Old Ladies and Buses

School Bans Superhero Lunchboxes -- Why It Makes No Sense Morally | National Review Online:

It reminds me of William F. Buckley’s famous retort to those who claimed there was no moral distinction between the United States and the Soviet Union. If you have one man who pushes old ladies in front of oncoming buses, Buckley explained, and you have another man who pushes old ladies out of the way of oncoming buses, it simply will not do to describe them both as the sorts of men who push old ladies around. A country, and a civilization, that actively chooses to render such distinctions meaningless has lost the confidence to sustain itself.

This is an excellent column by Jonah. Both nations and people need to have some basic training in religion, mythology, philosophy, or at least superhero comics (morality),  to understand the difference between pushing the old lady in front of the bus or pushing her out of the way of the bus.

When the distinction is lost, that civilization has lost it's way. Unfortunately, we are that civilization.

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Opossums and Bernie, Viva Venezuela !

Opossum germs 'kill 17 babies in Venezuela hospital' - BBC News:

Seventeen dead babies in hospitals due to contamination by an infestation of opossums is somewhat shocking even by the standards of "good government" that socialism engenders -- that is what you see if you follow the top link. Here is WaPO on how well socialism is going in Venezuela ... short answer beyond the opossums and dead babies, "not well" (it's a January article ... as the babies attest, it's worse now).

Things are so bad that there isn't a bank run — who wants to save their worthless currency? — but rather, as Jonathan Wheatley puts it, a supermarket run. People have lined up for days to try to buy whatever they can, which isn't much, from grocery stores that are even more empty than usual. The government has been forced to send the military into these supermarkets to maintain some semblance of order, before it came up with an innovative new strategy for shortening the lines kicking people out of them. Now they're rationing spots in line, based on the last digit of people's national ID cards.

While BO is threatening congress and crowing about his "accomplishments", lefties have taken a bit to chiding other Americans that "hey, at least you aren't refugees"!  This is true -- YET, although when civilizations collapse, it tends not to be an orderly thing at all. Today your masses are standing at the stations welcoming the lumpen other masses from the ever growing myriad of disasters around the globe -- tomorrow, you ARE the disaster!

Let's face it -- police being assassinated in the street, dead babies washing up on beaches in Turkey, Europe is struggling under the weight of something like 350K refugees with many more to come, Trump, Cecil -- there really isn't much time to cover all the crazy in the world. Even if we had not long ago lost all common sense and any semblance of rational priority.

Hey, we have a SOCIALIST in the lead in a number of polls HERE -- in what used to be AMERICA! Even WaPO can look at the results of socialism with a semi-rational eye when it is in Venezuela, but much like any of us seeing someone else die in a car accident,  cancer, Alzheimer's, etc, etc we miss any possible connection to our own situation.

This is America -- it can't happen here! ... let's not focus very much on "Why not"?

We used to call California "La La Land" -- now it's a worldwide phenomenon, only here in the US "The Party" has achieved such a level of media control that the GDP numbers get changed so we have no idea if the economy is shrinking or growing, and we only vaguely know that the percent of people actually working is now at 40 year lows, productivity is ALSO dropping, AND, we are the only "advanced economy" in which this is so ... the list of woe is endless.

There just isn't enough time to even LIST all the bad news, even if people had the attention span to read the list  -- which they don't.

Perhaps the only sort of thing to do is to talk about Trump, the Cecil Dentist, and congratulate each other on not being refugees -- YET!

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"I have to go take a Dukakis"

Uncle Joe: A Democrat Republicans Can Believe In - The Daily Beast:

It's PJ, it's entertainment, the "Road Trip Poll" is near the end and is MUST read, but it is all PJ and good. FOR HUMOR! PJ is close to all we have to keep all the abundant humor of the left wing from being wasted!

I need the laugh -- back from seeing Tula, so in withdrawal, blood work Thursday AM, yearly checkup next week -- nothing but shed bills, problems and winter on the horizon from this jaundiced Tuesday POV.

Here is another "Tuesday POV" that PJ would likely recommend -- not that I will be following anything like this song, but my brain does have a tendency to call up songs for streams of words with reckless abandon ...

On the "songs from the Moose brain jukebox", consider this one with "Tula Time" in the appropriate spots ... along with some riffs on "She's a little cutie, a very special lady / baby ..." where they sorta fit. She likes it pretty well -- even with a VERY bad singer butchering it.

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California Public Pensioner $241K Per Year

Daniel Borenstein: Public pension-spiking Bay Area fire chief faces big cut in $241,000-a-year payout - ContraCostaTimes.com:

If you work or worked in the private sector for a living, this story will really bring a tear to your eye.

