Good News! Michael Brown and I are NOT Burly!

Michael Brown: Too Burly for the New York Times | Power Line:



OK, this is GREAT news, and I learned something today thanks to the NYTs! "Burly" is racially charged!



I really like the idea that folks of Brown's particular physical dimensions be described as "Svelte" as in "Svelte Moose".



I mean really folks, if a person can choose their sex, certainly they can choose what their physical dimensions ought be described as!



We need a law!



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Rule Over Ruins, Bill Whittle

I am begging you to watch Bill Whittle’s take on Michael Brown and Ferguson |:



I'll beg you too, it is worth it.



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Russian Tanks, Girl With Uzi

U.S. official says 1,000 Russian troops enter Ukraine - CNN.com:



http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-28/9-year-old-shoots-her-gun-instructor-with-an-uzi-four-blunt-points



Every time I think I have a bead on the insanity of the the anti-gun crowd, they surprise me again.



Russian tanks in Ukraine is running neck and neck with "girl with Uzi" for top spot on a lot of net "news" outlets.



So, yes, it was completely irresponsible for the instructor to allow the 9-year old to shoot the weapon without his hands ON or very hear on her arm to prevent what happened. OK, end of story.



Now lets look at reality. We REGULARLY let 9-year olds drive bikes on city streets, swim -- back when I was a kid, without lifeguards, run ATVs, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, farm equipment (I drove hay baler at 9), usually that is when you get your own BB gun, etc.



WITH AN INSTRUCTOR, many a 9-year old has taken the controls of an aircraft, boats of all sizes, and no doubt all manner of vehicle -- in at least rural areas when I was young, kids MUCH younger than 9 were driving cars, trucks, tractors, you name it on the laps of fathers -- but then that was a much different America, no doubt that never happens anymore.



Yes, many media people hate guns, and "automatic" is pretty much "bogie man" to many, but REALLY!



I looked up just bicycle deaths for kids and found this:

Between January 1999 and December 2010, there were 1,612 bicycle-related deaths among children younger than 16 years old, the researchers found.

So a little over 100 per year.  How many of those made national news? It was THE INSTRUCTOR that died, not the girl -- if it had been the girl, I'd understand the level of coverage a bit more, but as it is it is just yet another anti-gun media feeding frenzy.



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Walker, Hypothesis or Law of the Jungle?

Scott Walker and Mary Burke are running a tight race: The Wisconsin governor’s theories for winning aren’t 

working.:

Slate is crowing that what Scott Walker believed appears to be wrong:

But the biggest national test taking place in Wisconsin is a test of the Walker Hypothesis, which held that a politician who enacted conservative policies and didn’t shrink from the resulting controversy would be rewarded by a wide range of voters—

This is obviously the kind of thing that THE PARTY can't allow to happen.

A reminder, Walker managed to break a public worker stranglehold that forced employers to buy insurance from a union owned company, and forced the state to be the bay man for the union -- collecting the dues from the members checks before they got them. The result was that school districts across the state saved 10's of millions of dollars, and many union members -- some figures had it as high as 70%, stopped paying their now voluntary dues ... causing TP great pain.

Walter was somewhat rewarded -- he survived a hugely expensive recall election with national media and full union power arrayed against him. The first US  to survive a recall, but that was two years ago, and THE PARTY has been BUSY!

As is their current policy, they have been filing lawsuits and using some of the donation lists so obtained to harass Walker supporters with tax audits or other legal / political system irritants. There is no way TP could let Walker survive -- his doctrine is DEATH to them, their "hypothesis" being "If you support TP you will rewarded, if you oppose it you will be punished".

But worse is the "conservative problem":

But the latest poll shows Burke with 89 percent support among Democrats, roughly where that number has been for the last several months. Democrats are also more enthusiastic about the contest. Eighty-two percent say they will certainly vote, whereas only 77 percent of Republicans say the same.

