A little stale BO from 2012 ... he was of course "deriding Republicans", he does at least do that well :
At the Republican debate in Arizona on Wednesday night, Gingrich introduced himself by saying he had "developed a program for American energy so no future president will ever bow to a Saudi king again and so every American can look forward to $2.50 a gallon gasoline."
Without naming Gingrich, Obama appeared to target that remark Thursday, saying to cheers that "anyone who tells you we can drill our way out of this problem doesn't know what they're talking about -- or just isn't telling you the truth."
"It's the easiest thing in the world to make phony election-year promises about lower gas prices," Obama said. "What's harder is to make a serious, sustained commitment to tackle a problem. And it won't be solved in one year, it won't be solved in one term, it may not be solved in one decade. But that's the kind of commitment we need right now."
The truth is never likely to get close enough to BO to bite him in the ass, but if it did, he sure wouldn't recognize it! BO is the master at BOTH lying and "not knowing what he is talking about"!
But being loudly and arrogantly WRONG isn't enough for BO. No, he can BOTH call the other side names and then take CREDIT when what he called "not telling the truth" comes to pass!! Naturally the MSM is going to let him get away with it, and apparently the American electorate has a memory shorter than a late stage Alzheimer's patient! (from this link):
But virtually all of the increased oil and natural gas production has come from private and state lands, where Obama has no jurisdiction over approving drilling permits. Meanwhile, oil production on federal lands has floundered under Obama. From 2009 to 2013 oil production on federal lands fell by 11 percent and natural gas production fell by 28 percent.
He proudly held off the Keystone Pipeline and then cancelled it as well. BO has done all he could do to stop US and Canadian delivery of cheaper energy to Americans, but he shamelessly takes credit for it at the same time!
Our founders were right, we REALLY DO need an ADVERSARIAL MEDIA ... it is just too damned bad we don't have one when a D is in office! Just wait and see a completely insanely obnoxious completely adversarial media return if an R is ever elected president in BOistan!
One can't expect a lefty leaning person to really learn from experience, but if a corporation provided service this bad the Star Trib would almost certainly be demanding lawsuits, government action, etc.
Of course MinnesoataCare **IS** the government, and "they are here to help" ... but you would never know it from the phone exchange below (there is more in the top linked article):
I called often but the result was always the same: “We’re experiencing a high rate of calls. Please call again later.” **Click**.
I was foiled online as well, my MNsure account disabled by the usual cyberscape bouncer, System Administrator. On rare occasions I pierced the cones of silence that hung over their help desks. “Wait! I’m here!” I croaked. My throat dusty, forming words like a Bedouin straggling in from the Sahara. “I have copies of checks … Tax info …“They don’t match our records,” said the voice.
“How can you have records if you don’t send us invoices?”
“Mail in your payments anyway, without the invoice,” said the voice.
“I tried that, you guys applied them to the wrong account.”
“Mail them anyway.”
“You want me to mail money blindly, with no paperwork, to an agency I can’t call or contact?”
“Just put your ID number on the check,” said the voice.
“You mean this one?” I read the number.
“That’s not your number.”
“That’s my ID number from the last invoice you sent me. It says right here: ID number.”
I've heard a full crowd of lefties on MPR try to sort out why we have MinnesotaCare + MNsure, and how that all relates to BOcare, and it was obvious they were very confused, some of THEM even wanted to get rid of MNsure ... but naturally, since they were all lefties, there were a couple that were CERTAIN that MinnesotaCare's many problems (that they all agreed it had) would be worked out "soon". I believe I heard that last spring.
But who really cares? It is ONLY $44 Million, I mean it isn't like some CEO got that for a salary or the Koch brothers gave it to some campaign or something!
"As a result of the weak data, JP Morgan slashed its fourth-quarter GDP growth estimates from a 1.0 percent annual rate to only a 0.1 percent pace. Goldman Sachs cut its forecast by three-tenths of a percentage point to a 1.1 percent rate. The economy grew at a 2 percent pace in the third quarter."
