Kim Jong Dayton

http://conservativeminnesotans.blogspot.com/2014/10/is-mark-dayton-mentally-competent-to.html

This blog claims, and my MPR listening would bear out that sightings of Mark, I'm closing my Senate office due to threat of terrorism,  Dayton, have been a rare event since June 2013.

The governor's website stopped posting video of him in 2013. In gambling, that's called a tell. Some believe that something happened in June of that year, given his Kim Jong-un like absences from the public eye for long periods of time. We can never know for sure but we can  observe, and judge, Dayton's countenance and behavior in the time he's been governor. Only we don't know how much he's actually the governor and how much he's manipulated by others around him. The Kim Jong-un analogy is surprisingly apt.

Dayton's many mental and addictive problems are well known -- and not talked about, he is a Democrat after all and this is MN. Should persons with a long list of mental and addictive issues not be allowed to hold high positions in government? Well, to me that depends on:

1. Are they "cured", or at least in current "remission"
2. What is their track record of "staying on meds / off addictive substances" -- in Dayton's case, not good at all, he relapsed while US Senator and admitted this was the case. 
3. Does the level of medication needed to keep them functional allow them to govern? 

Yes, yes, I'm sure this kind of analysis is HEARTLESS when applied to a Democrat. My view is that I'm all for rising above disabilities,  but that doesn't necessarily mean that I think having a blind commercial airline pilot is a good objective!

Like a lot of other issues with Dayton and Al Franken as well, there is no concern here in MN. They are Democrat incumbents -- which in MN means they serve as long as is their pleasure. Why have an election? The "good guys" are in there as far as the MN media and over half the people are concerned.

My God, the medicated wide open unblinking stare even on HIS campaign Ads is enough to make one think of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest! But, hey, it is MN -- who the hell cares!

Fixing IBM, Fixing America, Futility

How to Fix IBM:

I used to keep up with Cringely pretty well. His documentary movie, "Triumph of the Nerds" has Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and many other leading lights of the rise of the personal computer and the internet in it, well worth the time to watch it. The article is fine too -- although I suspect far too credulous and hopeful.

In a 34 year career with IBM, from say "late '80s" on I was always hatching schemes that I thought might return IBM to the former greatness that it had with the advent of the 360, and then again for a brief instant when the PC came out -- we seemingly ruled the world. Naturally, my scale was smaller than the whole company -- but dreams of a standard IBM kernel that could allow us to have a layer of isolation/recovery/performance tuning/compatibility/ etc that would run across all our computer architectures, a standard language (eventually partially embodied as Java), schemes to do things like cloud computing today, only leveraging more PC power connected to IBM main or mid-frames -- etc, etc. Such dreams were always exciting for me -- I used to be hopeful. Some of them even got somewhat implemented in some cases, and in a couple I had the joy of being in the thick of it.

But, much as in the US, success always carries with it the seeds of demise. "Full employment" and "promote from within" created a large drag of people that were just "hanging around for their 30". While non-productive, the worst were not really the ones that knew they were "just hanging around", but rather those that were certain that they were integral to the business but really had no clue. Their "skill" was working the organization -- very much the same as middle functionaries in the old USSR, or in the middle ranks of any large organization. The Catholic Church, the military, the US government, academia -- bureaucracy is a necessary evil of human organizations, but like oxygen to our lives, it tends to eventually kill.

Eventually, the primary skill that allowed continuation with IBM became "survival" -- a skill I was willing to partially succumb to to make 30 years and a pension, but jettisoned for a final fling in cellular technology that may well have been one of those "save the company" billions of dollars wins had we invested a few more 10s of millions over a couple of years. Instead, the project  was jettisoned, and ultimately me along with it. IBM had ceased to be fun anyway, and 34 years of computing is a lot.

A friend had a poster up at IBM that had a pair of buzzards looking down from a tree saying "Patience, Hell! I'm going to KILL Something" ... with the "kill" crossed out and replaced with CODE!

One can plan, manage, legislate, analyze, design, regulate, balance,  present, document, etc, etc, but EVENTUALLY, companies, nations and even people have to BUILD SOMETHING to survive, and certainly to grow.

Which involves INVESTMENT and RISK, and has no sort of guarantees of a defined returns for a known period of time, future profits, or even breaking even!! One can summarize IBM's supposedly now abandoned "2015 roadmap" as an exercise in gutting the company and using stock arbitrage in it's own and purchased company stocks to "guarantee" institutional (and execs at the right part of their career) a significantly larger than market return on investment in IBM. Like all effectively ponzi schemes, if you got in and out at the right time, it "worked" -- all be it at the expense of a lot of good people's careers, customers loyalty (and in many cases the customers careers as well) and the conversion of one of the great lights of American technology to a stock manipulation financial holding company.

But the IBM story is really just the same story as the US government along with the governments of Western Europe and Japan. Supposedly, those governments have "guaranteed" the "Baby Boom" (or equivalent in the other nations "post-war population increase cohort") a financially secure retirement on the backs of the young, the productive, the brown immigrant, and hopefully the continually benevolent Chinese debt investor. As both Hillary and BO have declared at various points, they just don't believe that it is business that creates wealth. No, they can print it, borrow it, or just plain steal it and pass it around as they see fit.