Mary Burke is running as a "non-ideological candidate" and made her fortune in Trek bicycles which as done extensive off-shoreing, supposedly a terrible thing to TP. Remember CONSISTENCY IS NOT AN ISSUE! Wealth and how you made it are NO PROBLEM if you swear allegiance to TP! Nor even is really any political experience or positions -- the purpose of this election is to make certain that nobody believes the Walker Hypothesis, and everyone is reminded of the LAW of TP ("reward your friends, punish your enemies") The MSM totally gets that, so the media is as always part of the TP campaign -- this time trying the "we are only supporting the underdog" tact in WI, while the national outlets like Salon hint at what is really at stake.

This is a very bad problem, and the exact reason why our Founders were so adamant to LIMIT GOVERNMENT and why Reagan famously said "Man is not free where government is not limited". Unless the government is limited by LAW ... the Constitution, human nature and the nature of evil guarantee the end of earthy human political freedom.

"Reward your friends, punish your enemies" is not just the lead law of TP, it is "the law of the jungle", it is what humans and all life on the planet naturally does. Christ came with "do unto others" and "love your neighbor as yourself", but those have ALWAYS been very UNnatural laws ... indeed often followed by Christians and occasionally by non-Christians when they felt doing such was in their best interest, but NEVER something that could be counted on for general human behavior.

So even if Walker wins by a whisker, the idea that "doing good can be recognized and will be rewarded by good people"  has taken a big hit. It would be nice to believe it, but our Founders knew it to not be true. Human's tilt to the wrong side, and while in the SHORT TERM (like the recall), it is POSSIBLE for good to triumph, it is at best temporary.

Like gravity, age, entropy and TP, the game is stacked against the good in this sorry world.


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Lightning From High Places -- “Baraq Bamah.”

Did The Bible Actually Reveal The Name Of The Antichrist? // Mr. Conservative:

Oh, it's probably just a coincidence -- but then again, we have to remember that as much as 30% of Democrats believed that 9-11 was "an inside job" at the peak of the "Truther" popularity. AFAIK, Jesse Ventura still does.  They had complicated theories about thermite being attached to the beams of the WTC during maintenance and everything!

It shows what happens when you can pick your texts, pick your languages, data, interpretations that only support your favorite theory. Global Warming is a good example -- ignore 100's of K of ice core data, ignore the fact that ice has been advancing and receding on this planet for on the order of 2.5 million years "as far as we know", which is actually pretty darned speculative. Oh, and you have to convert a complex global climate system affected by solar output, axis tilt, orbital mechanics, water vapor, vulcanism ... and who knows what else into a univariable system with CO2 being the only determinant of climate. Man is the cause ... lots of folks say they believe that today.

Naturally, we all operate in somewhat this way. We have no choice -- we are humans who are drawn to "narratives", stories that "make sense" given our world view. Try as we might, we are not rational, but rationalizing -- we work extremely hard to fit incoming information into our model, and MUCH harder to not change our model!

So the two basic current models still operating in the western world are the "Judeo-Christian-Historical" (JCH)  and the "progressive/The Party" (TP) ... or "conservative / liberal" if you will.

JCH believes there is a plan, decreed by God, at best dimly understood by man, and that man is inherently lost/incomplete/"bad". TP believes that man is infinitely perfectible and that "history" is pretty much anything man decides it to be -- if TP gets enough power, it will ALL be "settled science / history / politics". JCH is  further blessed (saddled?) with a drive to attempt consistency in thought -- a fools errand for humans, but for JCH thinkers a goal to  to be sought after. TP has no such stricture -- "all's fair in getting to ultimate power".

So we disagree.

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Warren Buffett, Do As I Say

Warren Buffett's Tax Whopper - WSJ:



Yet again, the Oracle of Omaha is in the news for the old "do as I say, not as I do" problem endemic to humanity in general, but pretty much the rule for those of The Party that make over say "$150K".