I know that in the age of BO, we are all supposed to listen in rapture while he pisses down our backs and tells us he made it rain, but I guess I just don't enjoy it that much!
DOES ANYONE IN THE US CARE ABOUT THE ECONOMY ANYMORE!!!!
So if the economy "grew" at 2% in 3Q, that may actually be a 1% DECLINE under the old measure.
Now 4Q is estimated to be a 2-3% DECLINE under the old measure.
I reported on the first two quarters here -- they originally reported 1Q as -.2 and then bumped it up when they reported 2Q with 2.3% "growth" with the new measure. So, if we take THEIR "adjusted measures" and apply the "new GDP math", we get +.6, -.7, -1, to a -1-2% 4Q! That
That folks is supposed to be a "good economy" in the age of BO!
Does ANYONE believe the inflation figures from the government anymore? Sure, gas is down, but food? medical? internet? TV? property taxes? any sort of "service" like car repair, tires, etc? anyone look at the price of a car lately???
I realize what a complete dupe I am holding some money in "inflation protected US Bonds" -- and WHO is it that I thought was going to calculate the inflation number? Talk about the Fox guarding the hen house!
The linked article makes a case that Mike McCarthy cost Aaron Rodgers yet another Lombardi last night. (I know, we only would have had to get by Carolina and then win the big one! Would have been NO PROBLEM! ) I especially liked this part of the argument ...
It's almost always better for the underdog to try to turn the game into a shorter contest. Taken to an extreme, if you're playing Steph Curry one-on-one and you start with the ball, it's better to play to one than 11, because you might fire off a jumper and get lucky, but you're not going to hit 11 shots over Steph without giving him the ball.
It's a good article on aggressive vs conservative coaching. McCarthy is pretty conservative coach at heart, and like everything, that has it's plusses and minuses. Oh yes, and "Monday morning QB" is ALWAYS a great place to be smug! Football is however a GAME, so if there is enjoyment in 2nd guessing, why not? Besides, there IS some worth worth to a post-mortem, and given my head, I'll be thinking SOMETHING about the Pack headed to next season.
I was surprised they didn't roll the dice on going for two after the big Hail Mary. We had the momentum, the birds were stunned, I think it was our best shot and a good one ... I think even a better one than what the article leans toward.
The best news of last night was Jeff Janis and Jared Abbrederis ... we have been waiting to see more of both of them since the O went south even before the break, and last night they both looked good. I'm certainly hoping we return to being loaded with good receivers next year!
I found this one to be WAY easier to take than the over conservative 2nd half with the surrealistic final minutes at Seattle last year. I was thinking of that kick today as Carolina did successfully field the onside!
I'm the kind of guy that likes to watch my team methodically run up 3+ touchdown leads and then do long grinding drives to leave the margin at that level! Last years mid-season Pack was PERFECT! Note, I don't like that in general -- I like to see everyone else play CLOSE! I almost turned off the Carolina - Seattle game in the fist quarter.
We're WAYYYYY DUE! Our season had huge issues, but we came back to life last week and ended up on the wrong side of one of the better playoff games one is likely to ever see.
This year has taught me to throw expectations completely out the window when it comes to football. I ALWAYS firmly held that relative to injuries, but this year I learned that at least the O can just suddenly "go to pot" and nobody can put their finger solidly on why?
Naturally, come September my hopes will be sky high again. I'm thinking Carolina beats the birds and goes to the big dance.
"Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore"! As I've noted before, we also certainly aren't in anything that would have been called "America" or USA prior to 2008 anymore. WTFistan? It was "Changed", and it seems Hopeless ... but I think I could even take THAT a little better if I could even begin to understand how I might even imagine walking a few miles in the ruling elite's moccasins -- or perhaps wearing their tinfoil hats? What is going on????
In the linked article we find that a lot of strange people are running in and out of the remote wildlife refuge that has been "occupied", including somebody dressed like a Declaration of Independence Signer, some kids, reporters and ladies baking brownies. and a horse named "Hellboy".