The assertion is that grubby, risky, sometimes very messy and ALWAYS less than "perfect" (by some unknown abstract measure) activity around "building something" is just no longer needed.

IBM was on a "2015 plan". How many years is there in the US debt / currency / bond manipulation plan before it is abandoned? Who do we plan to "pay" to take the decrepit pieces of this once great country away like IBM's Chip Fab, and just what do we think is the currency we will pay that tab with?

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Voter Fraud, TP Is All For It

How Many Elections Will Democrats Steal Next Week? | Power Line:

Ho hum, another paper documenting a significant level of voter fraud -- in this case with illegal aliens.

In order for a country to have honest voting, a LARGE majority of people IN ALL PARTIES have to care about the vote being fair and honest. They have to care about the validity of the vote MORE THAN JUST WINNING! (a concept hard to fathom in this time of TP)

Lets be just a tiny bit honest here. TP (The Party, D) absolutely doesn't care about the vote being "honest", because they know that the most questionable of voters -- Felons, Illegal Aliens, people of such low capability or knowledge to be incapable of making a voting choice, and most of all, those willing to stuff the ballot box, vote multiple times in multiple states, etc are OVERWHELMINGLY GOING TO VOTE DEMOCRAT!

Naturally, TP in it's party, government control, media,  nor education arms is never going to directly admit this, but does anyone actually doubt it for even a second? It is so patently obvious as to defy even TP people from keeping a straight face and asserting anything else.

If you favor massive government enough, you are willing to do ANYTHING to see that it continues to grow -- if you are a government worker, your paycheck depends on it. If you are receiving benefits from the government, you want TP to keep that gravy train running. If you are an illegal, you want lax enforcement of immigration laws, benefits that are not checked for citizenship, rules that prevent officers from checking citizenship, more ability to bring your family and friends in, etc. TP and it's media arm can barely contain their joy as the tide of illegals ever rises and the overall "once minority" vote washes over the nation.

When power and political control are all that concerns you, there isn't a downside to seeing the once important and even sacred duty to vote become a pre-ordained charade of non-citizens voting, voters voting multiple times, sometimes in multiple states and outright ballot box stuffing fraud. What does it matter as long as TP wins?

If you are a Felon, well, why not vote illegally? What are they going to do? Charge you with a Felony? After all, too many felons are people of color, so that PROVES it is "racist" -- so TP has already decreed.

This is yet another area where the die is already cast -- to even talk about an "honest vote" in this country is synonymous with "racism", to mention that an ID might be required as it is to check into hotels, get on a plane, mail a UPS package, change anything about your cell phone number, cash a check -- etc, etc, immediately labeled as "voter suppression".

Perhaps the opposition party may yet take the Senate one more time, in many ways a smart TP should actually throw it -- it will make it seem to the marks as if the vote is "honest". There is nothing they can do anyway -- BO will continue to operate by fiat, and they don't have the votes to overturn anything.

TP has succeeded in convincing most of the people to care more about the benefits they draw from the government teat than any abstract thought of "the spirit of America", "sacred rights and duties", or even a tiny bit of pride in their nation. For well over half of our nation, the base principles are dead -- right along with God and the idea of anything that transcends the day to day existence of todays ration of daily bread and circuses.

Fraud, really just another name for TP.



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Christianity a Threat! Islam, Not So Much

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/10/21/christian-extremists-threat-muslims-homegrown-cliven-bundy-column/17679789/

Drawing upon surveys of law enforcement and intelligence experts, the report cited the sovereign citizen movement — Bundy's law-defying, government-denying crowd — as the most potent U.S. terrorist threat: more threatening than Islamist jihadists, who along with militia/patriots, racist skinheads and neo-Nazis rounded out the top five.

Contrary to the popular opinion that radical Islam is the primary threat to homeland security, Christianity provides the other four groups with their extremist rationale. All are in one way or another affiliated with the  Christian Identity movement, a hodgepodge of anarchist and white supremacist politics dedicated to white Christian activism. It's all about God vs. government, and shoring up the rights of Anglo-Saxon Americans

See, the "Sovereign Citizen Movement" is a greater threat than Islamists who are 2nd -- BUT, "militia/patriots, racist skinheads and neo-Nazis" fill in the "top five". There simply is not, and never has been -- in the view of  TP (The Party, D) ANY threat from the left whatsoever. How could there be? In the view of TP, left is "good", right is "evil".  "God vs Government" is the crux -- the assertion that there is a power higher than government! That is the evil that TP simply MUST stamp out!

In fact, left is control, right is chaos. The far left is totalitarian control, the objective of TP, Naziism, Communism, Socialism, dictatorship, monarchy, Islamic States, etc. The far right would be anarchy -- but the country that was once founded as the United States was CENTER RIGHT -- the horrible state of being "over half way to anarchy" when viewed by TP and it's media and education arms.

Christianity is a threat because it asserts that there is such a thing as individual salvation, that the individual is important to God, and that God is a higher authority than the state! This, along with any connection to "sovereign citizens" (citizens with INDIVIDUAL rights -- like property, political speech, bearing arms, etc) are a GIGANTIC threat to TP.

The PRIMARY goal of TP is POWER, which often confuses the masses on the reason that they are so much less threatened by Islam than Christianity. One of the tenets of Islam is authoritarian state control and rigid application of Shariah law. In other words, the complete destruction of individual freedom (for all but the leadership of course).