In this case, Buffett is going to profit handsomely from financing a merger between Burger King and Tim Horton's of Canada. The primary reason for moving the HQ to Canada is that the company wants to expand internationally and the US not only has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, but it is the only major nation that ALSO double taxes income earned outside the US for US based corporations -- a very hefty penalty for a multinational corporation for being based in the US. One wonders how management with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders can justify being US based given such a strong anti-business sanction.



In the past, Buffett has run up HUGE credentials with the easily led and the uniformed by saying "I pay a lower rate than my secretary" ... and even having BO, the prevaricator in chief, pick that up. This article points out the obvious fallicy in this claim -- if one wants to assume it is true at all, which is at least somewhat doubtful:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2012/01/25/warren-buffetts-secretary-likely-makes-between-200000-and-500000year/



The big subterfuge in Buffetts claim is the rate he primarily pays is CAPTIAL GAINS ... a rate that less than 50% of Americans are used to dealing with since they have no financial assets which would qualify them. So the low information voter hears Warren or BO bray about "my secretary pays a lower rate than I do" and assumes some strange "benefit to billionaires" in the tax code making it to be "unfair", when in fact the rate is the same for all -- you just have to sell assets held for certain periods of time to use it.

Insofar as Buffett (like Mitt Romney) earns income primarily from capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent (and according to Obama need to be raised for reasons of fairness), we need to determine how much income a taxpayer like Bosanek must earn in order to pay her  tax rate. This is easy to do within ranges.

Buffett has enough non-capital gains income to bring his claimed rate up to 17.4% and claims that his staff pays 34%  ... so it is just a matter of looking at the tax tables to see what amount of income his secretary has to make to hit that figure  ... as the linked article points out, something north of $200K.

Now I'm sure that to a man with $60 Billion in assets, $200K a year is a paltry sum -- virtual impoverishment. No doubt he feels some guilt at being involved with the scourge of "income inequality" on a level that there are only a few hundred men in America that can even come remotely close to imagining.



For the rest of us however -- and indeed BO, $200K+ is actually wealthy ... if you run it through http://www.whatsmypercent.com/, you find it is the top 6%, so 94% of the population makes less.  This is PRIME territory for BO to fleece even harder than the current 34% rate.Already, if Warren's "poor" secretary made $450K, she would be saddled with a 39.6% rate! I'm sure Warren would feel especially bad about this!



The moral of all this is that Warren is a smart man -- sidling up to The Party is just a sign of knowing where your bread is buttered. His opposition to the Keystone Pipeline is brilliant -- makes him a friend to The Party while he profits handsomely through his rail interests moving the oil that the pipeline would move -- all be it more expensively and dangerously. You don't get to be worth $60B by being stupid.



The other moral OUGHT to be that our Founders were right when they put the equal protection clause into the Constitution -- all OUGHT to be treated equally under the law, and the "progressive" income tax ought to be ILLEGAL. Pick a rate, and make ALL AMERICANS pay it!!!

With what we currently do, it allows the vast majority of Americans to believe that they can get goodies and "someone else" will pay for it. Meanwhile, the super wealthy -- like Buffett make expert use of whatever system is put in place to maximize their benefit, and those that were formerly "the middle class" -- those that are striving to pull themselves up a class or two from their birth, are the ones that get the shaft.

And of course that isn't enough either -- so we go after the corporations, chasing them and their jobs from our shores. We disincent people from trying to improve their station with taxes, regulations, and the general idea that somehow improving your position is always at the expense of someone else -- we kill the idea of economic growth benefiting all.



So we continue to slide -- those with wealth siding with The Party because they know it is where the power is, and The Party being happy to have them and give them cover -- even if they have $60B, because they never were actually about "fairness" -- they are about POWER, and they know that the actual country that they are shepherding us to is like the old USSR or some Central American republic -- a very very few wealthy, directly connected with the government, and vast heaps of impoverished humanity, hopeless, seeking greater hand outs from the elite. A country where BO could preen and posture as Presidente for life!



Liberal Heaven.





