Of Kickers, CEOs, Bananas and Magicians

Vikings kicker Blair Walsh tells 1st-graders he'll 'cherish' their cards forever - StarTribune.com:

I'm fine with kids being nice to Blair Walsh. I'd be fine even if the muff had happened to a Packer kicker in a big game -- it's part of football, part of being a kicker, and life is CERTAINLY more than football. It is also fine that the Star Trib covers it ... heartwarming article.

As near as I could find out on the web, an NFL kicker in 1965 made about $35K ... that was pretty good cabbage back then. When I started at IBM in 1978 I made $15,500 and that was considered an excellent starting salary. A starting teacher got like $9K in '78.

Walsh made $3,250,000 last year. That is a little less than 100x what a kicker made in 1965. Aaron Rodgers made $19.1 million for comparison.

We all know about the biggest CEO packages, but looking around the web I ran into a "real jobs site" in REAL CEO pay ... not the "Top 400 companies". It's kind of a laugher ... $160K average, $460K "high". The average for CEOs is $15.1 million, counting the big guys. So Aaron Rodgers makes $4 million more a year than the average CEO.

We KNOW what the Star Trib thinks of CEO pay, and we KNOW what they would say about a $3 Million a year CEO whose company lost money! I hate to tell them, but just as making kicks is not guaranteed in football, making money is not guaranteed in business!

I believe that all of us at some level are a little aware that "value" and "markets" are complicated and have WIDE variance. You can go down to Kwik Trip and grab a banana for about a dime, then walk over and grab a bottle of water for a little over a buck.

The banana grew on a tree somewhere in Central America, somebody cut it down, trucked it to some city, put it in a big container, put it on a banana boat, it showed up on likely the Gulf Coast, went through a shipping center or two, a truck or two, and found it's way over a couple thousand land miles to your Kwik Trip shelf. Simple.

The water probably came out of the ground within a few hundred miles and ended up in the close to zero cost plastic bottle in a palletized flat with nary a human hand touching it and was trucked to the same store.

The difference is of course "markets and marketing". The banana is a pure commodity. The water likely is too -- but it is getting a halo effect from the marketing of other bottled water. "Perrier, Dasani" ... you may not be able to recall them, but they are in your head, trust me!

The reason you think as you do about CEO pay differently than you think about Blair Walsh is the same as the reason that water and bananas are priced differently. Marketing. (or "propaganda" if you want to give it a more sinister spin)

You have seen hundreds ... maybe thousands of headlines, articles, political statements, digs in entertainment, etc on the horror of high CEO compensation. ALL of those statements focus on the very highest of CEO pay and the most egregious of CEO excess. CEOs, and corporations in general have been demonized more than the Nazi's were in WWII.

Why? They are MARKETED as "An enemy of The Party (TP-D)" ... and therefore "the common man". TP is ALL about "the common man" --  like the millions of blacks living in hopeless inner city poverty and 6K young black men gunned down in the street every year. They would be very happy for you to become their wards just like blacks already are! Just vote for them!

 Just as TP isn't really a "friend to the common man",  Corporations and CEOs aren't really enemies of TP -- CEOS and Corporations donate 10's of millions to TP, but what part of MARKETING don't you get? That bottled water at the Kwik Trip isn't any better than what you could have drank from a free water fountain, but you still bought it didn't you?

TP needs "enemies" like Hitler needed the Jews. Scapegoats. As I cover here regularly, "truth" is a very early casualty of the slide to one party rule. Constant control of the "message/narrative" keeps the masses of the sheeple firmly in the grasp of "the world according to TP".

The vast majority of the country and really the entire west is like an audience watching a magician on stage perform "amazing acts". I've come to believe that in this life, Christian faith provided the massive advantage to the western mind of making the masses of people skeptical of the claims of man and governments. "Render unto Caesar"  indicated that government had a role, but that role was LIMITED and should always be viewed as SUBJECT TO GOD! TP has made sure that the masses have gotten "smarter" than to believe in the sovereignty of God vs TP.

In our souls, we all know this story, but given our nature, and the nature of evil, we forget it. We should all watch the following every now and then. This isn't so hard to understand -- GOD is the Master, we are the Apprentice and government, is the "servant" broomstick .... there is a tendency for our "servants" to get out of hand if you don't remember the "spell" to shut them down!

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Trump, Cruz, Weevils

Haley’s plea for tolerance draws cheers and jeers, revealing GOP divide - The Washington Post:

The Stupid Party Get's Stupider

For those that read this blog, you are hopefully aware that I am a CONSERVATIVE, not necessarily a "Republican".  I voted for Ross Perot after HW Bush broke with his smaller government promises and raised taxes. I'm not proud of that, but from it I learned that politics is nearly always the choice of "The Lesser of Two Weevils":

The two linked articles at the top of the post show that "the establishment Republican Party" and whatever one might like to call the more conservative wing ... let's go "militants" for now rather than "Tea Party" since I already use "TP" for a couple other things, are getting HOT, and it looks like change might be on the way.