But wait you say.  What about free love, gay sex, drugs, art, and the "bohemian life"? Perhaps you have never been exposed to marketing before? All humans are weak minded -- sadly, including myself. Certainly TP -- and Islam, allow significant human corruption in their societies, (following Muhammad in things like  "marrying" 9 year old girls being an Islamic example), but the PRIMARY objective is TOTAL POWER for the leadership and TOTAL subjugation of the masses.

Quibbling over outlawing sugary drinks, Christianity, wearing Burkas, forcing dietary restrictions (no pork just being a more "liberal" law than no meat), etc are just details.  Both TP and Islam are 100% opposed to individual freedom philosophically -- the specifics of how control is gained, and what human vices are used to assist in the subjugation are mere matters of mechanism. It's the POWER that counts baby!

As the article makes clear however, both have a FUNDAMENTAL hatred of the Freedom given through Christ! Christ is a higher transcendent power, not of this world. Both Islam and TP seek to create "heaven on earth" -- through total subjugation of the population. "For their own good" of course! ... and naturally, those who are the "elite" that manage the power are exempt from the myriad of restrictions that need to be promulgated on the masses -- again, FOR THEIR OWN GOOD!

Certainly one can find nuts of all religious, philosophical and  political affiliations in a nation with hundreds of millions of people, but the fact remains for anyone willing to look that left leaning and lately Islamic organizations are BY FAR the preponderance ... Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, The Weathermen, Manson, The Symbionese Liberation Movement, Black Panthers, SDS, Unabomber, etc, etc ... the important point being that from the view of TP, "left is right" ... if it is BAD, it gets called "right wing". Nazi stood for National SOCIALIST Party, and in no way, shape or form is Nazism "right wing", meaning "less control by government, bordering on anarchy", and it is difficult to imagine in what kind of fevered imagination it is "Christian"!!

Take note! This is the USA Today! ... not Mother Jones or even HuffPo! TP has enough control that even very mainstream publications are in the heavy anti-Christian fear mongering propaganda mode.

Deficit Day, A Bit of Debt Perspecitve

Deficit Day | RealClearPolitics:



When TP (The Party D) is in power, deficits are not a problem. W never even had a deficit as high as $660B, and if this comes to pass it will be BO's BEST number. For comparison, W's '06 number, the year TP took over Congress was $248B  http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/federalbudgetprocess/a/Budget-Deficit-History.htm  ... deficits were ALWAYS a major issue when W was in office! It isn't really very hard to spot how the TP controlled media tune changes.

The day the money runs out is Deficit Day, and this year it falls on October 26. Every dollar the government spends from October 27 through the end of the year goes on the nation's credit card. Spending at the rate of $10 billion a day, Washington will rack up about $660 billion in debt by the time the ball drops in Times Square.

The yearly deficit is less 10% of the real problem though. The real problem is all the unfunded liabilities, which is why we are bankrupt. 

Alone, this would be cause for tremendous concern. But the government never pays a dime toward principal; it simply borrows more every year. This means that we are fast approaching the point at which it will become mathematically impossible for the government to pay off its debt - ever. And we're only counting the official debt. Excluded are unfunded liabilities like Social Security and Medicare benefits the government has promised but which it does not have the money to cover. With debt and unfunded liabilities of around 3,000% of its annual income, the federal government has already passed the point of no return.

So we know that at some point the government bubble will burst -- here, in Western Europe, and likely in Japan as well. So,thinking people need to keep some level of gold and silver in their portfolios (5-10%) and some level of survival preparedness -- the hunk of land somewhere that you may be able to live off, hopefully a few hundred miles away from any large urban centers and ideally in an area where you have family / connections that can help make life worth living in a period in which the civilization that was unable to live rationally breaks down and hopefully re-forms with a minimum of starvation and bloodshed.



Every civilization is temporary. Some last longer than others, but it seems quite certain that the US will go through a point of existential doubt if it survives at all, well before it's 300th birthday in 2076.





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BOcare Canceling Millions More Policies, "Working Well"

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/10/16/obama-health-care-insurance-cancellation-column/17353673/

Hundreds of thousands of Americans will soon receive cancellation letters affecting their 2015 health care plans — and that number may quickly rise into the millions. This wave of cancellations will fall into two categories. The first group hit will be in the individual market, the same group that suffered through at least 6.3 million cancellation letters last year. They will almost certainly be joined by millions of people in the small-employer market, which has 40 million plans and will be under Obamacare's control starting next year.

I don't watch much TV, but when I've turned it on the last couple of weeks, especially in IA, I'm completely floored by the number of negative Ads. The paragraph above gives us a preview of what actual news we will be getting just AFTER the election.

Just like last year, the administration knew these cancellations were coming all along. As far back as June 2010, the Obama administration 

estimated, 66% of small employer plans will face cancellation.  In a nation with a free press that operated when either side was in power, this would not stand. I can unequivocally tell you how it would operate, since we KNOW how it would operate if a Republican had done a program like BOcare and we were in any sort of election! The media would be awash with articles on "Mr President, where are the numbers for THIS year"! The Sunday talk shows would be shout fests about how we were all fooled last year, but THIS year we want this information PRIOR to the election!