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Non-Person Non-Patriotic

Whopper Donut Cheeseburgers, Eh? | Power Line:



Liberals assert as holy writ that when it comes to speech, corporations are NOT people -- as in they have no right to fund speech, which in a country of 300 million +, means they really have no 1st amendment rights. Thus the hue and cry over Citizens United.



It appears that corporations do however  react to incentives and disincentives just like people -- Canada has a MUCH friendlier business climate than the US, so doing a merger with a Canadian company and moving the HQ there is a smart tax move.



Naturally, liberals are aghast -- actual choice? How horrible! Companies ought sit still and pay the highest corporate taxes in the world because -- well, because it is PATRIOTIC! Got that? NON PERSONS with NO RIGHTS according to the left ought to still be "patriotic". Did patriotic become a synonym for stupid somewhere along the line?



Liberals HATE it when their policies result in what any sane person would expect their policies to result in -- tax something and you get less of it, subsidize it and you get more ... so liberals tax productivity, thrift, success, and get less of it. They subsidize broken homes, poverty and sloth and get more of it.



and they are SHOCKED and ANGRY!



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The Infatuation of 2008

The Madness of 2008 | National Review Online:

Well written article covering the fact that there was no reason at all to expect BO to be anything but what we now know him to be -- feckless, disengaged, self-centered, incompetent, hyper partisan,  a liar. He was all of those things in 2008 and demonstrated them right before the eyes of the fawning media and masses -- but their blindness was as bad as the idiocy of many "star crossed lovers" who awake when the spell  of infatuation wears off to wonder what they were thinking.

This paragraph covers the mood of "the elite" in '08 quite well I think:

Pundits vied for superlatives. On little evidence, Christopher Buckley assured us that Obama possessed “a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect.” For some, proof of Obama’s godhead became almost physical — a “perfectly creased pant” for David Brooks, a tingling leg for Chris Matthews. For Evan Thomas he was a “sort of God”; for one blue-chip historian he was the smartest man with the highest IQ ever running for the presidency. And on and on, as huge crowds acted as if they were watching Paul McCartney on tour in 1966. After the election, there was real apprehension that the country might not make it for the two and a half months until an elected Obama could take power.

For myself and readers of this blog, the article is primarily walking over ground well known, but there were a couple things that I was not aware of or had forgotten ... National Journal rated then Senator BO as the absolute most partisan of the 100 US Senators  -- this being quite amazing for the guy running as "post-partisan", but naturally, since doing things like going over the voting record of a one term Senator running for President would have been seen as "racist" in '08, that story was covered very little.

It seems that the beheading followed by golf has been enough for another cohort of former BO lovers to awaken, as a large majority of the country apparently finally has (his current approval rating is 43% ... he has been down to 38%). Much like the aftermath of a messy divorce however, this is not to be a quick fix -- in the words of our Secretary of Defense, "the world is exploding all over", our economy is at best sputtering, our debt is following suit with the world and exploding, our borders are open, and the only real growth areas are food stamps and public assistance of one sort or another.

We will be a very long time paying for the infatuation of '08.

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Hating Government Transparency, Only Dictatorship Is REALLY "Liberal"

The Transparency Trap - David Frum - The Atlantic:


The author never actually specifies how to "fix" what he calls the transparency trap -- probably because he suspects his readership isn't ready for the call for dictatorship yet.


My favorite paragraph:

By the International Monetary Fund’s reckoning, American government spent about 40.65 percent of the national output in 2012. That’s somewhat, but not radically, less than what Germany’s government spent (44.93 percent), only slightly less than what Canada’s spent (42.02 percent), and more than either Australia (36.4 percent) or New Zealand (34.24 percent) spent. These raw numbers overstate the difference between the United States and other countries, however. The U.S. government tends to route its subsidies through the tax code—with child tax credits and deductions for state and local taxes—rather than by issuing mother’s allowances and aid to local governments, as other countries do. This mode of doing business makes both spending and taxes look lower in the United States, even when the country is doing nearly the exact same thing as its European counterparts.