A public employee had a meager salary of $194K a year and was forced to scrape by on a pension of only $241K a year for the past 6 years. Now he MAY face a 25% cut for gaming the system!

I'm sure most of you will cry crocodile tears if he is forced into poverty at $180K a year!

When you see tens of thousands of public union employees get out and demonstrate and even make threats of violence against Scott Walker, you can rest assured they have a VERY good reason!

Combine large salaries, superb benefits and hugely lucrative retirement packages with giant financial kickbacks to "The Party" (TP-D) as well as tremendous door to door foot soldier work for TP and you have one of the chief cornerstones of political corruption in the SSOA (Socialist States of America).

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Broken Windows, White House Renamed To Trump Palace

Obama will rename the highest U.S. peak, dropping McKinley for Denali - The Washington Post:



Our current "elite media" have less foresight than a 7 year old after two Dews and a bag of candy.



This nation elected BO ... MN elected Jessie Ventura ... one really doesn't need to look at the polls very long, let alone watch the trash that just falls out of something like the "VMAs" on Miley Cyrus to realize that at this level of decadence and idiocy in a nation, ANYTHING (bad) is possible!  But our capacity for good has sunk to pretty much zilch! We could EASILY be "Trumped"!



Tyranny doesn't happen overnight -- the important thing is to get "executive orders" to be common, for the great and the small. Win a few big ones like immigration, EPA regulations, then "break a few windows" like ordering McKinley renamed.



The key is to establish lawlessness rather than rule of law as the norm -- BO has done a masterful job of this! A Tyrant to be feared!



So the precedent has been set that whoever is sitting in the WH can just rename any old thing they want by executive order. It is supposed to be OK because ... oh, the Alaskans want it, there have been a lot of attempts, the Ohio delegation is obstructionist about it ... you know. Nobody cares!



Trump loves to name stuff after himself. Why the hell not?







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Plane Nerd Heaven, Flying The C-5 Galaxy

What It's Like To Fly America's Biggest Jet, The Gargantuan C-5 Galaxy:

If you like BIG planes, and like DETAIL, this is a SUPERB article. It started out as the C5-A, it's mostly all the "M" now ... more powerful, quieter, more efficient engines and a lot of digital upgrades make the monster really a new aircraft.

Lots of interesting background on how USAF pilots start out and choose between fighters and "the heavies", the logistics challenges of a plane with a 226' wingspan vs 196' for the 747, and mission planning for taking things like tanks and helicopters around the world.

The military tends to have some  some tongue in cheek designations for thier craft ... "Freddy" is the C5, an extension of FRED "Freaking (they don't say freaking) Ridiculous Economic (or Environmental) Disaster"!

It sounds like the really hard part is taxiing ... which I can REALLY imagine after only taxiing a Cessna 152 -- being as wide as an airplane because of the wings does not come naturally -- 226' wide is like "out there"!

They launched an ICBM out of one back in '74 ... Dr Strangelove calling!

WARNING ... following the link may induce EXTREME (possibly terminal) boredom in non-aircraft geeks! You have been warned ... NO LAWSUITS!

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Climate Science vs Climate Politics

German Physicists: Late 20th Century Warming “Nothing Unusual” | Power Line:

A short and worthy read -- bottom line, the planet appears to still be working as it has for the last 2500 years or so. Climate goes through cycles ... news at 11.

The solar and oceanic cycles are the big determinants -- we will return to 1870 level climate temps by 2080 ... if the alarmists had been right about CO2 ... well, I'll let them tell you:

In a parting shot at the politically-motivated, unscientific alarmists, the three Germans point out that “50% of the temperature increase expected to happen by 2100 should have taken place by now – if such a CO2 warming were true. The scientists say that the way things stand now, if the CO2 effect were real, the future warming up to the year 2100 could be at most 0.7 °C.”

No doubt we will hear plenty of climate whoppers this week with BO talking "climate" (actually politics, what he ALWAYS talks!) in Alaska this week.

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'Pigs In A Blanket, Fry 'Em Like Bacon'

Black Lives Matter: 'Pigs In A Blanket, Fry 'Em Like Bacon' | The Daily Caller:

Most of the MN media covered the "Black Lives Matter" protest of the State Fair as "peaceful" -- the Red Star Tribune made no mention of the "Pigs in a Blanket, Fry 'Em Like Bacon" chant that you can to see if you follow the link at the top of the post.

I'm thinking that if say anti-abortion protesters chanted anything like that it might get some media notice ... perhaps even more so if it was a couple days after some abortionist had been gunned down assassination style as Darren Goforth was Friday?