Franklin among other founders said that Democracy could not operate without a free press. I doubt they ever even imagined a press so biased and in the corner of one party. Certainly, the ultimate responsibility comes down to the people, and it is sad to see that a clear majority of our people have so little memory and so little interest in keeping abreast of what is going on around them that they are going to be blindsided AGAIN by this arrogant and feckless administration.

It makes me both angry and sad to see this once great nation slide quietly into the abyss of total government dependency and control!

The irony is that President Obama and the politicians who voted for Obamacare are now  declaringthat the law is working as intended. They're right — and the millions of Americans anxiously checking their mailboxes for cancellation notices are learning it the hard way.

TP Political Speech Control, Wisconsin Test

David B. Rivkin and Andrew Grossman: Criminalizing Political Speech in Wisconsin - WSJ - WSJ:





I've covered this a couple times, but it gets zero MSM coverage, and this is a HUGE testcase for TP. The article is worth a read to just cement what we already know. They may well bring down Walker, or at least damage him enough to remove him as a presidential threat as they probably already have with Christie and Perry by similar methods.

Unfortunately, Wisconsin may be an early indication of what’s to come. Just as the Delay prosecution touched off a dozen other politically motivated cases, the Wisconsin John Doe investigation provides a template for similar mischief across the nation. It suggests that anyone can lob accusations of illegal “coordination” between an officeholder and his allies—and all a partisan prosecutor needs is evidence of a single private meeting or email to justify an intrusive and aggressive investigation. It’s that easy to tie your ideological opponents in knots for months or years on end. After Wisconsin, the temptation to use the law as a political weapon may prove irresistible.

The REAL "unfortunate" part of this is that the country is run by lawyers and judges that are 90% + members in good standing of TP (The Party, D), so this will be a nearly 100% one-way attack. Meanwhile, TP will coordinate the MSM, education, various government agencies, plus their vast resources of union, environmental activist, anti-gun, gay rights, etc groups in perfect lock step with no threat of prosecution at all.



THIS is how a nation slides to one party rule!

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The Republican Freak Show, A View From the Left

America’s looming freak show: How GOP control in 2015 will terrorize a nation – with no political repercussion - Salon.com:

The title is another example of the civility and interest in understanding that The Party (D) shows to those who have differing views.

So what is it that TP has it's panties all in a bunch over relative to the tepid and powerless political opposition they face? BO is just going to keep on ruling by executive order even if they lose the Senate, and while it might mean that BO can't get a completely obvious far lefty on the SCOTUS like a Sotomayor or Vader Ginsburg, lord knows it is difficult enough to for even a conservative president to find a conservative judge -- see Breyer. No doubt BO can get one plenty lefty through a slightly R Senate.

Well, this paragraph has something close to at least what the left sees as factual in it.

The shutdown cost the economy $24 billion in growth. It showed the nation the incompetence of House GOP leadership. It exposed the civil war in the Senate. The country saw that the party was craven, dysfunctional, agenda-free and not merely incapable of governing, but uninterested in it. After the shutdown, the share of voters identifying themselves as Republican dropped to 25 percent in Gallup polling, the lowest level in 25 years, and polls showed Democrats might have a shot at taking back the House.

So how did delaying and possibly preventing a tiny bit of government spending cost the country $24 Billion in growth? First of all, $24 Billion in a $17 Trillion economy is .014%, so they must have a DAMNED accurate way of measuring something as complicated as the US economy to know that the shutdown "cost" us $24B in growth. They don't say HOW this tiny effect was supposedly conjured by the shutdown, but it is an article of faith for TP that money spent by the government is magically "multiplied" by a factor of 2, 4 or even more, so that is probably the imagined cause of this terrible .014% effect to the fevered lefty brain.

After dealing with the only "fact" in the article, we get back to hyperbole, the staple of TP ... the shutdown "exposed" Republicans as "craven, dysfunctional, agenda-free and not merely incapable of governing, but uninterested in it". See in the TP universe, they did .014% damage to the economy, so this is a factually justified and a highly civil criticism -- we know that because TP is always civil!
In case TP would like to consider more facts (doubtful), the House passed a budget with all the money to do everything outside of BOcare -- which they said was not ready. The Constitution gives the House the power of the purse -- they are the ones that provide funding, and not funding everything the President wants is exactly what "separation of powers" means.  Harry Reid and BO would not allow that budget to pass the Senate, and took the position that they would not negotiate unless they got a "clean bill", meaning one that had all the funding for BOcare that they wanted. These facts are well covered by Thomas Sowell, linked here.

The core difference here is a difference in world view. TP assumes that "government is great, government is good, we thank it for our daily bread" -- the government is central to TP life, and the idea that it can be flawed and even counterproductive to economic and other forms of human well being is simply not accounted for in their model. Total Federal, State and local government spending in the US is now around 40% of GDP  a question that nobody who pledges allegiance to TP will ever answer is "how much is enough"? In their model, since government is only good, there are no barriers at all to any figure up to 100% -- they simply can't conceive of there being a downside to government spending.

This view means that they simply can't imagine people not being thrilled by everything about a new government program like BOcare.

