Tactical Setback Day

Summer 2015 Forecast: Much of U.S. Could See Below-Average Temperatures - weather.com:

Reading detailed history makes one aware that "the experts" are nearly always very wrong, and "the common wisdom" is only common.

Last week we were treated to ISIL taking over the Iraqi city of Ramadi, and a BO speech to the graduating Coast Guard class that featured "Climate Change" as our leading military challenge.

"You don’t sit back; you take steps to protect your ship," Obama said. "Anything less is a dereliction of duty. The same is true for climate change."

The linked article for this post points out that much of the US is expected to have a "much colder than normal" summer. The residents of Ramadi likely would have an even more disbelieving attitude to the pronouncements of a once very important, possibly even exceptional nation ... now similar in stature to "Greece" ... or possibly even "grease" ... for the treads of Russia, China, ISIL, or who knows what formerly lowly opponent.

On the world stage -- at least as reported through the lens of US media, we have one of the greatest events in world history happening -- ALL POSITIVE, on par with what, if anything that has happened or could possibly happen?  ... the end of WWII? the development of fusion power? the Emancipation Proclamation? The Moon Landing?

I speak of course of Ireland VOTING for gay "marriage". For a media normally enamoured with rule by fiat as to such "rights", it falls into that surreal realm. Does this mean that the rights of gays are greater or less than  those of women relative to the slaughter of generations in the womb? It is hard to even imagine something as horrible as the inviolate "right" of a woman to kill her child being put to something as fickle as "a vote" is it not? The SCOTUS has ruled against even the most minuscule attempts of any state to regulate such a cornerstone position of modern left wing thought.

I can only conclude that "consistency is not an issue" -- were "the vote" to go the other way, "democracy" should immediately be usurped by any means possible -- hopefully "the court". Thus in keeping with the only true morality of the left "we hold to what serves us".

On that front, the ecstasy of the left on the Josh Duggar news of sexual touching of minor girls (while a minor himself), reported to his parents, reported to the authorities, and dealt with while he was yet a minor is something to behold. Yes, I understand the emotional reaction of those who have no morals finding that one who attempts to have morals has failed. It is nearly as giddy as the joy when another one of their own gets away with being caught in a moral failing which they never claimed to even care to avoid -- Bill Clinton getting off is the great example, but there was another more in the news last week, David Letterman .

In contrast to say Bill Cosby, Letterman is another proof that if you have the right politics, even if you push the limits of using position for sexual favors, all will be forgiven. So go and sin ... quietly if possible, as long as your leftist political fealty is pure! If you are even CHILD of the wrong political thought, there is no such thing as a minimum age of accountability -- you must be held accountable. No forgiveness, no compassion, no veil of "being a minor"! Refusal to renounce God, family, morals and to bow to the supreme power of the state is the unforgivable sin of both Satan and the left!

Again, this is NOT new ... Roman Emperors had their boys, concubines, etc It took centuries there before the rot seeped to the masses and the empire fell. So too the British Empire -- many of the lavish weekend parties at the vast country estates during the supposedly repressed Victorian era were thinly veiled spouse swapping events mostly hidden from the lower classes (servants were considered to be furniture).

Like the flesh that serially forms the corporeal national body over time, civilizations are born, (sometimes) flourish, peak and then die. In the case of the Greek, Roman and English, sometimes pieces of what they were live on in their offspring, but of this there are no guarantees.

Will some future space exploring Chinese or Russian civilization even recall the old once great USA, or will  all be ground to powder as a nuclear, biologic or possibly drone war victorious Islamic Caliphate treats all the previous civilizations as they have treated ancient artifacts everywhere they have conquered?

To the victors go the spoils ... and the very writing of the memories of what has gone before. It is a huge and expensive responsibility -- in commitment to the values of a civilization, passing them on from generation to generation, the vast investment in blood and treasure that it takes to continue to grow and expand those values. Old things like Freedom, Justice, reverence for God, holding the traditions of your nation and civilization with awe and reverence. All those things we no longer care about as a nation. Welcome to "Grease" (as in spot).

Perhaps it is time to rename "Memorial Day" to "Tactical Setback Day"?


