Saturday, December 29, 2012

Underway On Raspberry Pi

http://www.raspberrypi.org/ Welcome to the world of a $35 computer!! This post is being done on the Midori browser on the machine seen here. Not blazing speed, but for those of us that lived with machine with K of memory and speeds in K instructions per second, it is pretty amazing!!

My Raspberry Pi

Tax Fairness

Soak the Rich? | Power Line

The chart shows it well. We have no fairness when the top 1% of the people pay in much in taxes as "the bottom" 95%!!!

There needs to be SOME more connection between voting and amount of taxes paid!

Sunday, December 23, 2012

The World Is A Beautiful Place

The great divide: Little common ground with pro- and anti-gun forces - CNN.com

This article in CNN was less biased than some, but I was struck when I hit this paragraph:
"I think that people are hard wired differently. If you look at the world as a beautiful place and I'm in the arts, I'm a composer, I write music, I write poetry, if you believe the world's a beautiful place, your viewpoint is different than if you feel 'I have to have my guns to protect myself,' " said Hollis Thoms, 64, from Annapolis, Maryland, as he protested outside of the Willard InterContinental Hotel just after the NRA's press conference.
Huh? Don't ALL sane people agree the world is BOTH beautiful and ugly? I love music, poetry, natural beauty, etc as much as the next guy, but doesn't this guy shit? Was he on another planet for 9-11? Hasn't he ever seen Michael Moore? 

So unlike the supposed "divide" in this article created by the "progressive mindset" that believes that all need, want, violence, waste, ugliness, sweat and fallen arches can be removed from the world with just a little more regulation, taxing the wealthy, borrowed money, or some other elixer, there are people that believe that the world has a bit of "Ying and Yang". Evil exists and has to be controlled by force, life ends in death, party nights lead to hangovers, producing things requires that SOMEONE works ... sometimes at something that isn't even "pristine". That IS life for some folks -- I guess the Troglodytes in this guys universe, but Earthlings in mine!!

BUT, we DO have a HUGE divide in this country because CNN and the vast bulk of people going berserk over the NRA suggestion (also made by Billy C in 2k) believe in a world where beauty can be legislated, rather than created by God and the sweat of man's brow, and evil can be "cured" by drugs, education, laws, or some other human mechanism. 

We have a gulf because we ALL used to accept that man was flawed and needed written and unchanging legal and moral codes in order to survive, but that the "Leviathan" (government) was also managed by man, so therefore had to be LIMITED, thus the Constitution, Checks and Balances, and the final check, the 2nd Amendment. 

Yes, Hollis, there ARE people "wired differently" from you, and for that you ought be grateful, lest you die. While music and poetry are great, they are ONLY great when we are a few notches up the needs hierarchy from food, clothing, shelter and safety. 

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Cornball Brothers Racism, RGIII

RGIII, ‘Cornball Brothers,’ and the Blackness Code - National Review Online

When these two articles showed up on the web within a couple of days of each other it was nearly more than my old brain could handle. Seems that RGIII turns out "not to be black"!!! Thanks to the Web ESPN and Urban Dictionaries, we can learn that "Cornball Brothers" are guys that look black, but "act white" ,.. as in date or marry white women, live with no "street cred", dress and act "white", and in the lowest of the low situations, dare I say it?? Vote Republican!!

Does that sound at all racist ?

Try this http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/opinion/the-puzzle-of-black-republicans.html?_r=0

He doesn't say "Uncle Tom", but it is pretty clear. Tim Scott just isn't allowed to think the way he does --- that is leaving the "Democrat Thought Plantation"!! The Democrats used to keep the blacks on a real plantation, then they moved them to the more virtual "Segregation Plantation", but now they are locked up solidly in the "Thought Plantation".

Guys like Thomas Sowell, one of my intellectual heroes? Well, they just don't exist -- or they doing nothing but "serving as sop to a white man's racist guilt". Sowell has more intelligence in his little toe than this columnist could muster in a year of good days.

A little quote from the end, but it needs to be read to be truly sickened. If you don't sign up for "advancing black interests", then you simply aren't black. Got it?? Get out there and commit a couple crimes for "street cred", wear your pants around your ankles, join a gang and for Gods sake, get on welfare! THOSE are "black interests"! Enough of this stupid white man's education, talking like a white person, staying out of prison, etc -- that isn't being "authentically black"!
The trope of the black conservative has retained a man-bites-dog newsworthiness that is long past its shelf life. Clichés about fallen barriers are increasingly meaningless; symbols don’t make for coherent policies. Republicans will not gain significant black support unless they take policy positions that advance black interests. No number of Tim Scotts — or other cynical tokens — will change that.





Monday, December 17, 2012

Facts About Mass Shootings

The Facts about Mass Shootings - John Fund - National Review Online

Just read it. If we ever return to being a rational nation where people are capable of governing themselves, this is the kind of analysis that will be demanded of our media.

