Lack of Will, Having Another Beer

The Iraqis’ “lack of will”. . .and Obama’s | Power Line:

Last week, our Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, said that the Iraqi army "lacked the will to defend Ramadi".

That is hardly surprising really. Iraq was a country drawn on a map by Winston Churchill (and others). It is made up of Sunni and Shia Muslims as well as Kurds. It never had any great historical common ground -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident" kind of stuff. It might as well be split into parts of Iraq, Turkey and who knows what. A lot of the countries over in the sandpile are just lines on maps, and often not even lines along any natural boundary. The IA - MN border is a bit hard to pick out when driving. Most of WI - MN is pretty easy. It makes a difference.

The obvious irony of our SECDEF saying the Iraqis "lack the will", when it is abundantly clear that our current administration for sure lacks the will big time is uncomfortable and sad.

Does America lack the will, or just BO? The evidence is strong that we as a nation now do -- there is no real outcry against BO's feckless foreign policy. On momentum we still have troops in South Korea and Germany along with many other places as remnants of WWII and the age when we were the "exceptional dominant superpower", but those seem anachronistic.

Historically, the superpower list is a short one ... Egypt, Greece, Persia, Rome, "The Barbarians" -- Genghis Khan, Visigoths, etc, then the British Empire, then the US -- contested with the USSR for 45 years, but then the sole remaining.

"Everyone has to believe in something -- I believe I'll have another beer" might best summarize the current American outlook. We are certainly not superman "Truth, Freedom and the American Way"! We are definitely not "God and Country" ... it would likely be a federal crime to try to make that a slogan! We are certainly not "The New Frontier" -- we have given up on frontiers, space is left to Russia and the Chinese.

America today is a lot like a large family where a once prosperous last grandparent has passed on, trying to split up the remaining assets without out too much rancor. Can the blacks, whites, browns, old, young, more prosperous and less prosperous find some mostly equitable way to hack up the old family business / farm / legacy, because it is clear nobody wants to dirty their hands running it, and they sure as hell are NOT going to be trying to expand it!

Why would they do that? It was "imperialistic", "created on the backs of the poor, the black, etc" ... besides, BUILDING something is HARD WORK! Even worse, while the vision of building perfection and certainly the criticism of what was built before seems clear, doing yourself is fraught with issues of imperfection, "unfairness" ... "inequality"  ... Pass the beer!

Lacking will when what you were bequeathed is a pile of sand with a bunch of unrelated tribes on it is understandable. Lacking will when you were bequeathed the greatest nation on earth, shining city on a hill, one nation under God, liberty and justice for all, sea to shining sea, amber waves of grain and all that is a WHOLE lot sadder.

Where does "will" come from in the liberal mind? "I gotta get me what that other guy has!"?

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Benghazi Boredom Story, E-mail Edition

Hillary Clinton 2016: The 15 Benghazi emails you need to read - POLITICO:



After over a century of expert mass media/advertising manipulation you would think that Americans would be the most sophisticated and cautious information consumers.



But we are clearly not.



We love a "story". We ought to know by now that we love a story, and given our weakness for such, advertisers and media people work very hard to give us what we want. Naturally, with the content that THEY want!



Story of the Iraq War -- "Bush lied, people died" ... everything else from the MSM fits on that theme and supports it. Information that doesn't fit that theme -- and may make people think that it isn't that simple at all, or the theme is far from correct, is simply not reported, or reported in a way that seems to support the theme. (eg, WMD found in Iraq or Syria today are "just there")



Story of Watergate -- "Nixon broke the law in coverup, courageous media defeated evil liar". On NPR, this story gets trotted out a couple of times a year as bigger than WWII. For the left, it was -- it was at least as good as the Berlin Wall falling was for people of the right. Again, a strong theme ... reported often over decades becomes a simple established fact.



Nobody is going to tell you to go off and read 15 e-mails on Bush going to Iraq or the Watergate story -- my God, in a nation of where "Hope and Change" works, 15 emails is beyond "War and Peace"!



Libya could easily be done as Iraq and Watergate (and many other things have been).