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Polar Ice, To Melt or Not to Melt

Updated NASA Data: Global Warming Not Causing Any Polar Ice Retreat - Forbes:



This is ONE data point from NASA. To summarize:

• All our DETAILED and GLOBAL temperature, Co2, etc measurements are VERY recent in terms of climate data. "1979" before we had significant sensors in space to start to gather true global data. 
• 1960-1980 were a relatively cool climate period -- thus the thoughts in the 1970s that we might be entering another ice age. 
• The Little Ice Age, roughly 1300-1870 added a lot to glaciers -- especially mountain glaciers. Nearly all of our even rough measurements from stations WIDELY scattered around the globe comes from post 1870 -- so that also tends to show "warming" ... from a very cold period. 
• The accuracy of our information, even the space based information is "within a degree or two" or "a percentage or two" on things like ice coverage. 

So, given all that, it appears that when one considers TOTAL POLAR ICE -- sea ice and glacial ice, at the poles, we are back to within 5% of 1979, and thus the headline "No Polar Ice Retreat". Our accuracy isn't that good, and 1979 as a "base year" for ice extent is questionable at best.



Forbes is conservative -- the mainline media is not likely to pick this up, because it doesn't fit with the "warming crisis" narrative that they and "The Party" (D) hold to. Just last week, BO was blaming ISIL on Global Warming, so don't expect the MSM to be casting any doubts on it's total truth anytime soon!



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Trigger Intellectualism

The History of PTSD and the Evolution of Trigger Warnings | The New Republic:



The linked somewhat pretentious article can be summarized as:

• "Trigger Warnings" -- for survivors of rape, domestic abuse, PTSD, etc are on the rise, especially in universities. 
• The root causes for sensitivity of the "PTSD sort" has been going down -- it used to be surviving things like genocide, famine, the plague, the holocaust, and is now being applied to things like "bullying", "sexual harassment". 
• We used to see human suffering as potentially spirit enhancing in a heroic, transcendent, religious way ... now it is purely "cause for therapy" ... and protectiveness "safe places". 

The article closes with: 

It’s easy to caricature the vanguard of the so-called politically correct: to paint them as fanatics who are trying to destroy well-established norms of free speech. But they are not caricatures; they are products of history. Most current college students grew up in the shadow of September 11, with the specter of large-scale terrorism always looming and with a steady stream of soldiers returning home to grapple with their demons. It is no wonder that they feel that they, too, deserve security, even in the precarious and flimsy form of trigger warnings and safe spaces.

It is always "easy to caricature". Some kids indeed had to grow up after 9-11, some had to grow up with the constant spectre of nuclear war "duck and cover" in the Cold War, some had to grow up after WWI and WWII with 10's of millions killed in Europe, some Jewish kids grew up after the holocaust killed 6 million of their families and friends -- some even wrote books like Victor Frankl "Man's Search for Meaning".



I'd argue that to claim that post-9-11 is somehow understandable as a "special product of history" **IS** very much a caricature that shows a complete lack of understanding for humanity and human history. The Plague killed around 50% of Europe's population in like 10 years around 1350. That we are here is strong evidence that "life went on".



Yes, 9-11 was a big event -- 3k dead out of over 300 million in the US, and the deaths of nearly 7k servicemen as of 2015. The Civil War on the other hand killed over 600,000, and total WWII deaths civilian and military were over 60 million.



The hallmark of the "intellectual" used to be perspective and intellectual distance -- a "bigger picture". Somehow, our supposed intellectuals have COMPLETELY lost that!





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The Gas Can Explains It All

Five Years of Gas Can Hell! - Beautiful Anarchy:

The linked article is worth reading, but if you don't have the time, just think and understand. It is all very clear.

Gas cans used to work -- they were metal, often with a flexible spout that could go in anywhere. They had vent hole so that when you poured, gas came out.

You can't buy a gas can that works anymore. They have strange push valves that have to be precisely braced against "something" ... which often doesn't exist, because the tip has to push open some other little door to prevent ??  fumes I guess, but that is what the cap is for.

And they have no vents ... so they slowly blurp, often spilling on each blurp.

Filling the mower with gas has become a guaranteed spill. A spill used to be rare, now it is standard.

Why? Because the government decided that the old cans were "too prone to spill" -- so they created all sorts of new cans that are GUARANTEED to spill!

The government wanted to "fix" something and they destroyed it. This is what happens. If there was competition, nobody would ever buy one of the current gas cans, they would buy one that worked.