But a year later, Republicans are in no danger of losing the House and have a better than even chance to take back the Senate. Even at the time, it was clear that a feckless, frenetic media — which immediately went on to treat Obamacare web site glitches as just as catastrophic as the GOP’s shutdown debacle— would let the party off the hook. Yet so have voters. The Republican base is more than content to have its leaders do nothing but block and sabotage Obama. And the Democratic base still disproportionately sits out the midterms, which lets the obstructionists dominate the agenda.

Millions of people losing their existing insurance and being forced to pay vastly higher rates had nothing to do with a turn in the Democrats popularity in the minds of TP believers -- all merely a result of a "feckless, frenetic media". It certainly couldn't be that Republicans declared BOcare to not be ready for prime time -- and it turned out that it wasn't. Nah, in the TP universe, people ought to still be stewing over an imagined .014% reduced growth in the economy rather than concerned over paying $25K for insurance rather than previously paying $10K as in one case I know of where one of the couple had a stroke in late summer and then the policy they had was cancelled because it "didn't meet BOcare standards", so they needed to find a new policy in the midst of dealing with recovery from a stroke. Yes, they and millions like them (few as bad we hope)  have no reason to be concerned about BOcare outside of media influence, and should still be fuming over a .014% reduced economic growth.

The discussion this country needs to have is about the perpetually increasing percentage of our economy that is consumed by the government, and what sort of limits (if any) might be rationally considered. Reading articles like this doesn't present much hope for that very much needed discussion ever being had.
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WMD, Ebola, Economic Collapse, Global Warming, The Price of Propoganda

Bush Didn’t Lie | National Review Online:

I'm not going to go through the whole titular list here in detail, but propaganda takes many forms and ultimately it always has a very high cost for the people that become anesthetized to the always complicated, uncertain, and messy world of actual data and information. I will return to the specific of WMD.

We tend to think of propaganda in only the most blatant forms -- the old Tariq Aziz "Iraq is winning the war", or USSR claims of superior production, science, medicine, etc. The slightly more subtle forms are even more dangerous because they prevent large masses of people from dealing with a closer model of reality that could allow them to advance, or at least stave off the myriad disasters that result from not dealing with the real world.

When someone says "settled science", "Bush lied, people died", "We won't see Ebola in the US", and a broad range of other simple pronouncements, they are dealing in propaganda -- maybe because they are directly trying to mislead you, maybe because they themselves are under the spell already, or most likely because they have nothing that transcends the very broken and imperfect reality of the real world and DESPERATELY want to believe that "there are experts / power / government / science / ???" that have managed to make this mortal coil into a meaningful and understood reality that they can bank on.

But in their soul, they know it is not so, so they fight those that deal with reality as it is -- messy, largely unknown, meaningless (when taken in only it's own context), unpredictable, capricious, dangerous and totally uncaring.

Paradoxically, nobody can deal with reality as it is without having something that transcends it, so they can achieve enough distance to allow objectivity -- for thousands of years, religion was that mechanism, with various philosophies providing a weak second place, and Christianity being the undisputed ruler as to actually SUCCESSFULLY allowing reality to be managed and often subdued in the service of the transcendent infinite.

In the past few days, more information has been coming out ( http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html) on what was known to widely read conservative readers and readers of this blog for a long time http://bilber99.blogspot.com/2006/06/of-course-iraq-had-wmd.html.

BUT, for propaganda to really fog the brain, it must create a MYTH , which is actually the only way we ever  relate to the world, it has just been given a bad name by the myth-makers on the left scurrying to replace the "myths" of religion, western culture, classical Greece and Rome, science (the ordered universe) with the "models" of today's "sciences" -- humans ONLY operate in the world of model/mythology, as in "a simplified story about the world that is explanatory enough to allow people to operate successfully, but is less than fully "factual" in it's detail".

I deal with computers with a more complete model than "95%+" of the rest of the world because I studied computer science and worked in the field for 30 years which included low level boot operations, assembly language programming and machine language patches. The ESSENCE of successful modern economics is SPECIALIZATION driven by private property and Ricardo's law of comparative advantage. I was able to apply my specialized skill and be paid for it, so 95% of the rest of the world can deal with computers with a MUCH less detailed model (myth).

We all deal with 99.999% of the world at a pretty high level model -- which is all we can do given our limited brains and the overall complexity of the world, but it can trip us up very badly when the models we are presented are architected to be false. The core of the "Bush Lied" statement is the myth (this one based on very very little fact) that W went to war ONLY over "AN ACTIVE WEAPONS PROGRAM" -- the basis of this lie is covered in detail in this article http://ace.mu.nu/archives/352462.php ... essentially we went to war because we KNEW Saddam had WMD, and HE DID ... thousands of rounds of it, not the hundreds that were disclosed. So why didn't the W administration publish this information?

My guess is that the major reason is the same one that caused Reagan to never try to combat the "Reagan sleeps in meetings" myth (he was the boss, if he was tired, he cancels the meeting), or W to combat the "Mission Accomplished" myth (the banner was the ships, not Ws). When the opposition controls 90%+ of the press / education / entertainment storytelling industry and is actively on the job creating their mythology, whatever you say is only going to get people to revisit the media mythology and ignore the facts of the day going forward more than they are already. One of the highest costs of having a party as dominant as TP is that the healthy give and take of real complex information vs one-liner myths is effectively suppressed long before the dominant party reaches total control.