Nah, our media is completely without bias!

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No Lives Matter, One Nation Under TP

Man accused of gunning down Texas deputy faces judge:

There are a lot of quotes about the moral measure of a society being how it treats it's "weakest, most vulnerable, poorest, etc". I think this one from Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who stood against the Nazi's and was executed by them:  "The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

We have killed over 50 million babies in their mothers wombs, and publicly fund the harvest and sale of those innocent lives. The US socialist party ("The Party" (D) ) has the same "morality" as the socialists that Bonhoeffer fought against -- POWER!

As the linked article shows, we have our executions as well. If you look hard, you can see that the name of the man who killed the officer in Texas execution style -- Shawn J Miles. He is is a black man -- and the evidence is that the murder is related to "Black Lives Matter". Strangely, that is close to a state secret.

So we have white news people killed by a gay black man, and an officer in Houston executed by a black man -- shot in the back while filling his patrol car at a gas station in less than a week. What are the headlines? BO renames a big rock -- overturning a 100 year old act of Congress that he has no Constitutional authority to do. Do you need the difference between POWER and law spelled out. BO has no respect for law.

We have undergone a full year of "Black Lives Matter" protests and disruptions. This past Saturday up at the MN State Fair, they held a protest -- a day after Goforth's execution, in which they chanted "Pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon!". Most of the MN papers covered that protest as "peaceful".

Every case of a black being killed by a police officer in the nation has been a multi-day national news saturation with "racism, prejudice, excessive use of police force, etc" ... or MONTHS in the case of Ferguson MO.  Each case is endlessly linked to a narrative that all this is due to the national crime of racism -- even though nearly all of the cases turn out to be completely justifiable use of force by the officer. Michael Brown becomes a well known name, a martyr, with smiling pictures looking nothing like the thug that stole cigars from a convenience store and shoved the clerk as if they were a ragdoll minutes before officer Darren Wilson was forced to defend his own life lest he become another dead officer statistic.

Would you like to place any bets on how well known the name Darren Goforth becomes? How many pictures we see of him with is wife and family? Do you really think that his life matters to the powers of TP?

We saw two officers ambushed and executed in NYC last December. Our government and the media did their best to ignore those as much as possible -- Al Sharpton, he of many WH visits and $5 Million in unpaid back taxes, took part in a rally where "What do we want? DEAD COPS!" was chanted. There was a little outcry from police officers -- really none nationally.

We are "One nation under TP" -- TP says what matters and what doesn't. The only "morality" is what TP says it is -- "Climate Change", THAT is a "moral issue" to TP, as BO again takes unconstitutional action to change the name of a big rock. We really need to study Neanderthals and Cro Magnon grunts more -- if the first folks that name something have dibs, pretty much every area and land feature must have originally been named "Grunt", "Groan", "Squeal" and such ... At our current rate of regression due to "progressives", such forms of communication may be high culture in just a few years!

"Climate Change" is a "moral issue" because the only "morality" of TP is POWER! Absolutely all of the actions of TP are ONLY ABOUT POWER! If you open your eyes and look honestly at TP, you realize that every last policy, program or slogan is about advancing the power of TP by all means legal and otherwise.

 Babies in the womb are organs to be harvested. Young black men that kill each other at the rate of 6K a year due to the policies of TP matter not at all -- they aren't news and nobody cares. Unarmed servicemen gunned down by Islamists in our own nation is a short and quickly forgotten story, young women murdered on the streets of or "Sanctuary Cities" in cold blood by felon illegals, and police officers executed matter not at all. They are "collateral damage" in TP's rise to total power.

No lives matter -- only the rise of TP to total power matters. You are living through it and have eyes. Do you see?

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Hype, Percentages, Comparisons, Supermoons

Supermoons Are Super Dumb | PCMag.com:

I generally agree with the conclusions of this PC Mag article, but had to laugh at them a bit. In true techie nerd "I don't get it" fashion they used about the worst percentage example they could use to make their case ...

Think of it another way: Let's say Dr. Bruce Banner is a completely average American male who measures in at around 5' 9" and tips the scales at 196 pounds. Going by the supermoon's standards for super-ness (e.g. 14 percent larger), whenever the good doctor becomes agitated, he transforms into a Hulk who stands at 6' 7" and weighed 223 pounds. In this instance, the Hulk would be slightly smaller than LeBron James. Intimidating on the basketball court? Perhaps. But hardly "incredible" and definitely not super.