But we can't, the government has outlawed gas cans that hardly ever spill in favor of ones that always spill.

That is exactly and precisely how government works. You may THINK that you have a counter example, but what you are seeing is "lag" -- FICA hasn't blown up YET, but YET is what to focus on.

The ONLY hope for mankind is LIMITED government -- keep it small, keep it controlled, force it to be in competition with private solutions. Let it become the monster that we have allowed and it destroys all!

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Wings, Bikers, Gangs, Waco

Waco coverage shows double standard on race - CNN.com:

As a member of a couple of Gold Wing forums on the net, I see all sorts of posts to the effect of "Harley riders give motorcycling a bad name", "No Gold Wings were involved in the making of this riot" etc.

It is human  nature to want to feel superior, and when given the chance, we all have a tendency to take it.

The operative term in Waco, as in a lot of black on black violence is GANG. Neither Harleys or guns are causes of violence. Defining groups with symbols, colors, turf, handshakes, etc and then having conflicts arise does tend to cause violence.

The linked article thinks that focusing on the "biker" aspect of the participants and not mentioning race is a "double standard". Maybe. I tend to think that if we have a non-racial grouping for a riot, as in  "student", "union", "xxx team fans", etc, we use that rather than race.

Otherwise, in this country with segregated areas of cities "black" or "hispanic" are used. When the pictures of the riots show 100% black people, it seems disingenuous to say "generic people rioted". Indeed, in Baltimore and Ferguson, the people rioting were saying they were rioting BECAUSE of "treatment of BLACK people" -- their self identified race was the purpose of the riot.

The writer of the linked article meets another stereotype -- the liberal writer so far from reality they would need a telescope just to see a tiny bit of it's light.

So why is it that in cases such as Michael Brown and Freddie Gray -- and so many others — race is made central to the story, even in instances where the black and brown people involved are victims of police violence?

Uh, because the entire discussion is about the race of the "victim"???

Waco has nothing to do with race, and it only has to do with "biker" because this particular set of Gangs are BIKER Gangs.

We all know what "Biker" means -- loud Harley, boots, dressed like a pirate, tats. It's a stereotype rigorous enough to be it's own parody. As the "1%ers" who are the kind of Biker Gang that are responsible for Waco are PROUD to say, they are the 1%! 99% of "bikers" are not bad ass gang members -- they may be tough, risk takers, etc, they are just not members of a violent biker gang.

The fact is that we LOVE stereotypes! Those Wing forums are also loaded with pictures of Wings "attacking a DQ", or overweight Wing riders at a big table "Wing riders KNOW what to do at a restaurant ... EAT!"

But then there is me -- middle of the bell shaped curve, no distinguishing features, rides both a Harley and a Wing, utterly devoid of distinguishing characteristics, doomed to comment from the ivory tower on the associations of others.

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Stephanopoulos Behind the Curtain

Clinton Foundation donors include dozens of media organizations, individuals - POLITICO.com:

I still run into the occasional really really pure lefty that seems to believe that the ONLY "biased media" is Fox news or talk radio -- everything else is "unbiased". But at least the less looney half of the left understands that basic bias exists. Most holdout "there is no left press bias other than Fox" people were pretty disappointed when the Berlin Wall fell, and are still pretty shell shocked as to why it would even happen, so I'm sure this data on the Clinton Foundation and Stephanopoulos won't affect them either.

This is just a tiny bit more documentation for what anyone reading this blog already knew decades ago. The Clinton's may be slightly more egregious than some, but really folks, this is NOT news. The numbers are very well known, over 90% of the press self identify as Democrats if asked in private, and that often includes campaign contributions, as well as direct advocacy and "gifts" in dollars and in kind.

We already knew that Stephanopoulos was a hired Clinton shill for a number of years before going to ABC -- the same thing happens on Fox for Republicans -- Gingrich, Huckabee, etc. The only difference is that Fox makes it clear that those people are "former whatever", but REALLY, do we need that? Have we become such idiots that we have to constantly see a label to know "there is bias here"?

"Meet the Press" Tim Russert was chief of staff for Daniel Patrick Moynihan and worked for Mario Cuomo up to '84. The current "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd, worked for Tom Harkin, far left IA Democrat Senator. Brian Williams (my helicopter was shot down) was an intern for Jimmy Carter. We could keep rolling a long time here, but for anyone with even a tiny reality base, this is old, old, news.