I didn't watch the rise of Ronald Reagan, I was a Democrat to the small extent I cared until Carter convinced me that I'd rather not turn off the lights, put on a sweater, and say goodbye to America at the age of 21.

In retrospect however, it is obvious that the "Rockefeller, Country Club, Blue Blood, Coupon Clipping" former elite of the Republican Party were not enamored with Reagan. They found him shallow, a loose cannon and from the wrong side of the tracks. Their candidate was George HW Bush ... patrician, great blood lines, Yale, CIA ... "establishment".  Needless to say, the left was in total agreement! Reagan was an "idiot", "warmonger" ... he was SURE to be a DISASTER, if not the end of the world in a nuclear battle with our then partner in stability, the USSR.

History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme. I would have LOVED to see Scott Walker -- we have just experienced 7 years of expensive on the job training for someone with no experience in leadership or governance, and aside from extreme expense, it has really only gained us the certain knowledge that some people can't be trained. For that reason I'm anything but excited about Trump, Cruz or Rubio.

Christie has too many skeletons in Jersey and we don't need a pol that is ham-handed enough to hug BO right before an election.  I think Kasich is a great person and a good governor, but he has drifted left and doesn't really stand for anything in the small government arena.

So, I'm not excited, but I will vote for whomever 1) I see as most likely to limit government 2). Has a chance of winning. (Voting for someone that can't win is the equivalent of voting "present").

That said, I have to admit that craziness of the left and Republican establishment going after Trump and now even Cruz is making me give both of them a strong second look. I would assume that BO certainly realizes that his calling out voices like Cruz and Trump puts them in a better light with a large set of voters.

BO's approval ratings are well below 50%, it would have been like W Bush coming out and saying that "I really hope the Democrats don't go with a strident partisan like Obama" in the the spring of 2008 -- W would know that would help Obama, and I'm certain Obama knows that his comments help the more strident voices likewise.

The Republican establishment is a little easier to understand. They got back in the drivers seat after Reagan ... HW, then Dole, then W, then McCain, then Romney. Newt was more Reaganesque, but Speakers since have been establishment all the way.

Do I get mad at the Republican establishment and fervently wish for another Reagan? Oh, certainly I do, but a very large part of being a conservative is being reality based.  Being mad and cutting off your nose to spite your face are two different things to a conservative.

The list of things I detest about Trump is lengthy, but I DO very much enjoy how mad he makes both the left and the party elite. I had never really noticed Cruz much -- yet ANOTHER lawyer Senator with no leadership experience! David Brooks going after him though is a good sign that there might be some "there there"! Anyone with a shred of either patriotism or conservatism has to be completely disgusted about where we find ourselves after 7 years of the stench of BO!

If you aren't disgusted, you have to REALLY not be paying attention, or you are a Statist / Socialist at heart and need to start "Feeling the Bern"! BS is the obvious successor  to BO.

Sadly, with the look of the markets, Europe, Iran, crime, ISIS, etc, it may just come down to "Who do you think our enemies are the most afraid of"?

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Liberalism, WASPism, Pair O Docks

Doctrinaire Liberalism: Paradoxes:

Fishing along, having a brew on a sunny day and observing with a philosophical tone "Oh! Look!  THAT is what Nietzsche meant by a "Pair O Docks"! (paradox) ... I'm so intelligently humorous it is simply amazing!

Well, I'm still not smart enough to be a Liberal, so there is that.

The linked article is worth the time, it points out what I regularly do, that "morality" is "whatever the dominant liberal elite decides it is" -- but these days there are a lot of protected non-violent Muslims raping young women or blowing stuff up, which we know has NOTHING to do with Islam, and as the article does a good job of enumerating, the list of such paradoxes is very long.

It seems that the fact that man has GOT to believe in SOMETHING, and that only works if at least the vast bulk of people take that something to be "divine,  eternal, omniscient, etc" is very much coming home to roost.

In the Christian age in the US, the dominant culture was "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant". In the post-christian age, that mantle is "liberalism/progressivism".  Problem is, "WASP" had CHRISTIAN and WESTERN (as in EUROPEAN) written all over it, and they had a pretty solid track record  -- it was the "Divine Right of Kings" passed down through "endowed by their Creator" on the way to making a nation sacred, and exceptional.

Our current foes in Islam, Putin or China have no trouble believing in their divine, historical, philosophical, etc exceptionalism and mandate to rule.