I can say it over and over, and naturally only a very few people will read this Atlantic column -- the US **IS** spending money at European levels and beyond -- we are close to them in actual spending and when you add in our various tax "credits" (like "earned income credit" ... fill out your taxes and get a giant payment that is called a "refund" even when you paid in little or nothing) we largely EXCEED THEM!
So "liberals" actually loathe transparency -- especially when they are in power. We are spending like drunken sailors but not getting the "results" they somehow "expect", so the best solution is to hide the poor results!
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Blue State Diaspora

The Growing Blue-State Diaspora - NYTimes.com:



The article documents the reality, but doesn't say why.



My guess is that it is the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks "That's where the money is" ... in this case, it is "That is where the jobs are".



So is it REALLY true that even after all the blue-state policies have killed the jobs in their home states, when they move to states with policies that allow them to have a job there, they still don't get the connection?



I suppose, one should never underestimate human stupidity.



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JV Mission Accomplished?

An Earnest clarification | Power Line:



When W spoke on the Carrier Abraham Lincoln at the end of major combat operations in Iraq -- meaning the end of fighting Saddam Hussien's forces, the ship had a large banner displayed behind him indicating "Mission Accomplished" FOR THE SHIP -- the longest deployment by a US carrier.



Naturally, the media arm of "The Party" (Democrat) did all it could do to smear the sitting president in wartime by claiming that landing on the carrier was "a stunt", the administration erroneously put up the banner indicating "the war was over", etc.



In the unlikely event that I would ever be president I can guarantee I will do all I can to maximize my opportunities to ride in, drive, fly, etc any and all cool hardware that I can get my hands on! The media would hate me anyway, why not give them more interesting stuff to talk about? I'd definitely carry a 3 round auto burst,   double stack modified Desert Eagle .50 with  HEIAP rounds (High Explosive Incendiary Armor Piercing -- just to give anybody that got by the SS a special surprise.  Rather than golf I'd prefer to waste my time unwinding with the Fat Moose version of special ops training .. but I digress.



So BO released the current leader of ISIS in '09 and then declared them to be "Junior Varsity" earlier this year, and THIS is "the explanation".



We know how this works. How many times did we see the bogus "Mission Accomplished" meme repeated endlessly? Very few will even know of either the release or the JV remarks -- thanks to the way The Party and it's media arm operates, we really don't have "bias", we have a ministry of information and total control of the narrative that the masses are fed.



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Dowd, Golf, Artists

The Golf Address - NYTimes.com:



Alas, poor Maureen has been jilted yet again by a supposedly wonderful progressive male leader. Her column is rather devastatingly funny, an example of what even a "junior varsity wit" on the left is capable of. We had Buckley, PJ O'Rourke is damned good, and I like Jonah Goldberg pretty well too, but in general, the artistic gifts for writing, humor and art are far more lavish on the left of the political spectrum.



Which makes it easy to understand why the media, education and most of the country is in thrall to "The Party" ... as PJ once put it, God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat -- With the Democrats, the ONLY bad thing you can do is be a Republican! There are no limits on how much wealth you have (Gates, Buffet, the Kennedys, Mark Dayton, John Kerry, John Edwards, every movie and sports star ...  etc etc.). Behavior? Hell, there are NO standards ... child rape? Roman Polanski is still at large. Murder? See Ted Kennedy ... all manner of violence, drugs, sexual deviance, etc are celebrated as long as you worship at the alter of The Party and approve the sacraments of abortion, gay "marriage" and "something happening to the global climate that we are not longer sure about, but we are SURE that it is the OIL COMPANIES FAULT!" ...



Hell, if it wasn't that God is real and Santa isn't, it would certainly be more fun to be a Democrat -- it is that damned reality thing that always gets in the way of the kind of party that would be possible if the world was as imagined by Democrats!



Anyway, the column is pretty darned funny. I keep wondering what part of NO PRINCIPLES and CONSISTENCY IS NOT AN ISSUE it is that folks like Maureen just can't seem to get?