Deeper inside, down an icy, tree-lined road, the group has seized about a dozen buildings, and the Bundy brothers have commandeered the cluttered office of Linda Sue Beck, a government biologist who had been leading a war on invasive carp before the occupiers took over.
The heart of the protest, however, is a quarter-mile from the biologist’s office, at a bunkhouse with bedrooms and a large kitchen where women marinate chicken, grill salmon, bake brownies and organize a stockroom that swelling with donations from around the nation. To slip in, a reporter just has to ask.
I know I'm pretty concerned that the LEADER of the "war on invasive carp" has been sidetracked! Thank God we are still able to combat "Global Warming", the "challenge of our generation", as well as the other biggie "Income Inequality" ... I wasn't even aware we had declared war on carp.
So WTF? The NY Times clearly cares about this "occupation", although the federal government either completely doesn't care, is totally incompetent, or ??? I mean, 3rd grade snow fort occupation management 101 would be to RESTRICT ACCESS! In the event they have ANY future plans to take the government property back ... perhaps in a hurry because the carp have maybe captured a couple of our navy craft and we want our sailors back!
Or perhaps our leadership is looking to get a bunch of people in there so they can burn it up like Waco and make a bigger "statement"? Isn't there SOME limit on how much incompetence a sane person can buy into? I know that is "black helicopter stuff", but I simply can't figure out what the Feds are up to here at ALL, and I don't think the NY Times can either.
I WILL say however that watching Facebook, one sees how quickly the left goes to VIOLENT HATRED! There can be all manner of black riots, police killings, blacks blocking freeways, Islamic beheading, rapes, planes bombed, etc, and your average lefty is "keep calm, don't stereotype, be "proportional" etc.
Let a few cranks take over a remote wayside rest and the lefties want BLOOD and they want it NOW!!! TERRORIST is a word they are no shy about using at all in THIS case!
So on to the Iranians and the boats. We are expected to buy that our navy is SO incompetent that they "drifted into Iranian waters". This makes no sense. The boats were stopped on the high seas for a great show of force over the US, especially the obviously false cover story plus BO and Kerry bowing and scraping.
I understand why Iran would like the show of force and slap in the face on the day of the SOTU and a couple days before sanctions are lifted, but why would BO and company play along? Even MORE surprising is that it seems that NOBODY is concerned at all about how completely off the wall this incident is. There are at least 10 sailors that know at least a lot of the story, and nearly certainly double, triple that or more on this side and who knows how many on the Iranian side. It would seem like the truth eventually will come out, but OTOH, the gigantic lack of curiosity is AMAZING!
Was the propaganda photo op something that Iran demanded to release the three hostages they have been holding forever? I could see BO going for something like that for sure. Oddly, although the linked WaPo headline is ; "Plane with freed Americans leaves Iran; U.S. imposes new sanctions", the sanctions are not on Iran, but on the companies that helped them prepare their ballistic missiles that they have tested in violation of the agreement that the sanctions have been lifted as a result of them agreeing to ... and violating!
Again, What???? I have no idea what is going on -- the "ship of state" seems to just be completely drifting domestically and abroad, and it seems everyone is just watching the playoffs, TV and movies and surfing the net like cud chewing cattle.
You can go off and read the reasons if you like ... I have a few in the same vein that if I cease to be reality based, I could proffer as my platform ...
1) I believe that white teens should be able to walk through black neighborhoods late at night, drunk, carrying large amounts of cash in complete safety.
2). I have the death sentence on 12 systems
3). I've shook NRA members hands.
4). I believe police forces should be disarmed, carry rainbow flags and dispense GMO free granola.
5). I believe that everyone should vote early and often with no identification required.
6). I think we should pay students to attend free universities for as long as they like with no grades and pay for it with money -- prettier money, printed on colorful paper with a lot of unicorns on it!
7), I support mandatory voting for EVERYONE! If you don't vote, you go to a special camp where they convince you to vote! Coupled with #5, we should have turnouts in the 300-700% range!