Trying to make the "we told you so" case would not have worked at all for the "50%+" of people that were NOT going to buy that we went to war because we KNEW that Saddam had WMD and we were of course CORRECT -- because he did, everyone in the world knew it because he had used them, and stockpiles of thousands of rounds were and still are being discovered. This is no surprise to those that deal in reality and it is only another cause for myth-making in the case of "news" outlets like the NYTs ... the myth has to be updated a bit to " focus on we ONLY were told that we were going to war because of an ACTIVE WMD program".

People are very unwilling to give up their myths ... to those already in the thrall of "Bush Lied", there are no facts that will change their mind -- not even 100K dead in a US city due to sarin from Saddam's stockpiles, because in their minds, ONLY "active weapons program" sarin would count as having been a reason to invade Iraq!

The current level of media bias, plus the level of public willingness to believe in the "myth of the day" prevents us from taking reasonable actions (like a temporary flight ban) to prevent ebola from killing people in the US, continual tax and spend policies that destroy our economy, and focus on warming that "may happen" in 100 years ... although hasn't happened as predicted in the past 15, rather than energy policies for the present good. The list is much longer -- as we slide to one party rule with a media in lock step, the set of issues over which rational discussion is effectively suppressed becomes ever larger, and our exposure to reality "surprising us" increases proportionally.

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Ebola, Asian Flu, Dioxin, Politics vs Science

2005: Obama rips Bush on flu response:

In the top linked article we see then Senator BO rip W on "failure to contain the avian flu" ... and the nation was all up in arms about the dangers of the avian flu back in '05! TP and the MSM were all over that one!

Fast forward to 2014. We have a relatively easy to contain virus so far isolated to W Africa, vs dealing with the avian flu virus in Asia, a FAR more integral part of the world economy / number of flights. Out ability to take precautions to not allow cases into the US would have been child's play by comparison.

What we are being told is that "Ebola is hard to transmit" ... must have DIRECT contact with bodily fluids -- which we certainly hope is still true, but in the deadly Russian Roulette game of viral mutation, there are no guarantees.

In Danger of Airborne Ebola, we read:

It's the single greatest concern I've ever had in my 40-year public health career," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "I can't imagine anything in my career -- and this includes HIV -- that would be more devastating to the world than a respiratory transmissible Ebola virus."

The authors of the article took solace in the fact that nobody could identify a virus that had made that shift, but failed to mention that virology is less than 100 years old and virologists are not necessarily historians. We can be QUITE certain that smallpox made the jump from animal to human in the last 10K years and we know nothing about the mutations required to do that, and thus the Europeans famously had resistance, but it ripped through the natives in N America like the Grim Reaper.

How is one to understand the vast difference in how the Avian Flu was viewed by TP and it's media arm in 2005 vs how Ebola is viewed today? My only explanation is that for TP, POLITICS IS ALWAYS SUPREME -- it IS life! It trumps all -- life, safety, the good of the nation, family, ALL -- it is religion practiced in a way that very few religious practitioners outside of suicide bombers approach. In fact, TP tends to have an awful lot of "understanding" for suicide bombers -- TP just assumes it will "get all the virgins" (or whatever they see as "pleasure", their ultimate good) in this life!

It seems to be that when TP is in power, whatever it's Dear Leader decides to do is Holy Writ, and any thought that might not be in agreement by anyone -- even just "non-political scientists" ( an endangered species in the modern TP controlled world), is not welcome.

This is not new or unusual in any way. In the late '90s we were treated to endless diatribes against the horror of Dioxins -- up until it was discovered that Ben and Jerry's ice cream, a darling of the left set, contained a TON of this supposedly horrific toxin ... oops, never mind.

We can now see the gathering decline of the "Global Warming" fiasco for the left -- almost certainly, in less than 10 years, a lefty will look at you like a "cow at a passing train" (a Don Henley song line I love from "If Dirt Were Dollars") if you are so ridiculous as to bring such a thing up.

Don't worry, if Ebola turns out to spread farther than expected it will be the fault of Christians and Conservatives! In the unlikely event we ever have a non-TP president again, an unsightly rash spread by skin grafts will be a national crisis! Such is the way of TP and it's media arm.




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No Warming, HEY! Look At Those WALRUSES!

The Walrus and the Climate Hysterics | Power Line:

The people of Oz were fooled by the Wizard for a long time until Toto pulled back the curtain. It is even  harder when you have the whole dominant political party, the media, the universities, and multi-billion dollar global Warmist industry intent on keeping that curtain closed!

We even have to delete information off Wikipedia to try to fool the people at this point ...

Walruses have always swarmed on land during the fall. This is called a “haulout.” In 2007, Wikipedia said, in its entry on walruses:
In the non-reproductive season (late summer and fall) walruses tend to migrate away from the ice and form massive aggregations of tens of thousands of individuals on rocky beaches or outcrops.
That portion of the walrus entry was recently deleted. Hmm, wonder why?

But, until Google decides to suppress searches (are we going to need an unbiased search engine?), we can find data a lot better than we used to http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic33-2-226.pdf ... a scientific article from 1978 that talks about haul-outs back to 1900 ... with a peak in the 1930s. 