"Obama and Hillary broke Libya and thousands of lives, including the US Ambassador were lost". I'm not a marketer ... the "Dardanelles Disaster" was often called "Churchill's Folly" ... the double D's work well. Rhyming is very good.  Get the "hook" right and the narrative fits neatly ... like a popular song.



As one of the e-mails referenced shows, Hillary was big in the Libyan "strategy". BO and Hillary, with no congressional vote, destabilized Libya and took down Gaddafi who had become remarkably well behaved after he saw what happened to Saddam. Gaddafi had unilaterally gave up his WMD programs and opened for inspection.  That tidbit was of course one of the little facts that did not fit well with "Bush lied, people died", so there was not a lot of coverage for it.



"O-Hillary broke Lib - I -yah, now they own it!" ... in which case things like thousands of refugees dying in trying to escape via the Mediterranean, Christians beheaded in Libya, the death of the Ambassador and Navy Seals, etc would be seen as an ever growing "bill for damages"  for breaking a nation for reasons that nobody seems interested in even asking -- to the extent that the BO administration has had an answer it is something like "Arab Spring". "Get rid of the dictator and good things will happen".



The other e-mails in the list that would fit a narrative very well (if there was one) are the ones about that relate to Sidney Blumenthal "Sid Vicious" every evil one has to have "henchmen". Bush - Cheney - Rove for example. Blumenthal fits such a role exceedingly well -- if anyone cared even slightly about the story of Libya and Benghazi. But, since any hint of a narrative has been scrupulously avoided, there is no story. 



Which is really the eternal question. To create a story or not? There can easily be a story built on nothing -- The "outing" of Valerie Plame was a story with no real basis, yet it occupied a Grand Jury and much media time from 2003 - 2006. There was no "outing" because she wasn't a secret agent -- but if she had been, it was confirmed it would have been Richard Armitage that outed her, and he was considered one of the "good guys" against the Iraq war, so nobody would care if he accidentally did.



ALL stories from the real world are over-simplifications of facts. "Kennedy got us to the moon" and "Reagan ended the USSR" are both simplifications, but stories with significant basis in the real world. None of our stories are completely true -- no human has access to anything even close to all the facts, and even if we did, without significant moulding of the picture of reality it is impossible for us to process.



The DEFINITION of human understanding is very close to "having a narrative". Can I give you an "elevator pitch" on what happened in Vietnam, how I met my wife, how the Internet works, why I think Obama is a bad president ... and on and on to infinity. For things we truly understand at a deep level, we have non-story subconscious "core truth", but we can't communicate that -- that is why the super smart programmer often comes across as "not having a clue", because he can't make a "story" out of his understanding, it is too detailed and deep.



So "The Story" of Libya and Benghazi is a boring non-story. "A bunch of Republicans trying to pin something on Hillary or BO". Most of this is just due to the big capable story telling guns in the MSM not being on the job telling the tale, some of it is due to the decline of America.



In 1979, when Iranians took the US Embassy in Tehran, the nation was riveted. Some of this was no doubt due to the fact of hostages being held, but a good deal of it was due to A UNITED STATES EMBASSY having been overrun. Even after Vietnam, many Americans still saw this nation as the top Superpower -- ahead of our nearest competitor the USSR. Seeing us unable to defend our Embassy in what we saw as a small backwater nation was something that hurt the pride of people proud to be Americans.



That is probably the real basic story here. We are no longer the nation we were in 1979. Seeing an Embassy destroyed, the US Ambassador killed and body desecrated, brave Navy Seals calling for support with no response from our leadership has no effect on 80% of Americans today. We are not a nation that believes that we are exceptional. We believe that it is possible to care only for our ease in the manner of cows chewing our cuds.



Today we like stories that make us feel good. It is too much trouble to test their truth or consider their dark sides.



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Proof Of God, The Inhumanity of Western Civilization

Dennis Prager -- Judaism's Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism (and then Christianity) Rejected Homosexuality:

This is a somewhat longish but highly important article, VERY worth the time to read. It is uncomfortable, because it paints human (especially male) sexuality in a light that we would prefer not to be painted -- but it makes a very strong case for the truth of that painting.