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Political Gridlock, Socialism Works as Expected, France

As feud grows, French premier dissolves government:



The EU seems a bit closer to the end of socialism ( the point where they run out of other people's money) than the US, and France is "one of the leaders" (to the bottom) ....



The end of socialism isn't always all that good though ... Fascism, Communism, Dictatorship are common ways that it ends ... or the GOOD way! Complete economic collapse, depression, and people realizing that there is no free lunch and something like 80-90% of the population has to work to have a successful economy!



It appears that the world needs another solid lesson on this front before it realizes this rather simple fact yet again.



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Weapons of Mass Cultural Destruction

What Are Your Kids Learning In School? [Updated] | Power Line:

Literature can be one of the bulwarks of culture, or in this case it can be used as the equivalent of a bucket of cement to tie culture to and throw it in the river. Republicans are often accused of wanting a government so small they could "drown it in a bathtub", but it is obvious that the education arm of our government has and is drowning the intellectual and spiritual future of the nation in a cesspool of post modern, marxist, and just plain old insane thought.

It's hard to even read what proudly hails from literature curriculum IN THE TWIN CITIES, but it is important to know.

I will need to pray for forgiveness for my envy of Hinderacker for his daughters essay answer:

When my youngest daughter was, as I recall, in fourth grade, she was given an assignment to relate how she, personally, would combat global warming. She wrote that she would never live in a house bigger than John Edwards’ or fly on more private airplanes than Al Gore. 

That is American spunk! I fear that the numbers of youth with that kind of independent thinking brilliance is far to small to save us however.

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NY Times Getting Concerned on Christian Slaughter?

Who Will Stand Up for the Christians? - NYTimes.com:

It appears that at least one columnist at the NY Times is getting a little alarmed a the slaughter of Christians.

Historians may look back at this period and wonder if people had lost their bearings. Few reporters have traveled to Iraq to bear witness to the Nazi-like wave of terror that is rolling across that country. The United Nations has been mostly mum. World leaders seem to be consumed with other matters in this strange summer of 2014. There are no flotillas traveling to Syria or Iraq. And the beautiful celebrities and aging rock stars — why doesn’t the slaughter of Christians seem to activate their social antennas?

I suppose the beheading is disconcerting and the liberals are having less luck getting videos of it banned than they have had with various abortion videos -- "Silent Scream" comes to mind. I suspect a partial-birth abortion video might make beheading seem a little tame.

Yet again, we have a great example of "Christ is the issue". "Liberals" are move than fine with Buddhism, Hinduism and amazingly Islam ... the latter being incredibly sometimes called "the Religion of Peace".

For a Christian, the lack of concern is easy to understand. Christ is truly the great divider -- he even divides history into BC and AD. His doctrine is so radical that it defies human understanding, and is often converted by un-believers and even supposedly those attempting to believe into another "follow these rules" religion as are all the others on the planet.

Free, life changing salvation by Grace, available to all -- the scandal that rent history in two, and continues to do so to this day. It created what was once Western Civilization -- levels of prosperity, justice, peace, technology and economic success not dreamed of in history. The most Christian Nation on the planet, the US was so blessed it was able to land a man on the moon.

Much as in the Garden however, even the moon was not enough. Could there not be complete sexual license for pleasure with no more old tired restraining mores? Why must we work? Could there not be a full welfare state where each received all they desired without any requirement to earn it? Why is this Christian religion so oppressive? Can't we force it out of our schools and the public square so we can be god of our own lives?

So the very goose that layed the golden egg of the work ethic, restraining morals, dedication to career and craft as being in Gods service, the desire to treat even enemies with justice, etc became the enemy! The core values that built the success that was Western Civilization and especially the US were cast away, and ANY other religion or complete lack thereof became to be considered superior.

In world organizations like the UN and NATO, Christianity and Judaism were remindes of "colonial injustice
 ... and not worthy of assistance, and CERTAINLY not protection.

and so it goes -- and as the civilization declines, my guess is that very much as in the Roman Empire at the time of Augustine, the Christians will be blamed for the decline.



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