difference. As it does when the car crash victim is a loved one rather than just a number. This has all been well understood by the wise for likely most of human history. To paraphrase Adam Smith  "... if all China were swallowed up tonight, we would be more afflicted by the knowledge that we were to lose our little finger tomorrow than by that great calamity." The actual Smith quote is at the end of this blog post if you want to check my paraphrase.

We have an inherent understanding of this fact as humans if we STOP AND THINK, but the reason that our founders created a Republic, NOT a "Democracy" (mob rule) was because masses of common people, busy with their daily lives and wanting to "fit in" are far far too easy to manipulate. Reacting as we are told to react is easier, and as the societal drive to conform becomes greater, and often even safer.

Smith understood that humans can't be otherwise than to be more affected by their PERSONAL situation than by global calamity, because it is our nature. So markets naturally developed which operate based on actual (not the desired) human nature. Smith didn't invent capitalism, he discovered and documented it. It is also true that an extremely painful finger is likely to make you forget about A LOT, and inherently disrupt your rational thought.

Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, BO, the NYTs, Satan, Madison Avenue, etc discovered that constant bombardment by specific messages, especially when coupled with appropriate rewards and punishments ( free stuff vs higher taxes for BO, life vs death for Hitler, etc) could make most people follow a political regime that promised immediate and PERSONAL benefit to them for following. The "benefit" might be as small as "if you think this way, you will be in alignment with the forces of good / progressive / intelligent / popular / proper thought". If you don't think that way, you will be "bad / reactionary / stupid / unpopular / improper". The "promise" hasn't changed much at all ... "You surely will not die! "For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."…

You will be "like God(s)" ... at least in comparison to the "bad / reactionary / stupid / unpopular / etc".

The human condition is one of generally "weak" or "selfish" moral sentiments, which are fairly easily manipulated. Western Civilization was based on the success of Judaism and Christianity to provide a very strong moral framework that gave the common man a set of "higher objectives" relative to his eternal soul, making human life sacred, promoting hard work, respect for parents, ancestors, tradition and the value of caring for others in our community. We once had a strong Judeo - Christian moral compass of our own and were able to resist (to some degree with Gods help) Serpents, Democrats and Media.

We now have The Party -- the dominant media / educational / political system that most values conformance and tells us what to think about all issues and happenings, and more importantly, which to focus on, 24x7. That is why I heard a segment on "Marketplace" last evening discussing how various animal parts -- polar bear and lion being chief, were now on the "no fly list", and how wonderful that was. Animal parts are now sacred ... baby parts are legitimate objects of commerce. Thus saith the "progressive moral compass" today.

As is typical of the "progressive compass", they didn't mention if a rabbit's foot, beef jerky, or halibut shipped back from Alaska would be prohibited -- consistency, practicality, cost, common sense, etc are never part of the "progressive" thought process -- FEELING GOOD (self righteous) about something new is the primary objective, sticking it to some new sub-group is usually a secondary objective. Feeling good to the "progressive" involves feeling superior to somebody -- and usually expanding government or societal power over somebody.

ALL human life being sacred, special, worthy of protection, etc was the old moral compass setting. The "progressive" setting is that those in power (The Party!) selects which lives matter, and are "sacred" in their profane sense. Criminal lives matter, but the most innocent of lives do not, nor do those of those who take up the task of being on the police force. Muslim lives matter -- but US soldiers lives do not. Illegal immigrant lives matter, but people shot and killed by them do not. In general, like all pagan morality, the pagan/progressive moral compass points the opposite way from the old Christian moral compass.

When the vast bulk of the population has no moral compass but the one that is presented to them through The Party and it's media / education / entertainment arms, they must wait to be told what to think about everything, as well as being told what is of importance to them and what is not.

That is most certainly where we are at.

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PJ, Democrats Hate You (Individually)

They Hate Your Guts | The Weekly Standard:

PJ O'Rourke has a great name and a wit to match. The whole thing is pretty funny, but like much of PJ's stuff it is not only funny, but makes a very serious point.

Politics is about POWER, not about people -- people are a MEANS to the politicians goal of power.

Democrats are very good at politics. Republicans -- with the now deceased exception of Ronald Reagan, SUCK at politics! So they are a better choice for office -- they hate you less!

I thought this little section was especially pungent -- but just a teaser, the whole thing is worth the time.

Democrats are particularly infatuated with the demographic group of voters who are poor. Democrats provide many social programs for the poor. If you happen to be poor, you know what these social programs do. They pay you to stay poor. 

Democrats favor a higher minimum wage. And they’ll make sure you get a minimum wage. Forever. 

Democrats want to give you health care that’s free—and worth it.

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63% Inflation, 234% College Inflation

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/opinion/sunday/were-making-life-too-hard-for-millennials.html

Hopefully I can manage to clip a chart from the article at some point and insert it here -- but for now you will have to either believe me or go look at the article. It is the NYTs, they didn't really mean to make the point they made, but here it is:

• Inflation since '93 is 63% ... so your '93 buck is worth .37 cents. That is what a debtor nation calls LOW inflation! 
• College costs have gone up 234% since '93! Think about this for a moment. College is HEAVILY state sponsored, HEAVILY regulated, nearly 100% UNIONIZED, 99% DEMOCRAT in administration as well as educators, etc. Do you REALLY want to give the government MORE things to manage???? 