The basic proposal of the article is that Judaism created the concept of "homosexual" -- in all other ancient life, sex was a power relation between penetrator and penetrated. Gender was just one of the many things that didn't matter to the ancient male.

The revolutionary nature of Judaism's prohibiting all forms of non-marital sex was nowhere more radical, more challenging to the prevailing assumptions of mankind, than with regard to homosexuality. Indeed, Judaism may be said to have invented the notion of homosexuality, for in the ancient world sexuality was not divided between heterosexuality and homosexuality. That division was the Bible's doing. Before the Bible, the world divided sexuality between penetrator (active partner) and penetrated (passive partner).

Prager covers a lot of ground in the piece -- the ancient civilizations and sexualized religions that surrounded the Jews as well as the Greeks, the Romans and others. Quite in contrast to the idea that Judaism and Christianity "subjugated women", he points out the obvious fact that males are more powerful -- they take what they want by force, and what they often want is sex. Without restraint, the world they create bears little resemblance to Western Civilization -- even in its rapidly declining form.

I've often stated the things that most convince me of Christianity:

1. Nobody dies for something they know to be false. Many of the disciples that bore witness to the Resurrection would have had to know it to be false if that were the case, yet they went to their painful deaths as martyrs testifying to it as truth. Not human behavior if it were not true. 
2. Nobody would make up the New Testament -- it is full of things that are simply extremely poor salesmanship. Peter denying Christ, the bickering among the disciples, the differences in the accounts. Including the testimony of women as witnesses (they didn't get the vote in the US until 1920, their status in the 1st-2nd centuries was nada). Sure, TODAY, we understand that a too pat story with too perfect hero's is a sign of fabrication, but the ancient world did not see that -- they wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, etc ... a suffering saviour that dies a horrible death on a cross? Not a good founding story for a religion!  

To these, I will now add the following proof. Without intervention from a higher power,  powerful men are not going to give up total sexual license and limit themselves to one or even a small number of females. Even today, young men regularly destroy their lives or die because they are completely unable to trade short term pleasure / power / thrills / experience for longer term gain. This is with the influence of thousands of years of attempted civilization. Praeger puts it better:

"In all my research on this subject, nothing moved me more than the Talmudic law that Jews were forbidden to sell slaves or sheep to non-Jews, lest the non-Jews engage in homosexuality and bestiality. That was the world in which rabbis wrote the Talmud, and in which, earlier, the Bible was written. Asked what is the single greatest revelation I have derived from all my researches, I always respond, "That there had to have been divine revelation to produce the Torah." The Torah was simply too different from the rest of the world, too against man's nature, to have been solely man-made."

We can pick up a living thing and instantly know "this is not of human construction". Or we can go to any of our stores and pick up items that are clearly "not a construction of nature".

Just as we can look around us at the universe and know in our soul that this was created, even more so, we can realize that without the hand of God, none of what we call Western Civilization today would exist. Thanks be to God that he has promised that his Word and Church will endure, so it will not ALL be lost -- but only the most blind can fail to see that massive pieces of the once great civilization are falling around us.

As Praeger says in another part of the article, even if most people were blinded, we will never look at blindness as "normal"!

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Tactical Setback Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Polar Ice, To Melt or Not to Melt

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



This is ONE data point from NASA. To summarize:

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

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



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



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Trigger Intellectualism

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



The linked somewhat pretentious article can be summarized as:

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

The article closes with: 

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

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



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



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



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





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The Gas Can Explains It All

Five Years of Gas Can Hell! - Beautiful Anarchy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wings, Bikers, Gangs, Waco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Stephanopoulos Behind the Curtain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Republican Death By Train

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Damned bloodthirsty Republicans!









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MN Orchestra, Crying With Cuban Pride

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

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

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

Isn't it all so wonderful ...

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

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

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

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

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

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Hopeful End of Jeb

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



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



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



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



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



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

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



Power for power's sake.



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



The quicker Jeb is gone, the better.



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Casey At The Bat, US vs China

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



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



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



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



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



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



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

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

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



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The 50 Year $22Trillion War

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

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

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

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

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

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Let's Agree With BO on Wealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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