The reason that it gets covered though is that the pure Democrat - Media - Education - Wall Street - Elite axis is loathe to admit the obvious truth of media bias, so when there is an especially egregious "slip" as in the Stephanopoulos case, they like make it SEEM like this is really somehow "news". It is yet another proof of the very shabby game that has been afoot as we have slipped to one party rule.

It is much like the Wizard of OZ, exposed by Toto, still trying to work the big machine as if the fact that he is now just a normal VISIBLE little man working a great big scary machine had not been fully exposed.

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain"! The sad part is that the true ideologue Democrats are required to pretend that they DO NOT notice!!

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Republican Death By Train

Hours after tragic train derailment, MSNBC ghoulishly uses it to advance a political agenda; Update: Train was going twice the speed limit « Hot Air:



The same day as the Philly train crash, NPR was all over the "connection" with Republicans trying to control spending and the deaths on the curve in Philly.



Government currently spends about 35% of everything the US produces each year (GDP). That percentage has been growing forever -- but like all growing things, there is very likely a limit. What we see now is that GDP has started to grow very slowly, AND this is at a point where interest rates are historically low while government debt is historically high. A reasonable betting man would say it is unlikely that interest rates will hold at this level.



From a Democrat view, trying  to control government  spending on anything, save defense, is universally bad. Government workers (including AMTRAK workers) are Democrats, so having more of them and paying them more is GOOD! (as opposed to corporate and other profits, which are BAD!)



It appears that the train was running over 100 MPH into a curve rated for 50MPH. Thanks to government unions which had a "fireman" on diesel locomotives over a quarter century after the complete switch to diesel, our trains still don't have automatic speed control. One of the evil things Regan forced in the '80s was the dropping of the "fireman" position the rails -- but I believe some hung on until the '90s! The government - union connection is a very strong one.



Imagine the politics of replacing a (union democrat) engineer with a computer! Since our trains are all a federally operated system, one can't expect any efficiency or cost containment, but some of the numbers and complexity quoted in this linked article might even give a lefty pause! $3.5 BILLION for speed control!



Anybody have cruise control on your car? Anybody have GPS? I hate to point this out, but trains tend to really stick closely to their tracks -- I'd strongly suggest a MAX speed control system that linked the throttle / brakes with GPS could be produced VERY cheaply. We aren't talking aircraft flight control here ... and looking around a bit, even THAT is now only about $5K for a Cessna 172!



Even fully feather bedded government kickback laden idiots should have no trouble putting auto speed / brake control on train for 10-100X the cost of what FLIGHT control costs for a Cessna! A train really only operates in ONE dimension, the "track dimension" ! So if it was 100x the cost, it would be 500K a train, x 300 (AMTRAK currently operates 300 trains a day in the US), so a "mere" 150 MILLION! Again, that is at 100x the cost for an AIRCRAFT flight control system!



But don't hold your breath. Controlling government costs is WRONG ... no doubt it will take the ENTIRE $3.5 Billion with cost overruns, extra kickbacks, plus, plus plus -- part of the reason listed in one article for the slowdown was "towers on Indian lands", and EPA studies!



Damned bloodthirsty Republicans!









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MN Orchestra, Crying With Cuban Pride

Minnesota Orchestra, in Groundbreaking Cuba Tour, Sells Out House - NYTimes.com:

The Cuba tour generated a great deal of excitement in Minnesota: The orchestra hung a huge banner announcing the tour outside its concert hall, and the performances here are being broadcast in the United States on the radio and streamed live on the Internet — where some fans annotated it minute by minute on Twitter. “I’m crying with pride,” Emily E. Hogstad, a musician and blogger who follows the orchestra closely, posted on Twitter. “I didn’t know you could CRY WITH PRIDE.”

Well, huge excitement in leftist MN at least -- MPR has been all over this, other MN news outlets, not so much.

Isn't it all so wonderful ...

It was not your typical concert at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. Tickets here cost around 50 cents, with students paying only half that — part of an effort to make cultural events accessible in a country where salaries are low, said Rafael Vega, the director of the theater, which also presents ballet, concerts, plays and comedy. The concert sold out quickly.

After 50 years of glorious communist rule, salaries are very low, and (not mentioned here), over 50% of the residents live in conditions rivaling the areas of New Orleans post Katrina that were ABANDONED! Marx be praised!