We however seem to have gotten lost somewhere between the martini and the joint (marijuana) and now discover that while the old WASPism was replete with privilege, boorishness, hypocrisy, etc, the  new liberal country club seems to be populated with the same sorts of issues ...

In truth, party-line, elite liberalism is mostly about careerism and embracing a loud ideology that trumps every other progressive and identity-politics agenda. Politically correct leftism is a career investment — a sort of insurance that indemnifies one against every sin, from carbon-spewing travel and politically incorrect gaffes to Wall Street profiteering and 1950s-style sexual loutishness. To borrow from Tolkien, the assertion of leftism is the “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.” 

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The End of Modernity

The End of Modernity | Hoover Institution:

A bit intellectually stilted, but worth the read. If you keep up with this blog you have read it all here in my own tech-weenie autodidactic intellectual wannabe prose -- these guys are the real deal.

Some priming before you begin ...

"Westphalian" -- Peace of Westphalia, 1648. The end of the 30 years war, the agreement between Rome and the European States to recognize and respect the state as the source of government. Could look at it as the REAL end of "The Holy Roman Empire" and the rise of the Protestant dominated nation-state west.

"volkerwanderung" -- "The Migration Period". From the perspective of Roman Empire, the invasion of the barbarians ... with  the obvious metaphor to today.

The end follows. I maintain that we DID (or at least W did) however make a SUCCESSFUL but very expensive "turning point" from 2001-2008. If the path set had been maintained, the world may well still be at peace, ISIS never rising, and Iran contained. The left could still lament a small contingent of troops in Iraq with deaths on the order of what we see in Afghanistan and claim "it was all unnecessary" -- but instead ... 

And turning points were not recognized or taken, most notably the moment in late 2015 when the U.S. could have inventoried the region to determine those states and parties in or on the side of world order and those who would destroy and replace it so as to firmly support the former and resolutely oppose the latter. 

It was not to be. The collapse of the Westphalian state system meant that the foundations for the values they upheld—open trade, open expression, consent of the governed, and universal human rights—crumbled as well, and the remaining states of the core region of the world withered away. 

As the historian Edward Gibbon mused when writing about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, perhaps the time would come when the interpretation of the Koran would “be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.” 

It has come to pass.

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Everyone Gets $4.3 Million

Powerball Meme Mathematical Illiteracy Illustrates Bernie Sanders' Appeal - Hit & Run : Reason.com:

I sincerely hope that this meme was put up by somebody just having fun rather than being serious, but it is certainly going around.

Of course, everyone actually gets $4.30 ... sort of.

What is REALLY scary is that if you DID get $4 MILLION as a young person and decided to "live off the interest" from an FDIC account you would get LESS than 1% ... so < $10K per million, or a total of $40K a year -- less than the median income! Talk about "living like a millionaire"!

So most of us have a lot of money in market index funds and bonds. To the extent that the "BO economy" has done ANYTHING the past 7 years, it has pumped up those funds with a lot of freshly printed money. Take a look at China, take a look at the stock market so far this year -- or go back and look at 2009. You can do MUCH worse than a 1% return on your money!

Royal Bank of Scotland says to sell everything! Are they right?

Walter Russel Mead has some sobering coverage of what is going on in China. He believes that the reason that we see the commodity market crash is that China is already trying to do what the US did in the 1980's ... move from a manufacturing economy to a service / knowledge / financial economy.

As I've said a number of times, the "bottom bottom" line is always the same -- the MAJORITY of the population has to be involved in MAKING (building, inventing, manufacturing, writing, growing, producing, etc) something that OTHERS WANT TO BUY.

AND ... in order to continue to be prosperous, INVESTING a significant portion of the value of that production in SOMETHING THAT GOES UP IN VALUE!

Taking stuff out of some peoples pockets and putting it in other peoples pockets, printing money, giving speeches, passing laws, "regulating",  having "programs", etc serve the same function as the scantily clad magicians assistant. They draw your attention so the house (government) can fleece you a bit more while the ship sinks.

The top linked article closes with the following and some of the problem is simply that "millions and billions" are just too large for the human brain to deal with ... let alone trillions and if you combine debt and unfunded entitlements, approaching 100 Trillion!

There's a relevant Richard Feynman quotes about big numbers. "There are 1011 stars in the galaxy," Feynman once said. "That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." That was at least three decades ago—the annual deficit is at about a trillion now. 

People have trouble conceptualizing numbers as big as a thousand, let alone a million, billion, or trillion. They listen to Bernie Sanders and come to the conclusion if only government took more money from "billionaires" it could fund everything for everyone. Appeals to reason and math are discounted as right-wing propaganda.

Let's face it, any appeal to reality is "right wing propaganda" these days!

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Two Boats, 10 Sailors

Iran's Propaganda Victory in One Illegal Image:

I'm sure this one is going to be GONE very quickly!