The government is a huge debtor, so it wants LOW INTEREST and HIGH INFLATION ... the number that counts is really the DIFFERENCE between the interest rate and the inflation rate. Inflation seems "low" at "a couple % a year", but the interest rate being paid on savings is actually less than the inflation rate! Just like it was under Jimmuh Carter. 

The difference -- as some of the charts show, is that nobody is making any money because we have no growth. "The problem is the recession" the article says -- the recession supposedly ended in June of 2009! The PROBLEM is that the "recovery" has been "tepid" to say the least -- and if they hadn't fudged the numbers, we would be in a new recession right now! (2 consecutive quarters of negative growth). 

If we had a Republican in the WH the NYTs would be APOCALYPTIC about this economy -- not just feeling a bit sorry for a few "millennials"!

The Difference Between A Democrat and a Socialist

Debbie Doubles Down (on Socialism) | Power Line:

You can go off to the link and see that the head of the Democrat party just isn't going to answer this question! She is as busy as the MSM making the claim that Donald Trump is what Republicans really are. In fact, Trump is more like what Democrats used to be. He is socially liberal, loves the limelight, and would like Oprah Winfrey for his running mate. He is pretty much exactly like a lot of Democrats -- a LOONY that just wants people to notice him!

A Socialist is really an honest Democrat.

Give all power and wealth to the State and let them hand it out as political favors. Promise the poor the moon, kill the golden goose of the producing class, and spread the rotting corpse on the poor and call it good! Leaves a stench, but all the Socialists / Democrats really want is the power -- they are going to blame others for the disaster anyway, just like they always do. Being a Socialist/Democrat means somebody else is always at fault!

Welcome to Greece -- it doesn't take long to run out of other people's money when you are the size of the US. A tick, leech, or other parasite like Greece can survive a long time on a host (like the EU), because even blown up to grossly big, it is still relatively small.

A Socialist US would be like a parasite the size of a blue whale! Pull that off with a tweezers!

It really does seem to be getting more insane and a faster rate now.



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Samaritan Shooter "Tired of Waiting Around"

Jesus Deniz Mendoza, 18, accused of killing Montana Good Samaritans - CBS News:

Two people that stopped to help a person along the road in Montana are dead -- the 3rd, their daughter age 26 is in the hospital. The shooter was "tired of waiting around".

"Deniz told the interviewing agents that he shot the victims because he was getting tired of waiting around, and because the daughter had laughed at him," the statement said.

One can't find out from the news if the shooter was an Undocumented Democrat (formerly Illegal Alien), but from the name it seems unlikely he is a "White Hispanic" like George Zimmerman.

One of the articles I read said that the youngest sibling of the still living victim is in High School -- but it is hard to find any of that information. No need to show a lot of flattering pictures of the victims, how much of a loss they are, etc in this case!

Anybody else tired of "waiting around" and being played like fools by the media? When the murder fits the "approved narrative", we get all sorts of pictures of sobbing relatives, outraged community members and high ranking administration officials somberly telling us how we MUST think about it!

When it doesn't fit the narrative ... small little stories, side of the page, nothing to glorify the victims, nothing to demonize the shooter -- in fact, it can be hard to find out ANYTHING about the shooter.

In the age of the internet we can "go hunting" to find out a few things ... apparently the shooter's page was linked to "Brown Pride". Is that bad? I really have no idea -- nor do I much care, but anyone with a brain needs to be fully aware that the media has 90%+ of the nation dancing like marionettes! Does it matter if the shooter might have had a Confederate Flag, or even had links to some "White Pride" site.  We are TOLD that it matters, but it doesn't.

When it DOES matter is if the shooter has links to a group that is world-wide in nature and explicitly wants to kill Christians, White People, Non-Muslims, Americans, etc .... Islam, Al Qaeda, Hamas, ISIS, Al Shabab, etc, etc

But we are told that all the Islamic groups DON'T matter ... just like all the black and brown groups. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). If the reverse is racist to even say ... "NAAWP", then you don't live in the country that was founded as America. We need a National Association for the Advancement of AMERICAN People", but it is impossible. Our president doesn't much like THAT idea of "America" -- liberty and justice for ALL, equal treatment for ALL -- even the "rich", limited government and all that jazz. We can't advance "America" because there isn't any agreement on what that is. Apparently, to the media, it is "making the wealthy whites, police, red states, etc PAY ... with money, lives, crime, etc, while advancing blacks, illegals, hispanics, muslims, etc.

We are told what to think -- and in "polite company" it is very wrong to even bring up news that is not "appropriate" ... like the policeman gunned down in Memphis by a black man for interrupting a drug deal.

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Spot The Station, Lake Shed

Link To Spot the Station

The last two nights have been our first in the new Lake Shed. It isn't home yet ... kind of camping out. No hot water yet, installing appliances -- but it it has a working bathroom, a small fridge, and a bed -- so it is working toward being home.