Selective Shooting Science

The Media is an Accomplice in Public Shootings: A Call for a "Stephen King" Law - Forbes

This article makes a claim that sounds familiar:

There’s really no useful debate on the point. The consensus of social scientists since David Phillips’ groundbreaking work in 1974 is that highly publicized stories of deviant and dangerous behavior influences copycat incidents. 
I don't buy the "no useful debate" here, in global warming or anywhere, but this is "fact" of a far older age and detailed correlation than Global Warming. In '74, the climate consensus was that we were slipping into the next ice age.

So why is the left "ignoring science"?

Because we ALL have a VERY limited aperture for what we can consider, and we are ALL highly biased in our world view. The best we can do is to pick our biases very carefully -- or if you are a believer like myself,  allow Christ to drive.

My bias says that we live in a very imperfect world that is completely imperfect-able outside of Christ. Even the most OBVIOUSLY important corrections like "ending slavery"  come with costs like 600K dead (including a lot of children), 100 years of Jim Crow,  the destruction of the black family through political graft payments to welfare and the creation of what appears to be a permanent underclass.  That doesn't mean that we ought not try to improve our world, it just means that as with medicine, FIRST do no harm, and then seek to be minimally invasive.

"Freedom" in the human sense has downsides -- as we see here with speech, will be reminded a million times about guns and see constantly with cars and alcohol. Right now from our media view, there are no downsides to legalization of pot, and it is considered horrible in the extreme by our ruling elites to even mention that there may be large and significant downsides to the slaughter of innocents through abortion. We are heavily schooled in selective horror when it comes to the slaughter of innocents.

Our founding fathers found government to be just one more human created mechanism that was flawed at best, and if not controlled was dangerous beyond imagination. The 20th century gave us more than a few demonstrations of just how dangerous; Communism, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, the "one baby rule" in China, Tienamen Square ... But for a greater and greater number of Americans, "this time it is different" ... they rush headlong to replace the God in the manger with government, the god of the gulag.

Freedom is costly. Tyranny is costly. Balancing them is costly. That is what "imperfect" means.  We trade off 10's of thousands of deaths every year on the highway for freedom of transport. We trade off  many of those deaths and millions of ruined lives to alcohol ... a case where we do seem to have come to the valid consensus that prohibition does not work.

Regulation? Sure ... we have LOTS of regulation on Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a juxtaposition that I always find odd and very wrong since Firearms are a Constitutional right and the other two are just drugs, but no matter.

Nobody that I heard called for stiffer drunk driving laws after  the Josh Brent (Cowboys player) accident as they had for stricter gun control after the Chiefs Jovan Belcher murder suicide the week before. Right now the left elite is in a power mode after the election, and they hate guns and gun people, but see no risk in uncontrolled government.

If we all just worked to widen our aperture just a bit, perhaps we could at least get along in this imperfect word just a bit better.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Deadliest School Massacre

http://qz.com/37069/the-deadliest-school-massacre-in-us-history-was-in-1927-why-its-aftermath-matters-now/

The deadliest school massacre was in 1927, 38 children and some adults. In 1927, the guy could have used an automatic weapon, they were legal then. He chose a bomb. Evil tends to find a way ... bombs, knives, guns, planes, gas, poison (remember Tylenol poisons? they never caught that one) ...

Human life has always been about family, culture and perspective. Family is biology. Culture is religion, recognized and understood, or not. We used to be a Christian Nation, now we are "mixed" ... for many, the government is god, for many others it is themselves, or money, or sports, or some addiction.

Perspective is our "model/story" -- it is the narrative that we believe to be true independent of day to day vagaries of life. Like "The American Dream" used to be -- work hard, be thrifty, be honest, etc and some day you will have built a good life and a world where your children's life will be better. We murdered our children's future though, so they are now the greatest debtor generation in history. We want our perspective to be "today", because the future looks pretty dark, and it is considered bad to think about the past. Those people were much less "enlightened" than we are told we are today.

Morality used to be something divine, and was about eternity. Now we murder unborn children by the millions and expect that the carnage will have no effects on our valuation of life. Many more are confused if human life is any different from animal life -- we are just "other animals". Man deserves only as much respect as animals -- and so inevitably, human life is devalued yet again.

Death is as much a part of life as birth. Killing any children is senseless, the born, the unborn, the "defective", etc,  but if life is cheap and morals are relative, it really can't be all that unexpected that "going out in a blaze of insane glory" appeals to some deranged soul after the joys of being "Gothic", video game killing or who knows what other pleasure dejour no longer thrills.

Who are we to judge?? Certainly we are unable -- as Niche lamented, since "God is Dead", or at least it is the fervent hope of many in our nation that he is. Somehow death seems both more meaningless and more tragic in the face of the currently popular imagined abyss of annihilation rather than the strong arms of a loving saviour.

We have a huge problem with evil. Human's can't really be evil can they? If they could, then maybe there would be a reason for God to come to earth in a manager to save them from evil. We used to have a religious holiday called Christmas around this time that celebrated just such a birth many believed in and did their best to live their lives in relation to. Now though we have "Holiday's" -- generic, consumption oriented dates on a calendar.

Why does it seem that there is evil? Certainly just a few better drugs, or treatment, or maybe regulations on guns, or magazines, or ammunition -- or? what? would "solve it".