Ah, the joys of communism, and how WONDERFUL that the US is cozying up to that kind of "successful government".

See, W Bush had the wrong ideology -- he was on the idea that HIGHER salaries and BETTER living conditions were good. So he was heartily castigated for over $114 BILLION in aid sent to New Orleans for Katrina aid ... but over half a population living in the conditions that W spent money to get people out of in NO is just fine in Cuba.

When one goes left, ideology is **ALL** that matters!

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Hopeful End of Jeb

In hindsight, Jeb Bush acknowledges he wouldn’t have invaded Iraq | Miami Herald Miami Herald:



There are few things more vacuous than the "If I knew now what I knew then" question. It is completely absurd on the face of it -- one need only look at Wall Street investing, sports betting, careers, etc, etc to realize that it gives any makes mockery of both intellect and an even grade school understanding of history.



Hindsight may appear at first glance to be 20/20 in things as simple as picking a stock or a sports game, in the real world, it just blindness.



Bashar Al-Assad in Syria is much the same sort of strongman ruler that Saddam was in Iraq. Syria has certainly gone swimmingly well. "More focus" was all that Afghanistan needed, both Kerry and BO chortled. 75% of the deaths in Afghanistan have now occurred under BO although given the paucity of media reporting on such matters at this point, the average sheeple could be forgiven for having no idea.



To ask the "hypothetical" is to be expected of the lowbrow sensibilities of the entertainers we call "media people" in these sad times is inexcusable. To answer one, especially one as fraught with "damned if you do, damned if you don't" as the Iraq one is just beyond the pale for a supposedly seasoned politician.



Conservatives have to be pragmatic. Pragmatism is both the reason to consider Jeb, and the reason to reject him. He must be considered because he was elected Governor of Florida twice, and given the Democrat lock on over 200 electoral college votes, all it takes are "the givens" + FL to put Hillary in the WH.

He must also be considered because he was a successful Governor of a large state. That is executive experience. BO had no meaningful experience to be president and neither does Hillary, Democrats could care less -- they aren't about the US being successfully run, they are about buying more votes and allowing more undocumented Democrats across the boarder so they get a complete lock on the WH rather than just 90% of one.



Power for power's sake.



Jeb must be rejected because he is "Democrat lite". He too would keep the hispanic floodgates open to convert the US to another hispanic state -- his wife is hispanic, he knows Spanish, and "mistakenly" listed himself as hispanic on some recent document (a rather bizarre "error"). He must also be rejected because when you have an R next to your name, you don't get away with being an idiot. "Being for the Iraq war before you were against it" doesn't work well for a D, it doesn't work AT ALL for an R.



The quicker Jeb is gone, the better.



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Casey At The Bat, US vs China

U.S. Gambit Risks Conflict With China - WSJ:



On the world stage for the century or better prior to WWI, Great Britain was the sole world superpower and sea power combined with it's vast empire and huge trade advantages kept the world in a long peace.



The US was gaining in power, but felt that given geography, it could be isolationist. The Lusitania broke that reverie in WWI, and Pearl Harbor broke in in WWII. By the end of WWII, air power, missiles and nuclear weapons made it clear that isolation was not an option. While regional powers existed, the military stakes were global.



The Cold War based a bi-polar power structure on strategic nuclear superiority, but even with physical walls and massive censorship, the USSR could not hide the fact that it was losing the war of production and technology to the west from it's own population. Reagan finally called their bluff and the wall and everything else of the old Soviet Union came tumbling down.



But the US, in much the same mode as at the end of WWII immediately retreated from the world stage, assuming things would "sort themselves out" without an dominant power. They did, in the form of a rapid rise of Islamic terrorism and 9-11. They also sorted themselves out in the rapid rise of China, the return of the Russian Bear under strong man Putin and a host of smaller rising powers around the globe -- India, Brazil, Indonesia, etc. Power is part of the natural order, and nature abhors a vacuum.



While the US responded strongly to Islamic terrorism for a period, the post 1990 US as largely been focused on broader and more equitable consumption, more leisure, higher wages, better retirement, more equitable medical care, housing -- essentially a rush to what is hoped to be a very comfortable lowest common denominator. After a reluctant half-century as one of the poles in a bi-polar world, the US has decided it is no longer exceptional -- or as Obama said, "exceptional like Britain or Greece". I always found this comment interesting, as in both WERE once exceptional -- he may be giving the US the same nod. It WAS exceptional until it made the mistake of electing him.