So TWO US military boats end up "drifting" into Iranian waters and are "rescued" by our "friends" the Iranians, who manage to violate the Geneva Convention by showing photos of the sailors in captivity (as covered in linked article).

Hmm ...

I used to go out on big water with my 1850 Tyee ... I had a GPS, a handheld GPS, marine radio, and of course cell phones. Are we to believe that TWO Navy craft can't navigate well enough to avoid getting within 12 MILES of shore? We used to find spots out in the middle of Mille Lacs that were 10 to 20 FEET across with NO PROBLEM with units that cost well under $1K when purchased 20 years ago!

Oh, "maybe they ran out of gas". BOTH OF THEM???? !!!! Did they forget a tow rope? Are we to believe that between BOTH boats there was no operative communications gear?

Not much makes any sense here other than GROSS incompetence.

It seems nearly certain that this was some sort of ill conceived Special Forces Op, which doesn't make you feel very confident in the current state of our Special Forces. One certainly HOPES that they were within the 12 mile limit by design and simply got caught. Getting caught definitely doesn't reflect well on Special Ops, but it is a hell of a lot better than "getting lost and running out of gas", which sounds more like a couple of carloads of teens drinking beers on the backroads kind of "operation".

I'm reminded yet again of the "Jimmuh Carter Desert Classic", the perfect Democrat military operation where nobody but Americans and the stature of the American Military died -- no Iranians were harmed or even stressed in the debacle!

We knew the military would decline rapidly under BO. There was apparently enough momentum to carry out a successful op to get Bin Laden in May of 2011. Things have obviously gone down hill a good deal since then!

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Brooks Brothers Brutalism (Cruz)

The Brutalism of Ted Cruz - The New York Times:

Remember, David Brooks is what constitutes a "conservative" at the NY Times -- and he voted for Obama in 2008!

Apparently he doesn't like Cruz very much -- and thinks he is "brutal". I suppose to a NY Times wealthy highly paid intellectual guy that is on NPR every Friday with EJ Dionne where they cover both the "left and the far left" of politics, it may seem that way.

I wonder how he feels about ISIS?

The opening salvo about how Ted Cruz as Solicitor General for the State of Texas ought to be called "brutal" because he took a case to the SCOTUS and **WON** 6-3 makes one wonder just a bit about the Brooksian universe. Justices in the majority included the BRUTAL Ruth Ginsburg, Sandra Day O'Connor, and that BRUTE, Steven Breyer!!!

Can you imagine an action movie with those three squaring off against a few hundred ISIS guys? Why, I'd feel incredibly sorry for the ISIS guys with that kind of "pagan brutalism, no hint of compassion, gentleness or mercy" arrayed against them. Imagine being attacked by JUST Ruth VADER Ginsburg!

I suppose you would be OK if you were in a population that she doesn't mind having a few more of ... which may well include ISIS I suppose, but woe be to you if you are in a population she doesn't like! To quote her on the subject:

"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of."

So since Ginsburg, Breyer and O'Connor sided with the case that Cruz brought and won, would that make them "brutal"?

It would seem it would HAVE TO if you are David Brooks and not insane, but for the rest of us, it may just mean that being Solicitor General for your state means that you are the one that appeals cases that federal courts overrule to the SCOTUS if it is determined that they have LEGAL MERIT, and you argue such cases on their LEGAL merits. When the SCOTUS agrees with you, the assumption would be that the case and your arguments were in alignment with the laws of the nation.

The law certainly can be BRUTAL! I find abortion law to be VERY brutal, but Brooks and obviously Ginsburg do not -- well, Ginsburg possibly only finds it OK if it is applied to "a population we have too many of".

To the extent there is any meat to the Brooks hatred of Cruz, I suspect it is here:

Ted Cruz didn’t come up with this hard, combative and gladiatorial campaign approach in isolation. He’s always demonstrated a tendency to bend his position — whether immigration or trade — to what suits him politically. This approach works because in the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges court decision on same-sex marriage, many evangelicals feel they are being turned into pariahs in their own nation.

I wonder if groups that Brooks or Ginsburg "don't want too many of", or "evangelicals", would ever have any right to "feel that they are being turned into pariahs in their own nation"? Probably not ... I'm sure if they listen to "The Party" and it's media outlets, they can all be "re-educated" to support the views that their intellectual betters like Brooks and EJ Dionne tell them are the right views!

I have no idea who the Republican nominee is going to be -- right now Trump, Cruz or Rubio would seem to be likely. When you argue that because a Solicitor General of a State takes a case to the SCOTUS that wins with 3 justices that nearly all would consider moderate to left siding with the majority proves someone is "brutal", it seems more than a bit on the "I really hate this guy and felt I HAD to come up with something that at least SEEMED objective to support my position" side.