We need to go back to that babe in the manger. "The problem" isn't "out there" ... with the guns or the media or the shrinks or the video games or the movies. Those are just mechanisms and symptoms. The problem is the human soul needing a saviour, and the more we deny that, the more Satan shows us the face of evil with glaring clarity that is impossible to ignore.





'via Blog this'

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Klobuchar&Franken, Tax Fighting Dynamic Duo!!


It appears that the MN Senators finally read the BOcare bill! Congratulations!!

Suddenly, for at least a couple of companies with deep campaign contributions in their state, they are able to see that "taxes kill jobs". Wow, what a concept!!

Other subtle little message in here are good to see in the open as well:
The industry has been skeptical of the argument behind the tax -- that devicemakers will benefit from the health care law through increased demand for their products.

Klobuchar and Franken fight planned tax on medical devices | StarTribune.com


Hmm,  The authors of BOcare ASSUME that it is going to INCREASE the amount of money going into the medical industry. I could SWEAR that we were told that BOcare would DEcrease the cost of medical care AND increase the people covered. 

Monday, December 10, 2012

Bush Tax Cuts Now Good??

The Left’s Flip-Flop on the Bush Tax Cuts — The American Magazine

Wow, who knew?? Every Democrat and MSM person has said for over a decade that "The Bush cuts were tax cuts for the RICH!!". Now, suddenly BO wants MIDDLE CLASS people to call their congressmen and tell them they must agree with BO and raise JUST the taxes on the "rich" or THEY will have to pay up to $2K more a year??

Apparently Americans actually are gullible enough to go for this.  They hear the tax cuts called one thing for over a decade, suddenly, the story changes and "presto chango", the $3T over 10 years of tax relief for the middle class is really good (at least now) ... but the $800B over 10 years, 8 DAYS of spending each year, of tax relief for the top 10% that pays 70% of the taxes already (by these calculations, many have that number even higher for the top 10%), THOSE taxes have to be raised, or BO is going to force the taxes to be raised on everyone.

Let's see. The Bush tax cuts only benefitted the wealthy, and now going over the Fiscal Cliff and raising taxes on everyone  is all the Republicans fault!!

Yup, information you can believe in!

Thursday, December 06, 2012

Why We Fight on Budgets

Bargaining and Its Limits - By Yuval Levin - The Corner - National Review Online

We fight because there is no shared view of America. The Democrats have built a fully formed "United States of Europe" with cradle to grave welfare assistance, protective laws, regulation, now medical care, and a massive old age medical and income security.

Wonderful. Except for the small fact that as in Europe, it necessitates UNlimited government, which was what made the US "exceptional", highly successful, and a world leader.  Sadly, as well, as in Europe, even UNlimited government is insufficient to supply all the "needs", since as been known forever, "needs" are infinite, but means are not.

However, my view is that the last election says that we have crossed this rubicon. We are no longer the America of the Constitution, Rule of Law and the therefore LIMITED Government with the rest of the liberty reserved to the PEOPLE.

We now need to wait for messy reality to take both the US and Europe back to some much sadder plane where MAYBE the wisdom of the US founders can be re-understood and the prospect of a brighter future to work for can once again be seen through the ashes of what we once had.

Sunday, December 02, 2012

Advent, Atheists, Accountability

The Real Root of Atheists' Anti-Christmas Rage - Doug Giles - Page 1

Most atheists don't really care so much about God, it is HELL that trips them up. They DO NOT want accountability, no way, no how. The idea that there is an eternal consequence to their arrogant faithlessness is where they break with the faithful, since it is obvious that an ultimate God would have ultimate rights to judge them, God must go!

But there is nothing new or courageous about rejecting God. It is part of the base human package and Satan is ever willing to assist us in that rejection.  We ALL reject God by our very nature. -- we want to be in charge, right, and have everyone acknowledge that!

Christ comes for each of us personally with the whole package. The faith to believe,  love for even those that hate us, and the joy of knowing that his ways are just beyond our imagining. Giles seems too strong on the judgement (law) and too weak on the Grace (gospel).

Atheist is just another word for human. Except through Grace, there is no faith, no love, no hope, no joy. So in this Advent season, we pray for  ourselves to remain in Grace, that all would allow the Good Shepard to find them,  and especially for those we love to allow the love and joy of Christ to bring them home to the fold.


Insane BO Clown Bully

White House Plan on Fiscal Crisis Draws G.O.P. Ire - NYTimes.com

 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner presented the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a detailed proposal on Thursday to avert the year-end fiscal crisis with $1.6 trillion in tax increases over 10 years, $50 billion in immediate stimulus spending, home mortgage refinancing and a permanent end to Congressional control over statutory borrowing limits
 Give me more taxes, more spending, AND permanently let me just run up the credit card.

BO ran on "the top 1% need to pay more tax" ... $800B over 10 years, $80B a year, 8 days of spending. He wants to double that to 16 days of spending, but it won't last that long since he wants to continue to increase spending.

Plus just throw away the debt limits!!!

We as a nation voted this bozo in AND kept the GOP congress. We clearly deserve what we get.