The difference between a 5' 9" guy and a 6' 7" guy is pretty damned significant to people (obviously not Nerds!). It really shows up in pictures, and speaking from experience and only being 6' 4" it really makes a difference in buying clothes, fitting in autos, hitting your head, etc, etc. The standard size range difference between humans is quite small from a mathematical POV (as the PC Mag guys note), but in HUMAN TERMS -- the ones that matter to HUMANS, it is a very significant difference! Just imagine a "typical 5'9" guy married to a 6'7" woman if you are still too much of a nerd to understand this!

A better 14% example might be a 10oz drink vs a 11.4oz drink -- hardly an extra swallow! They DID call out what is REALLY the problem though... nothing to compare the full moon with! ... Which is why the best time to view it is when it is just coming over the horizon so you can see against objects on the earth.

Keep in mind there's nothing to compare the moon to when it's up in the sky, so the slight difference in size will be imperceptible to most people

Not having a reference (something to compare against) is a BIG problem for humans -- it is why TRILLIONS of dollars in debt are essentially meaningless. Even "millions" are beyond our "sit down and count them" understanding, skipping over billions ... the debt is $18.3T and rapidly rising. You can go here to watch the absolute figures unwind. If we did the Nerd comparison with the "average American family debt", which totals nearly $100K per family these days ($70K mortgage, $10k student loans, $5K auto, $8K credit card ...) and stacked THAT next to the US debt, we would have the problem that the average family debt is invsible on the scale of $18T! 

So, the issue is "how to compare"? One nice way would be to compare to GDP over time -- but one has to be very careful about inflation adjustment and the fact that the way they compute GDP gets changed over time -- in fact it changed on the reporting of this most recent quarter which they just provided another "upward adjustment" to, now crowing about 3.7% growth! If this is on the level, based on the adjustment we now grew at all of .7% rather than shrinking at something about the same fraction of a percent. One realizes that we are in extremely deep trouble and it is getting nearly impossible for the rationally oriented to even discover the extent of our plight! 

The striking thing in looking at this chart of US history debt as a % of GDP is that you see that past debt peaks were due to events -- Civil War, WWI, Depression, WWII, ending the Cold War -- but then, BO arrives! There is no identifiable "crisis" or "project" -- suddenly debt heads for record levels with no known end in sight ... in fact, with no known "objective", the left assumption is EVER increasing debt! 

I see no real harm in paying a bit of attention to a "Supermoon" -- if nothing else, it makes people aware that orbits are elliptical, not circular, so they MIGHT tumble that there are astronomical causes for things like "Climate Change" -- but probably not. 

What we REALLY need to realize is that our debt is COMPLETELY INSANE -- as a raw value, as a percentage, compared to a family, relative to history, in terms of assumptions about the future  -- ANY way you look at it! 

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141 US Counties With More Registered Voters Than Citizens

141 counties have more registered voters than eligible live citizens | Power Line:



The Party (D) is absolutely FINE with this. Voter fraud is a cottage industry for TP and having dead, imaginary or "no longer at this address" people on the rolls is a major plus for the fraud industry, so the D's do nothing to enforce getting the rolls up to date.



Franken was elected in MN by fraudulent votes -- no MN counties on the list, but when you "win" by 225 votes, the dead vote doesn't have to work up much of a sweat!



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Worry, Newton, Creativity

Isaac Newton’s neurotic creativity may have been down to negative thinking:

Neurotics ruminate on problems, delving into their causes and the negative effects these might have. They replay these scenarios, amplifying their worries. Brain scans showed people who are good at this negative thinking displayed greater activity in regions of the medial prefrontal cortex. This area of the brain is linked to the conscious perception of threat and danger.

You don't say!  One doesn't need to read very many biographies of creative types -- writers, artists, inventors, etc to realize that this is OFTEN the case -- but certainly not universally. Einstein seemed to be very well adjusted and actually rather happy -- so it isn't a requirement!

There is a bit of irony that it is in the Irish Times -- plenty of rumination, dark side and "issues" to be had there!

The really sad part is that there are a whole lot of us "ruminators" that are in no danger of going down in history with as worthy a name as Isaac Newton -- or even Joyce, Yeats, Swift or  Beckett.

Seems that there is a lot of inequality in the creativity lottery!

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Buckley - Gore, Shout Show Genesis

http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/best-of-enemies-review-how-the-pundit-state-was-born

I will likely see this little film at some point. It asserts that ABC putting my hero (and initial sake ... WFB) William F Buckley, up against Gore Vidal in a snarky debate covering the 1968 elections that was the origin of the "Point, Counterpoint" that we see so often today that was covered so well with humor by SNL in the late '70s'.