8). I think everything should be free. Healthcare, nursing home care, housecleaning, lawn mowing, booze, drugs, Internet, Cable TV, movies, sports, masonry ... It should ALL be FREE!
9). I'd filibuster FOREVER for having no taxes paid by anyone in the 99% ... have the 1% pay it ALL and just print the rest! Now that I think of it, this seems like a BASIC RIGHT! Oh, and make the money more colorful and prettier -- with unicorns.
10). Why are we talking chump change like $15 hr? Anyone that wants to work deserves at least $100 bucks an hour -- heck, why not $1,000? This also seems like a BASIC RIGHT!
11). A Trillion? Why so little? I raise him double and add $30 Trillion! oh, and I would demand that we get most of the work done by disabled ex-con MINORITY veterans that are addicted to at least alcohol and one other substance and are unsure of their gender! Take THAT BS!
12). Everyone is entitled to EVERYTHING! If they want to work -- ENTITLED! If they don't want to work ENTITLED! If they want to be CEO? ENTITLED! Everyone is entitled to everything. It's ... you guessed it, A BASIC RIGHT!
13). EVERYONE should be paid equally! Men, women, children, pets, undocumented Democrats ... EVERYONE IS EQUAL! ... It's a BASIC RIGHT!
14). Why limit funding for any great idea? Planned Parenthood? UNLIMITED FUNDING! When people have ideas of things that they want, those are the things they want!
15). Why would anyone limit family leave, vacation days, sick leave, etc? Everyone gets UNLIMITED PAID LEAVE! ... for whatever they want! Can't Bill Gates or Warren Buffet take time off whenever they want for whatever reason they want? Why the hell should they have an advantage over anyone else? See 13 ... being off work tends to cost more. Everyone gets unlimited leave AND double salary while on leave!
16). Why have any campaign grovel for donations? All campaigns are FULLY FUNDED! No more grubby "donations"!
17). Coach? Why should ANYONE fly coach? Anyone that wants to fly anywhere flies on the best private jets! Why limit ourselves? See 13.
18). Banks? Why bother with banks? In my administration everything is free and everyone makes gigantic salaries. Sure, we can have a lot of "regulators" as an excuse for paying more gigantic salaries, but you don't really expect them to waste time looking at boring records full of columns of figures in a nation where everything is free and everyone is RICH do you? I didn't think so.
19). Gay rights? Hey, there are over 50 genders on Facebook and incalculable sexual preferences -- every one of them is to be "special, protected, subsidized, celebrated, honored, etc" in my administration. We will have special days for all of them with big parades pretty much every day of the year! Imagine the joy of "National uncertain genders attracted to imaginary species day"! A great excuse to produce a bunch of free T-shirts and party favors!
20). I got into politics because I was sick of everything not being PERFECT!
21). There was an invasion in 2003? Bummer! I oppose all war back to Sumer vs Elam in 2700 BC (first documented war)! My first act as President would be to outlaw War for all of time ... retroactively!
22). While I oppose war, I love veterans. In my administration anything to do with Veterans will have UNLIMITED FUNDING!
23). Oh, I love the Iran deal. I propose we "DECLARE PEACE"! ... with everyone! On second thought, this is redundant since I have already declared war illegal -- SO, I "DECLARE LOVE!" ... all people everywhere will LOVE EVERYONE! Why didn't we do this before?
24). Here today I declare that the CLIMATE WILL NOT CHANGE if I am elected! Not now, not EVER! This is it! ... unless you want it turned down a few tenths or something. I declare that all energy will henceforth be free, completely non-polluting and like my budgets, UNLIMITED! I'm forming a task force so that everyone can have the weather they want every day!
25). "Immigrants"? Isn't that kind of exclusive? Executive orders? I'm sick of all this -- on my first day in office I will send Congress home! It will be dissolved! Our borders will be COMPLETELY OPEN ! No more politics! What we will have is PERFECTION -- I came to abolish politics.
I guess I really like politics after all. In a world free of want and war where everyone not only has everything, but loves everyone, we will all live happily ever after. For CERTAIN!