One thing it does have is a pretty unobstructed view to the west and less light pollution than Rochester. The last couple nights I've enjoyed the "Blue Moon" (well, OFFICIALLY only last night ... but close to full is still impressive).

I get e-mails from this site when the International Space Station (ISS) passes over, and the last couple of nights it has been blazingly bright and easy to spot! Just look off toward the SW and keep a quadrant scan for the brightest star that you can see in the S-W quadrant. It is bright, and it is obviously moving, so it is very easy to see.

I always sit and try to imagine the normally 6 people there riding 250 miles above the earth travelling at 17,000 MPH  ... 17 THOUSAND MPH! They have a different perspective from those on earth.

Is the ISS a monument to the end of the US? Our shuttle was the main vehicle that took it all up there, but today we hitch rides with the Russians so our people can get there for missions.

It is worth at least watching the bright spot move across the sky and reflecting on the final frontier ... and the nation that once led there and so many other places!

Baltimore Regresses To 1972

Baltimore Sees the Highest Number of Homicides in 43 Years | TIME:

No secret to regular readers of this Blog -- "progressives" are misnamed, they ought to be called REGRESSIVES! If one wants to look at "settled science" (political in this case), the jury is long settled on exactly how well their policies work.

Human culture took a long and painful road up from a world with no morals, meaning, or purpose beyond individual enjoyment to the pinnacle of Western Civilization -- somewhere in there between the peak of the British Empire and the Moon Landing or so. We battled Communism and Socialism (National and otherwise), and for a brief instant in 1991, one might have thought the forces of good had finally won it all -- but evil is always waiting for good men to rest.

With their deaths, this year’s homicides reached 189, far outpacing the 119 killings by July’s end in 2014. Nonfatal shootings have soared to 366, compared to 200 by the same date last year. July’s total was the worst since the city recorded 45 killings in August 1972, according to The Baltimore Sun.

Baltimore is one of those sterling "All Democrat" cities -- this is Democrat heaven! (Much like Detroit in the past!) Democrat (even BLACK!) President, Democrat Governor, Democrat (BLACK!) Mayor, Democrats in control of both houses of the state legislature!

Naturally, Time Magazine has only "more of the same" suggestions to "fix" this problem -- more programs, more welfare, more talk with police, etc. Perhaps we could legalize a few drugs? That ought to help!

Nobody cares about this. Let's maybe try to cut some minority prison sentences as BO was talking about a few weeks ago. The violent disaster that was the '70s is what moved the wave toward more strict policing that peaked in the '90s with Slick Willie signing "3 Strikes" -- which he now calls a "mistake" because the base wants to let those guys out ASAP!

All this is well known, well understood, we have been here before. Many many thousands more will have to die before there is ANY hope of the rank and file public even getting wind of what is happening around the country.

Baltimore is not unique in its suffering; crimes are spiking in big cities around the country.

... oh, but Cecil the lion got killed! Tom Brady is still fighting his 4 game suspension! No time to be focused on this! Look! I think I saw a Confederate Flag over there!
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Economy In Recession, Nobody Knows

Consumer spending bolsters U.S. second-quarter growth | Reuters:

BO has gotten very unhappy with his horrible economic numbers -- the economy shrank the first quarters of both 2014 and 2014 and barely eked out something below 2% total growth both years. Small wonder that BO, whose economic numbers have been worse than W who started from a very high economic base after the internet bubble (that crashed right after W took office) W  1.7%, BO 1.6%.

As that Forbes article said at the end ...

President Obama “inherited” (another favorite word of the president’s enablers) a low GDP base and did terribly with it, well worse in comparison to his much-maligned predecessor. He inherited a high government spending base and still managed to increase that number at a rate 50% above general growth. In a rational world, we’d stifle such a failure from still having access to the controls.

But then we know we don't live in a rational world, so in this one BO is still in office, and we let him cook the books! The nation has LOTS of time for "deflategate", too little pressure in NFL footballs, but NO TIME at all  for our economic numbers being

Gross domestic product expanded at a 2.3 percent annual rate, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. First-quarter GDP, previously reported to have shrunk at a 0.2 percent pace, was revised up to show it rising at a 0.6 percent rate.

The estimate of the effects of the "new accounting" for GDP was +3%, so the ACTUAL number to be used for comparison would be a .7% LOSS in GDP, putting us in the BO Recession! (Two quarters of negative GDP growth!). The column never mentions that this is now done under the new way of reporting GDP which I discussed here ... as a bonus, they blithely adjusted the first quarter up from -.2 to +.6! Erasing a recession! (they had actually revised the decline to .7% after initial reporting, but since it is now obvious these numbers are just being cooked as desired, "What does it matter now?")

So BO would have officially had a recession on his hands -- but now it looks like a quarter of REALLY tepid growth (.6%) and one that is STELLAR by BO standards ... 2.3%.  Pretty impressive, taking two successive quarters of -.7 which would be a RECESSION, and turning into what the Democrats and media will hail as "solid growth".

If you like your economy, you can elect a putz like BO and it will still all go OK!

When the WH and the media are working together, it takes a little more work to figure out what is actually happening! It isn't going so well ...

'via Blog this'