So China is rising, and flexing it's muscles in SE Asia -- and dangerously, our feckless leadership might be going to challenge them as the linked article discusses. This too is a classic example of how the "once great" hastens their decline by first allowing their military, economic and most importantly, home tradition of resolve and willingness to sacrifice for greatness to decline and then get themselves into a confrontation with a rising power that has been gaining power the old fashioned way:

Indeed, China’s military strategy in the region has been built around developing the means—missiles, ships, warplanes, antisatellite weapons and cybercapabilities—to deter America from intervening in any crisis by dramatically raising the potential costs.

The aging hero, sports star, gunfighter, etc takes "one more shot". Sometimes in fiction, it works out, in reality, not so much.



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The 50 Year $22Trillion War

War on Poverty After 50 Years: Conditions of the Poor in America:

Go off and read the report. It isn't that long and the graphs are stunning.

Poverty was in rapid decline in America when we declared war on it -- then it flattened out. (if you want more of something, subsidize it!)

Now it is lodged at about 15% of the population over a long term, BUT, we have spent more than 3x the cost of ALL OUR WARS since the revolutionary in this stalemate battle.

The basic reason is very simple ... single parent families. We have spent more than all the wars combined and achieved a funding of single parent families doomed to live in poverty. Big government in action!

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Let's Agree With BO on Wealth

Obama Dismisses The Wealthy As 'Society's Lottery Winners' | The Daily Caller:

OK, it is all a lottery -- chance. You are born with whatever you are born with, you have whatever parents you have, life is a bunch of random circumstances.  You are rich, you are poor, you are an athlete, a criminal, a saint. It just randomly happens. It's a lottery!

There are no predictable effects of human agency. What happens, happens. "It is what it is".

BO, Aaron Rodgers, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill. All random -- just the odds, the breaks, the roll of the dice. What you do makes no difference, and there is no reason to kid anyone that it does.

Why bother with early childhood education? Some will win, some will lose -- it is a LOTTERY! Why do you expect different results from educational investment? Early, late, never ... whatever. ANY investment? Any action at all? Why?

Why make it a "little tax"? Why not just give everyone a guaranteed income? Hell, make it a million dollars a year for every man, woman and child. Print it. It's a freaking LOTTERY -- human actions are meaningless! Character, hard work, thrift, education, etc -- ALL BUNK. It is just a complicated set of dice. It's the breaks ... the stars, the random things that happen. Nobody has any control, nor ought anyone kid themselves that they do.

After all, BO is president!!! Doesn't that PROVE that there is no such thing as merit??

If anything could prove that merit, intelligence, character, competence, decency, rationality, hard work, honesty, or anything else of a positive nature is COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS, does not BO sitting in the Whitehouse at least cast strong doubt on what we formerly thought counted?? He is there -- if it was based on any form of merit at all, he would not be there, so he must be right!

He is right, it is all random. So why bother to do ANYTHING! The results of any suggested policy are also completely random in the BO universe, so why bother? Any action you take is just as likely to turn out negatively as positively after all.

The (random) emanations of BO are indeed the essence of modern "wisdom"!

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.380 America

Saudi King blows off Obama | Power Line:

The .380 is a 9mm "Kurz", German for "short". "Short" is what our current odiferous leader and increasingly America is relative to respect on the world stage.

The last two years of the Bush administration the media spent nearly 100% of it's time abusing W, and one of things they LOVED to focus on was any sort of comment, snub, allusion by some other power in the world to how bad W was.

BO was to fix all that -- he got a Nobel Prize just for being elected after all.

Actual results? Oh, Iran gave our merchant ship back last week, damned nice of them considering what doormats we are now!

In early April, the Russians intercepted a US plane in a manner that we said was "unsafe" -- we have "protested". I can almost hear Vlad saying "How is that reset goin for ya Barry?". Kerry is over there licking some boots this week apparently.