It is very hard to believe that this is what masquerades as "a conservative view" at our supposed "Paper of Record"!

HAL, Google Click Brain

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic:

I enjoy Nicholas Carr as a writer and it was fun going back and reading my Blog on "The Big Switch" from March of '08.  The world was a lot more positive back then, I was still more hopeful of technology advances helping our futures, and less worried about downsides. His predictions of computing moving to "The Cloud" are very much coming to pass.

I've also read "The Shallows" on which the linked Atlantic article is based, but did not blog on it (yet) ... I'm probably going to give that one a re-read, although it already obvious that the Atlantic article is a pretty darned good summary, right down to the "2001 A Space Odyssey" references ... in particular:

The Carr thesis, going back over a decade at least, is that our technology changes us in unpredictable ways, and we ought to be aware of that. His view on the Internet and Google in particular is that we are losing our capacity for "deep reading" and "deep thought", and are being "distracted". Like HAL, we are "losing our minds".

He recognizes that it goes back a long way. One of the fairly recent (in terms of history) pieces of technology that totally changed the world was the clock. To wit ...

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

Being a Lutheran, I recognize one of the other "big ones" as the printing press. Without it, Luther would likely have just been another heretic burned or hung to save his own soul at the behest of the Roman Church. Instead, 500 years ago in 1517, the printing press (invented 1436) allowed his arguments and eventually the Bible itself, to be put in the hands of the common people in their own language. The central power of Rome was de-centralized, and much of what happened with democracy, republican government, the rise of commerce and science, etc was a direct result.

However, as this blog laments, wisdom is much more dear than knowledge, and one of the many challenges with "artificial intelligence" is just what is "intelligence"? These are not new problems ...

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

Since 2008, I've become aware of at least SOME of the dangers of my own auto-didacticism (self teaching with no program of study) in the areas of philosophy, politics, theology and areas of science (primarily cosmology and mind / consciousness study).

I would argue that being "filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom" is pretty much the "disease of our day". I'm sure that the invention of writing was a contributor, but I'd argue that the abandonment of honor for history/tradition, infatuation with "the latest and greatest" as well as the pell-mell rush for "knowledge" (with abandonment of "values") and forced abandonment of "wisdom",  since it may slow the headlong rush, was a decision -- not "inevitable". As in the case of most of our modern decisions, it is hard to call it a "conscious decision" because we seem to firmly avoid thinking with enough depth to make those sorts of determinations, and have for a lot longer than the Internet has been around.

Some parts of the technologies are as McLuhan said, endemic ... "the media is the message". Mass radio and television begat mass marketing and everyone standing around the water cooler discussing what was on Carson last night. Airplanes trumped battleships and nuclear missiles made it clear that no visible nation could get away with isolationism unless you had "cover" (that used to be the US, prior to Obama). It seems that is a lesson that will apparently require a few more millions of deaths to re-learn.

While Carr seems to think that "technology is destiny", I prefer to believe that **IF** we, FIRST considered meaning, wisdom, culture, human frailty, Gods will, tradition, etc, and THEN made use of technology with those goals in mind and primary, we could avoid at least the most onerous of the losses due to technology.

We **CAN** still enjoy an evening around a crackling fire, and we can still shut off the lights and have a beautiful candlelight service at church, and as I often do, we can settle down in a nice easy chair in front of a big window looking over the backyard with a remote / thermostatically controlled fireplace to keep us warm while we read in depth.

It is completely true that before the invention/discovery of tools, fire, language, writing, printing, computers, Internet, etc, we had less choices and "things were different". What is far from clear however is that we can abdicate our responsibility for making appropriate use of technology and blame the problem on "the technology made us do it". I agree with the following quote from the column on the fact that we are creating a lot of "flat people" these days, but I find it to be a choice rather than our destiny.

Before even the first crude spear, God enabled us to have "Free Will" -- the rest of the creatures only have instinct on which to rely. We need to quit thinking we are "apes with tools" and recognize that we are uniquely blessed to be human with the divine gift of consciousness!

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

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Detroit, Chicago, Venezuela

More Detroit Schools Closed; Mayor to Tour Some Buildings - ABC News:

"All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." (Burke) A corollary from the position of evil is that good men  must be kept from the truth! -- which is what this post is about. If the follies of Socialism were kept in front of the people, Bernie Sanders would never have been elected dog catcher -- as it is, he is neck and neck in IA and hugely ahead in New Hampshire of all ironic places! (Live Free or Die -- guess they are ready to die!) Perhaps another of Burke's quotes comes to bear in these times

... "The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."