It is always a mystery to me why intelligent guys like BS with obviously intelligent supporters stop so far short of getting to what they and we all REALLY WANT!
Longish but worth the read if you have any theological bent -- what could be better than a discourse on Hell before a weekend which promises that there is a hope to see zero tomorrow, but the near certainty of a sub-zero high on Sunday! In the north, it is hard not to feel that God proved his mercy when he made Hell hot rather than cold!
It is a serious topic -- and a serious article. Considering that these doctrines are thousands of years old, and the idea of a "place of suffering" for the damned, crosses multiple religions and even non-religions, it is worthy of being aware of what such doctrines are, even (or maybe especially) for those who reject them. If you assume "it's all made up" ... as it MUST be if you are atheist -- somebody has been thinking these thoughts as "right" for a lot longer than whatever the latest thoughts are.
Consider Emerson on this topic ...
"All writers must submit their performance to the wise ear of Time, who sits and weighs, and ten years hence out of a million pages prints one. Again, it is judged, it is winnowed by all the winds of opinion, and what terrific selection has not past on it before it can be reprinted after 20 years, and reprinted after a century!"
The "progressive mind" tells you that old is bad, new is good. Is Eternity old or new?
Is clearly understanding "the worst that can happen" if you go without insurance of most import to those that are insured, or those that are uninsured? That is not a bad joke about "fire insurance", it is a serious question.
Having been raised a Baptist, I was especially struck by this:
There has also been a healthy reaction against the type of preaching that revels in depicting the sufferings of the damned in the most lurid possible light. An example would be the fictional sermon on hell that James Joyce recounts in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This kind of preaching fosters an image of God as an unloving and cruel tyrant, and in some cases leads to a complete denial of hell or even to atheism.
It is absolutely certain that each of us will die -- the specifics of "how" can vary a lot. Each of us has likely been exposed to, conjured ourselves, or otherwise arrived at "the worst that could happen" -- usually a LONG, PAINFUL, and LONELY exit. For some reason on my long motorcycle trip I imagined running off a curve in the middle of nowhere, falling next to a stream with massively painful and immobilizing wounds, yet being able to get water so thus survive in great pain until infection from my wounds or starvation finally took me. Naturally, as a very svelte Moose, I would probably starve in less than a couple days, so I'm not sure why the water was even a consideration.
In any case, that might have slowed me down on some of the curves a bit, so maybe that WAS warranted ... if it had made me pull off the road and call for the psych medics, it would have to be judged too graphic.
The point (such as it is) is that a firm idea of "the bad" has an obvious place in molding human behavior, as well as the idea that no matter how bad somebody else has been, the thought of "ultimate justice" of a nasty sort can help us decide that we don't need to exact immediate punishment on them. Hell has it's purpose -- like death and all else in creation. Don't focus on Hell, but don't forget it is there.
I had never been exposed to the argument put forward by Hans Balthasar ... although I'm pretty darned certain the name has showed up in fiction ... "Balthazar" ?
The most sophisticated theological argument against the conviction that some human beings in fact go to hell has been proposed by Hans Urs von Balthasar in his book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” He rejects the ideas that hell will be emptied at the end of time and that the damned souls and demons will be reconciled with God. He also avoids asserting as a fact that everyone will be saved. But he does say that we have a right and even a duty to hope for the salvation of all, because it is not impossible that even the worst sinners may be moved by God’s grace to repent before they die. He concedes, however, that the opposite is also possible. Since we are able to resist the grace of God, none of us is safe. We must therefore leave the question speculatively open, thinking primarily of the danger in which we ourselves stand.
"Dare We Hope" sounds interesting -- my reading list is a little long right now.
A summary -- if you are Christian, then Hell is real. God fervently desires that all be saved to the extent that he allowed himself in the form of Christ Jesus to be crucified, die, and descend to Hell to pay for our sins. He is a God of Love that allows or acceptance or rejection of this divine sacrifice.
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!
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"?
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.”
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.”
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!
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!
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!