Mr. Kerry’s visit is likely to be seen in Moscow as evidence of the U.S.’s inability to deal with problems in Iran, Syria and Ukraine without Russian cooperation

This is really old news ... here is a WaPo from last fall .. but it is WAY older and more common than that. The fact of dominance hierarchy is wired into nearly all species on the planet -- humans didn't miss those genes, and when we band together to form nations, the stakes go up. In old business meetings it was sometimes called "butt sniffing" in honor of dogs working out the hierarchy, and while our consciousness brains may like to lie to us about it, our snake brains know who the likely alpha male / females are in every room we are in. Your ancestors lives depended on it every moment of every day in the tribe -- it's a base feature of the homosapiens model.

So like in the alternate universe old Star Trek, when the alpha takes a powder, everyone moves up one! Oh happy day! ... at least unless you are not some old dog " stuck in the "US is exceptional" past ?

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Depression '16, Seven States Decide

Depressing reminder: The 2016 election will be decided by seven states — and Florida is an absolute must-win « Hot Air:

We can talk about how much we don't believe that Jeb Bush is the answer (and I don't), but unless either he or Rubio are on the ticket, Republicans really aren't taking a "conservative" approach to 2106. It is quite easy to see why political realists give Jeb a strong look.

"The Party" (D) has firmly locked up the blue states listed on the linked map since '92 (with a little caveat for NM that doesn't really matter). That means 247 electoral votes bought and paid for by unions, public employees, welfare minorities, and the "elite" ... that need to lock down just one more state and the US Presidential branch will be theirs for the foreseeable future.

The red states are less certain ... in '92 and '96 having Billy Clinton on the ticket put states like MO and TN in the D column ... as well as of course AK ... but let's go with the map, 206 likely R, with a lot less paths to 270 for the R, none of which include losing FL.

Walker - Rubio or Walker - Martinez look like good potential tickets to me. Shake WI out of the blue camp, do all you can to swing FL, and hopefully that will be enough. I don't want a Senator with no executive experience at the top of the ticket -- I don't like Jeb much at all, but I like him FAR better than Hillary. If it MUST be a choice between Rubio at the top or Jeb, I hold my nose and pick Jeb. President is NOT a job for someone with no executive experience -- if BO hasn't proved that sufficiently then there was nothing AT ALL good about his disastrous presidency!

It is a LONG way until November of 2016, but as this chart shows, and I have pointed out in this Blog a lot of times, TP is very close to getting a lock on one branch of Government -- the WH, which means they will shortly lock the 2nd -- the SCOTUS,

"Pragmatics must take precedence over elegance (and lots of other stuff), for nature can not be fooled".

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Free Speech For Me, Hate Speech For Thee

Free Speech vs. Hate Speech - NYTimes.com:



Over years of thinking and experience, I've come down to "Consistency is not an issue" as being the core of "liberal" thought. We could go on a VERY long and boring list of cases of this --

• "How important are budget deficits"? Compare media and liberal attitudes on deficits from W to BO. 
• How serious are US attacks on various foreign groups and US military casualties? Over twice as many US troops for example have died in Afghanistan under BO than under W -- you are forgiven for not knowing, it simply is no issue at all!  
• The US economy at best grew .2 in the 1Q of 2015, and may well have contracted when all the figures get adjusted. If you want to use the MooseTracks way-back machine, you can see how much better the economy was in '05 with the media not paying notice. 

We will only do a "boring 3". Back to the topic of "what does no consistency mean"?



For one big thing, it means UNequal treatment under the law. The "progressive" income tax tells you that --  different rates to different people based on level of income. We see it in the IRS -- let's allow groups that agree with our political viewpoint to be tax exempt, and not allow those that have differing views to have the same status. Oh, while we are at it, maybe we ought to audit a few of the people on the donor lists of those "wrong thinking groups"!



In the linked article we see it with "free speech". Want to have a tax supported art exhibit with a crucifix in urine? or possibly the Virgin Mary with elephant dung? Not a problem ... and CERTAINLY not "hate speech"!



A picture of Mohammad? The NYTs labels this "hate speech" ... and THAT is not allowed!!



Which brings us to that not so subtle core of "liberalism" -- Consistency is NOT an issue! Since it is not an issue, it is perfectly reasonable -- and even prudent, to have one set of laws, rules, freedoms, etc for those that follow "liberal" orthodoxy, and a different set of rules for those that do not!



The current "Progressive States of America" has a state religion called "progressivism", and those that are not members of this religion are subject to the usual treatment of "heretics" down through history.



There is nothing new under the sun.



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