Detroit should be kept in front of our minds at all times as "the wages of socialism" ... you can go to the top linked article and see the schools are in shambles, deep in debt, under state control and the union teachers have lots of demands, including raises. Greed is self limiting -- people can only work so hard, build so much, etc and they get "satisfied, tired, bored, etc". Not so with Envy! People can ALWAYS demand to be given more! About half of Detroit's schools were closed yesterday as a "sick out" is in progress by the teachers, a similar number are closed today.

We can go to that shining star of left wing policies, Chicago, with some of the strictest gun laws in the land. "Common Sense" anyone? Remember, our supposed "leader" hails from this cesspool, and his own ex chief of staff is the current sitting mayor -- until he is indicted at least.

As of Monday morning, at least 19 people have been killed in gun violence in Chicago this year and at least 101 more have been wounded, according to data compiled by the Tribune. This time last year, nine people had been killed and another 31 wounded, according to statistics kept by the Chicago Tribune.

Venezuela is a world example of socialism in action -- waiting in line for food is now the major occupation there. A decade ago, Hugo Chavez was hugely popular with the left in this country -- he said bad things about W, which was VERY popular with our media in those days! We pretty much all knew how "great" things were going in Venezuela, and how impressive a "man of the people" Chavez was. Now you can go and read a series of articles from a guy there for the NY Times about what a basket case it is. The Socialists are finally out of power, but the nation is a shambles.

We hear about the evils of "income inequality" nearly every day, yet the amount of bread lines in this country are pretty limited. Detroit is proof that it CAN happen here!, and Chicago is well on the way. DC, St Louis, Atlanta, New Orleans ... the majority of the large cities operated by TP are in very bad shape. The nation is in bad shape and sinking fast -- it may well be beyond hope already.

Destroy the drive of people to MAKE and convince them what is better is to TAKE, and pretty soon everyone is out on a "sickout" making demands on what they "ought" to be given.

We used to be able to look at East vs West Germany, Hong Kong vs China -- we can still look at North vs South Korea if we care, but NEVER expect TP controlled media in this country to help show the obvious.

SOCIALISM FAILS! One more Burke quote to end this lesson ...

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

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Go With The Fun!

The Fun Indicator | Power Line:



If you follow the link, you can read about a fun little anecdote about Nancy Reagan rolling an orange down the aisle on the Reagan campaign plane, and also realize that Trump is BY FAR having the most fun this campaign season. No matter how we might feel about it, at least somewhat often, the campaign having the most fun WINS! (can you imagine life (or their facsimile of such) on the Hillary or Bernie campaign? ... eek!)



I think that is often true for football teams as well. Seattle tends to have a lot of fun playing -- it doesn't mean they ALWAYS win (see Superbowl), but as the Vikings and Green Bay can testify, it means they pull some big games out where things just "go their way".



Green Bay decided to go into "avoiding losing" last year ... which led to them managing to NOT WIN! The 2nd half of the NFC championship OUGHT to have been FUN for the Packers and Packer Fans -- and I think it WOULD have been, had they only kept playing like it was a FUN GAME!



Miracle of miracles, the fun magically returned to the Packer offense after an 11 yard output 1st quarter that included a SAFETY. If it stays, I think we have a "punchers chance" in AZ -- they CAN be beaten, see their last game against Seahawks! (36-6, Seattle)



There is a lot of truth to this in life as well, with the important caveat that it won't ALWAYS be fun! The best projects / teams in my career always had some solid fun aspects involved. Yes, yes ... there are hard slogs involved, stuff that NOBODY wants to do, etc ... but when it is working, there is also some fun!



There is a lot of "big picture wisdom" in this little observation. The things we often believe (or are told) OUGHT to be FUN, rarely are. Partying, "laying on the beach", throwing away the "rules", etc ... they can be fun at times, but they tend to get stale pretty quickly as overindulgence, disorder, disarray, etc take their inevitable toll.



Is there really any group in America or Europe that is "having fun" right now? Maybe Islamists I guess ... they have a goal (world domination), and a reason to live (Allah and expanding his domination). Putin? The current whack job version of the "Kim Jong" inbreeding?



While "liberalism" is very dominant, it never seems "fun" no matter how much it "wins" -- the environment is too polluted, things are never equal enough, some group or another is "disadvantaged",  too much evil around -- corporations, the Koch brothers, Christians, white people, police, etc. Huge requirements for more government, more regulation, more laws, more taxes, more CONTROL! They may eventually FORCE us to have fun!



Maybe the "1%"?  ... they are busy at least, but as we see over and over in hollywood, sports, etc, that version of MORE, MORE, MORE! tends to be very self defeating. We are TOLD they have it "really good", but I'm not all that certain that many really believe it.



We do see that in the modern value free world, many still fervently hope for money to make them happy, thus the craze over the lottery that nobody seems to be able to win, now over $1 BILLION dollars!