As PL points out, this is a scam plain and simple, but since it is a scam of THE PARTY and it's media arm, it takes at least a tiny more work to prove it -- I certainly suspected it as soon as I saw it. Too damned "convenient", and if one watches the ice, 2014 was nothing unusual in the last 10 years ... 2012 was the low, last year was a big INCREASE in ice, this year was "average" for the past 10. 

Let's face it, the Warmist Industry is desperate -- no warming in at least 18 years, with prospects for yet another extreme winter running high in the US, no hurricanes this season yet with time running out, low tornado activity, they MUST come up with SOMETHING, at this point, so fabrication is REQUIRED! Desperation is never pretty, but it is very easy to understand. 

No matter what human is yammering at you ... DEFINITELY including me, stay skeptical! We humans are a damned unreliable bunch -- we shit, we puke, we even die(talk about complete unreliability!), and we make a TON of mistakes even when doing our best -- oh, and we OFTEN will do nearly anything to cover our failings. 

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Hayek: The Fatal Conceit

Hayek is a very precise and organized thinker, I'll open with his statement on what the book is about:

This book argues that our civilization depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation , on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism. To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection – the comparative increase of population and wealth – of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting , reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be ‘fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it’ (Genesis 1: 28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

He points out what in many ways ought to be completely obvious -- that humans have no more control over the economic systems that were evolved by trial and error have been selected because they were more successful than than we control our lack tails or gills, or that we tend to enjoy sex. Capitalism wasn't designed, it was evolved (or created by God).
Worse, like disease, dying, not being able to fly, etc in life, there are aspects of Capitalism that we tend to dislike. SO, we WANT to change them! We don't want to have to "unintentionally conform to certain traditional and largely moral practices" -- we want to create what works and is better, NOW, intentionally!

Contrast that with his statement on Socialism:

The demands of socialism are not moral conclusions derived from the traditions that formed the extended order that made civilization possible. Rather, they endeavor to overthrow these traditions by a rationally designed moral system whose appeal depends on the instinctual appeal of its promised consequences. They assume that, since people had been able to generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts, they must also be able to design an even better and more gratifying system.

And so we have a "Conflict of Visions", described excellently by Sowell in his book of that title which I reviewed here. "The Fatal Conceit" is this idea that "we can do better" -- in the large, as in the replacement of Capitalism with Socialism.

Fatal Conceit can be viewed as source work for Sowell's "Conflict" ... Sowell is more readable and easier to follow, but Hayek is worth the effort. There is a FUNDAMENTAL difference between the visions of people that believe in either a created or evolved state of human civilization and social mechanisms like Capitalism, and those that believe that humans are completely capable to create any form of civilization / mechanisms they desire, including Utopia -- usually socialist/communist.

Fatal Conceit covers a good deal of detail on how the two sides view economics and the kinds of problems with production, motivation and outcome that command driven (Socialist systems) have and will always encounter, and how/why the distributed Capitalist system surmounts those problems.

Hayek was an agnostic, but he closes the book with a chapter that he put in reluctantly -- since in general he is not religious, but I found quite interesting. He makes a point I've tried to make a few times:

In any case, the religious view that morals were determined by processes incomprehensible to us may at any rate be truer (even if not exactly in the way intended) than the rationalist delusion that man, by exercising his intelligence, invented morals that gave him the power to achieve more than he could ever foresee.

and

even an agnostic ought to concede that we owe our morals, and the tradition that has provided not only our civilization but our very lives, to the acceptance of such scientifically unacceptable factual claims.

There are many intelligent thinkers from history that finally admit (often grudgingly)  that even though they are not believers, Western civilization was not possible without Judaeo / Christian religion.

Well worth the read, but read Sowell first.

Republicans Fake Concern About Secret Service Protection

Showing Concern for the President, Even While Criticizing Him - NYTimes.com:

The Party (TP - Democrat),  hated W enough that making a movie fantasizing on his assassination ...  "Death of a President" on the assassination of George W Bush was somewhat popular in their ranks ... see  here.

TP has a hard time understanding that there are considerations higher than politics, thus the linked article.  When a shoe was hurled at W, the NYTs (and most of American media) found it to be very entertaining and appropriate -- concerns for his safety were FAR from their consideration, or that of Democrats in in Congress. Isn't the opposition the same?

So here we have the NYT's perplexed -- and largely unbelieving that Republicans would care about the protection of a president they disagree with. In order to understand this apparent contradiction, one would have to hold a number of things as being of higher import than day to day political positions. Say God, the Constitution, being an American President or basic humanity being more important than  political positions.

As an example to members of TP, potentially they would still care about the safety of a neighbor that didn't cheer for the same sports team that they do -- I'm guessing that they might still feel bad if they were killed in a car accident.

But this is hard for TP when it comes to politics! Being a member of TP in good standing and being 100% against the opposition is what counts! It is why it is OK for the IRS to target conservatives and conservative groups, or why the Koch brothers are evil incarnate while big TP donors are heroes, and a host of other discontinuities.

It is in fact one of the things that "the opposition" opposes about TP -- the idea that politics should trump all else, which of course to TP is one more reason that the opposition has to be destroyed -- maybe even killed, as in the case many of them hoped for relative to W.  To be a true member of TP in good standing, TP must trump your religion,  family and ALL ELSE!