Humankind has "progressed" a lot from Socratic Dialogs and even public debates like Lincoln - Douglass. Witness Donald Trump, the essence of the "World Wrestling Federation" as political discourse.

It is clear from reading the linked review that the the reviewer is unable to remotely sever himself from his own deeply ingrained biases.

At a certain point their clash is set up, regardless of their ideals, as the great debater (Buckley) versus the great talker (Vidal), which is probably the most relevant dichotomy here: even as a crypto-fascist, Buckley emerges as the one more concerned with ideas, where Vidal was more content to lob bon mots, smugly ensconced in the rightness of his cause.

Dear me ... "crypto fascist". Fascism is "nationalistic crony-socialism". It is socialism where the government doesn't own much of the industry, but controls it via direct command, regulations, taxation and subsidies. The US today with BO has ANTI-nationalist fascism. He certainly doesn't want to see anyone getting all jingoistic over "America", but he is all for maximization of government control of business by any possible lever.

Buckley certainly was pro-america, so in that sense a "nationalist", but love of country is irrespective of political creed -- lots of communists, capitalists, monarchists, socialists, etc love their country! In no way at all was Buckley a "socialist", and in fact, on the true left-right spectrum, fascism, socialism, communism, monarchy and dictatorship are all LEFT (control), white libertarian (WFB) is RIGHT (chaos).

I do agree though that this general structure -- "the shout show" likely had it's origin in that pairing, so looking through the article is a good little history lesson in how we got to where we are today relative to "political debate"

The reviewer falls into the format himself in the name calling department -- "WFB you ignorant crypto-fascist"!

Murder vs Mechanism, Real Gun Data

We won't get much a gun control lecture with the Virginia shooting because TP and the MSM will just want to forget about it -- the shooter was gay and black. Doesn't fit the approved narrative -- nothing to see here folks, move along.Bill Whittle is a very smart guy -- even got to see him speak in Rochester once. Soft spoken but extremely clear and concise. Worth your time to watch it.

Summary ...

The US is #1 in gun ownership (by A LOT), but #111 in murder rate per 100K. Take out the big Democrat mostly gun  controlled cities -- Detroit, DC, NYC, Chicago, Memphis, St Louis, Baltimore, etc, and we would  be more like 200th.

What he avoids -- because he is a reasonable guy and he might run for office, is that murder is cultural. The highest murder rates are all non-western, Latin, Muslim, etc --- and if you look at our highest murder rate cities, "ditto". White Americans can't comment on culture -- ours has been defined as evil and racist. In the real world, culture does matter, and some work better than others.

Increased violence is just one more aspect of the destruction of American Christian culture -- it isn't racial. If we continue to destroy our culture, our murder rate will go up ... even if the guns are taken, our murder rate will climb ... maybe to something like the Cayman Islands under British rule at #3 63.

Killing is from the human heart, guns are just a mechanism. The left is bent on control -- guns are just one more aspect of that drive for absolute power, with the typical ruse that "they care".  They care about CONTROL -- you are just as dead no matter how you are murdered and they could care less, just as they care less about the 6,000 young black men murdered in the US most years, most in cities with strict gun control.

When you live in a nation that has sacrificed 60 million babies in their mothers wombs on the altar of convenience, you know that you live in a nation that doesn't respect life. When a nation doesn't respect life, the murder rate goes up -- none of the 60 million babies were shot, however they are still dead.

We have always had a lot of guns -- when I was in HS in the 70's we took our guns to school to be blued, to go hunting after, etc -- no gun problem. Something changed -- it wasn't guns, it was culture.

Obama Robbed!

President Obama Says Derek Jeter Swindled Him on the Golf Course | TIME:

This story seems to keep popping up for whatever reason. I suspect that the media thinks it is "cute" or "endearing" for BO as "a regular guy".

Does anyone else find it a little scary that the holder of the top job in the nation is so gullible, narcissistic, overconfident, out of touch, etc that he gets "hustled" and has his "money stolen" by a baseball star? And he is willing to discuss it? Does he not realize this shows him to be a complete CHUMP ??!!

Seems like this alone is enough to explain the Iran "deal", negotiations with Putin on Crimea, etc

Obama gave Jeter a 30-stroke handicap, but that decision cost him in the end: “We had to take a picture of me handing Derek Jeter money at the end of the game,” he said.

A THIRTY STROKE handicap? Hello? Earth to BO ...

The man is obviously a complete chump and apparently PROUD of it to boot! He is SO much of a chump he doesn't even realize he is a chump!!!
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