I do think that we have more than ample examples that "building / doing stuff" has a lot more going for it than "taking / regulating stuff". My biggest opposition to us becoming a nation of takers vs makers outside of the fact that it doesn't work is that it is NO FUN to be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It is MUCH more fun to BUILD IT!!!!



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Crossing Einstein and Life

Einstein Cross - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Do I find these images to be "compelling evidence of God giving us a sign"?

No, I find them to be little hints that stir the soul -- like the little chrome or paint touch on a custom motorcycle, the "Easter Egg" in the game or other computer program or movie ... maybe. As always, God is a both a VERY showy God and a VERY subtle God. He BOTH lavishly stacks the deck to show he is there, yet he leaves enough room so that those who are determined to deny him are not absolutely forced (in this life) to admit the "obvious answer".  (Although, the more we learn, the harder atheism becomes ...)

But such visuals are fun ... and beautiful, and they give that little shiver of recognition of the work of the ultimate creative artist.

The top picture is the Einstein Cross and link takes you to more detail about it if you are interested. It is a visual of gravitational lensing predicted by the general theory of relativity.

The bottom is laminin protein molecule that literally "holds life together".

Both have been become somewhat popular in various Christian circles, but in general I find such things to be a danger if they are taken TOO seriously. The Bible is the Word of God -- it certainly tells us that God created us and holds us together physically, but much more importantly, spiritually and eternally. The creation will all pass away -- only the spirit is eternal.

But while we are here, God has blessed us with little "shivers of eternal awareness" to help light our way home to him.

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Understanding Islam, Rape as Reward

Cologne’s Rape Jihad: Muslim Migrants Crash Europe’s Fantasy Islam:

I've lost my ability to continue to try to understand how the leftist mind of "The Party" (TP-D) operates. On one hand, young women should be so protected that "ogling" is a crime no matter what they are wearing, "unwanted kissing" can be classified as "rape", and there is no such thing as "consensual sex" unless they sign the appropriate consent form -- all be it still difficult to discern if they have had anything to drink.

OTOH, when it comes to large groups of Islamic men forming circles and brutally raping women in the center as the police are blocked off -- well, then, women REALLY need to pay a LOT attention to what they wear (have they considered a hijab?),

Truth being the first casualty of war, it was left to Henriette Reker, the fantasy Islam–drenched mayor of Cologne, to blame the victims for their ordeal. Such assaults could be prevented, she declaimed, if German women adopted a “code of conduct” tailored to the Islamic culture, they could prevent future attacks. 

To even mention that such actions are occurring and rapidly expanding is suppressed by the western media.  We can't appear "unwelcoming" or be "profiling" after all ... but for those of you willing to risk your public standing by reading "subversive news":

The Muslim men used a tactic that has escaped the notice of fantasy Islam devotees but is well known to those of us who’ve followed the scant reports on the rape jihad as it has proceeded from Tahrir Square to Malmö to Rotherham: A group of men encircles the targeted woman or girl, trapping her while walling off police and other would-be rescuers. Knowing they are a protected class, the Muslim men have no fear of the cops — “You can’t do anything to me,” and “Mrs. Merkel invited me here,” are just some of the reported taunts. By the time “help” reaches one victim, the assailants have moved on to the next.

How DOES the mind of a person of the left operate? If they picture their own wife or daughter in the center of such a circle of taunting Muslim men, does it cause any protective emotion to rise, or are their brains so totally aligned with the "Word of TP" that such emotions are sublimated to "we feel only what we are told to feel"?  We live in a world where the "red and blue tribes" are so fully separated that the age old admonition to attempt to "see it from the other side" has become impossible for me.

There must be some place the mind goes where the baby in the womb, the thousands of young black men shooting each other each year, the lives of the police, and apparently now the young western woman being repeatedly raped by a circle of taunting entitled Muslim men, simply cease to matter. Once that happens, one can apparently feel morally superior and "good" as they look in the mirror in that they know they are aligned with TP and TP is always right!?  I assume they somehow see "the greater good of TP,  praise be to TP!!" but it is here that my ability to "put myself in their frame" is totally inadequate.

This is not isolated. No, it is completely KNOWN, written down, and STATED from many quarters that sexually taking women and children by force is a part of the Islamic plan of conquest:

As I’ve previously explained, when Muslims are seeking conquest, Islamic scripture endorses sexual assault as a weapon to establish their dominance. “O Prophet,” Allah is said to have announced (in the Koran’s sura 33:50), “We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou has paid their dowers, and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the captives of war whom Allah has assigned to thee.”