The Times DOES miss the one obvious cynical reason that Republicans would be VERY concerned about the safety of BO -- even though I suspect it is actually a quite bi-partisan reason.

JOE BIDEN!

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NYTs Discovers Liberal Fund Raising Hypocrisy

Are Liberals Fund-Raising Hypocrites? - NYTimes.com:

It's a pretty long article with no surprises to readers of this blog -- well, of course they are (hypocrites), but it really doesn't matter because while the NYTs deigns to do an article claiming they OUGHT to be more transparent, it isn't likely that the NYTs is going to shift sides or hammer on the issue.

I did enjoy the opening alternate universe in which Republicans had won big in '12 and then went around the Filibuster in '13 to pack the DC court with conservatives ... even the NYTs understands that they would be absolutely apocalyptic!

The elimination of judicial filibusters in November 2013 allowed Democrats to approve, by a simple majority, three of Obama’s appointees to the United States Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, giving liberals a 7-4 majority.

Because of the administrative law and national security cases it hears, the D.C. Circuit is considered the second most important court in the nation.

Now, only a year after the fact, since the TP controlled MSM covers it not at all, even the right wing has generally forgotten. When the degree of media control is as great as it is in the US, even those of us in the token opposition have a hard time keeping track of all the outrages -- nearly all the battles are total losses for the opposition to the massive TP advantage, so it is simply hard to be losing and outraged all the time.

The article failed to mention the biggest reason that "Dark Money" is growing on the right -- the IRS. How many times do conservatives have to be audited, or donor lists compromised and given to left wing and government organizations as they were for Walker donors in WI before there is concern about having your name on those lists?

There is no such similar problem from the left -- in fact, having your name ON donor lists to left wing causes may well help you avoid audits, regulatory attention or other negative outcomes from happening.

I loved this quote:

 “The more transparent we can be, the better. Progressive values are much more in line with transparency,” LaMarche said during our conversation.

I suspect that he even believes it, as does the NYTs, which is a major part of the reason that we are in such a sad state of affairs. Notice the "transparency" of the BO administration? What TP is "transparent" about are their STATED OBJECTIVES -- truth, beauty, equality, saving the planet, etc

What they are NOT transparent at all about are their OUTCOMES and their METHODS ... massive deficits become non-stories, lowest work participation since the '70s is little known, industries and people fleeing the nation (eg Burger King) due to tax policies are touched on but quickly disappear, using the IRS and other agencies to hound "political enemies", etc. ... those items are not very transparent at all.

The marketing message of BOcare ... "lower rates, better healthcare, if you like what you can have you can keep it", THAT is VERY "transparent" -- the reality of massive rate increases, losing your doctor, largest providers dropping out of the pools as in MN, etc ... that is covered little or none.

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Celebrating The Profane

The Tide of the Culture War Shifts - NYTimes.com:

For a younger generation of voters, the old right-wing nostrums about the “sanctity of life” and the “sanctity of marriage” have lost their power, revealed as intrusions on human freedom. 

Yes, as the NYTs celebrates, morality is indeed an "intrusion on human freedom" --  as are a lot of things. Death, disease, our corporeal selves -- requiring air, food, water, sleep, etc.. To be human is to deal with many "intrusions on freedom". "Sanctity", sacredness, that certainly ought to be stamped out, 



No morality, or "morality of currently in power" ALSO turns out to be an "intrusion" unless you are able to meld your will 100% to that of The Party and it's wholly approved positions as described in the NYTs. 



As philosophers have known forever, without God, there is no morality outside of power -- or rather, no morality with teeth, and let's face it, that is the only kind that has any effect on humans. Nietzsche's claim "God is dead" was a lament, not a boast -- without God and a religion like Christianity, "might", "the will", became morality. Hitler providing the most obvious example of what morality without God is like -- Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. provide others. Thus, the celebration of the profane as opposed to the sacred.



Humans are moral -- we were either endowed by our creator, or were randomly selected over a few million years to have arrived at having an internal moral compass. It can be set in a lot of different directions -- beheading, marrying 9 year old girls, and killing infidels to get a bunch of virgins in heaven is a current setting in the news, but it will be set. The NYTs gleefully looks to the worship of The Party and The State as the ultimate moral arbiter ... the new profane as sacred.



So "sanctity" becomes outlawing Big Gulps, smoking, guns, gas burning transportation, etc, etc. Or maybe driving a high milage car, eating organic and even voting for The Party. Heil BO!



The NYTs celebrates the removal of restrictions on killing the unborn and monogamy. The old moral code created Western Civilization and took us to the moon -- but it took most of a couple thousand years to catch on and really get the job done. So the "sexual revolution" really got going in the '60s, "gay marriage" in 2001 in Denmark. One of the hallmarks of the "new morality" is ME ME ME with NO KIDS! (or very few).



I wonder how "no kids" works out in even a few hundred years? Well, the NYTs might be right here:

The shift in public opinion might not be enough for Democrats to keep the Senate this year. But over time, it may help spell an end to the politics of cultural division.

One way or another, totalitarianism or just the silence of a culture leaving the stage because it has no children to carry on, I think it is pretty certain that TP will "end the politics of cultural division" -- or as it used to be known, Liberal Democracy (the kind of "liberal" that meant pluralistic)





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