Once consistency is no longer an issue, it becomes a requirement that INconsistency be pushed to points previously unimaginable. In one context, "kissing is rape", in another, brutal multiple actual penetrative rapes are to be ignored and blamed on the victim.  To hold BOTH these views in the mind concurrently and claim that you are "in support" of both is what it now means to walk around as a supposedly sane supporter of TP!

Can anyone NOT now understand how Germans could gas Jews by day and go home to wife and family in the evening and feel like a "good man"? We now see that millions of people walking among us hold the opinion on rape outlined above at least implicitly. It is the official position of OUR government and that of the governments in Europe!

Without rational and CONSISTENT thought, there are NO LIMITS on what humans can do and believe they are "in the right"! What part of NO LIMITS is it that we fail to grasp?

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Worst Stock Market Opening Week EVER

Stocks close out week with worst start to year ever:

Hey, BO gets another "first" to add to his list!

He ought to be in big favor of this -- one of the best ways to decrease the scourge of "income inequality" is to take the Dow to zero! Ah, the utopian BO dream where the 99% are all fighting over rats to eat and he is golfing with Trump and Slick Willie laughing about the chumps that let him fix all that "inequality"!

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Promises, The Political Currency

A Republican Cure for Liberal Failures on Poverty - WSJ:

A good column by Speaker Ryan.

President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964. Since then politicians have won votes by creating new federal programs, without bothering to check whether they work—because in the political market the currency is promises, not results. The federal government now runs more than 80 different antipoverty programs at a cost of about $750 billion a year. Yet 46 million Americans are poor today, and the poverty rate has barely budged: from 19% in 1965 to 14.8% in 2014. If you were raised poor, you’re as likely to stay poor as you were 50 years ago.

It's worth the read ... not very long. How many times have we heard some inflated figure on how much the Iraq war cost us and how it "bankrupted the nation"? Try 50 years of poverty programs that managed to lock tens of millions into a cycle of poverty,  despair, and violence while wasting something like $40 TRILLION inflation adjusted dollars over that period.

Oh, I know, GREAT deal for Democrats! Second biggest vote buying program in history -- with FICA/Medicare taking the TOP spot!

We have reached the point where we deserve the government we have because the government bought all our votes!

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Warming? CA Methane Leak, 6 Million Coal Cars?

A natural gas leak with seemingly no end | Marketplace.org:

I'd barely heard about this, but low and behold, "Climate Cast" on NPR talked of it yesterday.

On the show, and in this quote from here, they discussed it as being like "six coal fired power plants" -- one wonders if that is LIFETIME or one year? Six power plants each burning over a million cars of a coal in a year sounds WAY off to me, so it almost has to be lifetime.

O'Connor, of the Environmental Defense Fund said the gas gushing from Aliso Canyon is roughly equal to that emitted by six coal-fired power plants or 7 million extra cars. "I think we have found a regulatory gap," he said.

So one would think that if you were a warmist, this would be right up there with Exxon Valdez or BP and Deepwater Horizon in the gulf. Lots of people are being evacuated, planes re-directed, the governor has declared a state of emergency, it is going to be going on for at least MONTHS more and the end is uncertain! How can this NOT be a top news story??!!  I mean, come on, "Climate Change" is the "Greatest Challenge Facing our Generation"!

So I checked just a bit of "follow the money" just cuz I figure there has to be SOME explanation,  and "amazingly", governor Browns sister is involved with the owning company, AND, they have been very generous in donations to Brown.

Kathleen Brown was paid $183,000 last year as the director of Sempra Energy, according to a Wednesday report in the Boston Environmental Policy Examiner. She also managed to score $400,000 in stock in the much-maligned energy company, according to financial statements. 

Worse still, critics say, is the fact Gov. Brown owes a debt of gratitude to Sempra, as the governor has received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from his sister’s company.

I'm guessing we could find even more connections ... BO maybe? Who knows.

The beauty of environmental law, IRS audits, "coordination" under Citizens United, hate speech, sexual harassment and a whole lot of the other current "left wing causes/laws" is that they invert the old "innocent until proven guilty" idea and rules of evidence at that same time. They are like weapons that ONLY KILL YOUR ENEMIES! They are the very best sort of "smart weapon" in that they are "ideologically based".

It is rather ingenious really. Harming the environment is a BIG DEAL when it is made to be a big deal because it fits the left narrative or the "cause" is someone that hasn't greased the proper palms to the proper amount. But it is selective -- if you are the "right folks", or "pay appropriately", you get to avoid the issue. Getting your mind right and being on the "right side" (meaning left) has it's perks!

When you live in a single political party controlled totalitarian state, it is ALL about politics. When something bad happens, the FIRST question that is asked is: Which Tribe? Red or Blue. If red, go for the jugular ... if blue, then no matter how HUGE it is, sweep it under the rug.

It makes the "rules" a lot easier to understand!

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