Global Poverty Shrinks, Western Economies Stagnate

Douglas Irwin: The Ultimate Global Antipoverty Program - WSJ - WSJ:

 Global poverty has been cut in half in 25 years!

The World Bank reported on Oct. 9 that the share of the world population living in extreme poverty had fallen to 15% in 2011 from 36% in 1990. Earlier this year, the International Labor Office reported that the number of workers in the world earning less than $1.25 a day has fallen to 375 million 2013 from 811 million in 1991.

The biggest dividend from the end of the Cold War was the bi-polar political sphere became uni-polar, so "what works" moved into ascension. Rather than two Superpowers sending "foreign aid" (bribes to keep countries in their sphere), the forces of the market -- the forces that work, were unleashed over much of the world. 

But we hear very little about this miracle here: 

The reduction in world poverty has attracted little attention because it runs against the narrative pushed by those hostile to capitalism. The Michael Moores of the world portray capitalism as a degrading system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Yet thanks to growth in the developing world, world-wide income inequality—measured across countries and individual people—is falling, not rising, as Branko Milanovic of City University of New York and other researchers have shown.

We hear little about it here because it is WAY more than "Michael Moore" -- the myth of "Capitalist Injustice" is endemic in the political, media and educational systems here and in Western Europe. Why? Because successful economies are to bureaucrats and general government based looters as unprotected grain is to rats! The objective of government leaders and workers in wealthy countries (like wealthy companies) tends toward increasing the take of the leadership and the bureaucracy at the expense of all else.

It is easier to see in corporations than countries, because corporations still have to compete with quarterly profit / loss statements, and they have a hard time controlling all education and media! When Gerstner arrived in '93, bottom level IBM employees typically had greater than something like 10 levels of management between them and the CEO, he cut it to typically 4. He left, and now it is back to around 10 -- and IBM is again in crisis. The cat left, the rats took over -- quickly.

We generally all know what works -- hard work, living with and taking reasonable risks, suffering some losses and learning from them, merit based reward systems, responsibility, private property, rule of law, etc ...

We know that, but we WANT certainty, more leisure, freedom from or at least insurance against loss, we like to avoid responsibility for our failures, we like OUR stuff, but tend to think the "other guy" has too much, etc, etc.

There is a reason that capitalism is associated with "animal spirits" -- emotion, natural drives. We intellectually "know" lots of stuff, but it is our emotions that provide the DRIVE! As Adam Smith was very clear on in "The Theory of Moral Sentiments", we may THINK that if a million Chinese were killed by a natural disaster, that ought to weigh heavier on our minds this evening that say the pain from a finger we smashed in a door -- we may THINK that ought to be true, but we all know what IS true!

Capitalism works extremely well with what is. Socialism and Communism tell you that they can produce "what ought to be". The actual results are obvious -- but like the rats and unprotected grain, as soon as there is a "surplus", the looters show up and corrupt the working capitalist system to a wealth transfer system where the leading beneficiaries are the looters and ultimately destroy the working system yet again!

On top of this, the looters work overtime to convince us that there is a local and global zero sum relationship between poverty being reduced in China and stagnation here -- or, between people that make more money here and people that make less money. The capitalist system is driven off greed and produces growth and wealth. The looter system is based off envy and consumes wealth and produces decline. One might think they would "balance".

In the real world, much as with climate, one system is always driving -- "balance", as in "balance of nature" is a looter myth. The climate is always warming or cooling. Nations are always growing or declining.

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How Insane Can an ex Supreme Court Justice Be?

The five extra words that can fix the Second Amendment - The Washington Post:

The first 10 amendments to the Constitution placed limits on the powers of the new federal government. Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of the Second Amendment, which provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” 

For more than 200 years following the adoption of that amendment, federal judges uniformly understood that the right protected by that text was limited in two ways: First, it applied only to keeping and bearing arms for military purposes, and second, while it limited the power of the federal government, it did not impose any limit whatsoever on the power of states or local governments to regulate the ownership or use of firearms. Thus, in United States v. Miller, decided in 1939, the court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that sort of weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated Militia.”

So there is no individual right to Free Speech (the 1st amendment)? A state may declare any speech it wants to be illegal and no challenge from the court will be forthcoming? I think not.

 How about the 4th? The vaunted "secure n their persons" -- the right to "privacy" the rubric under which Roe V Wade operates. Let's see, where does the SCOTUS of the US stand on THAT one of the first 10 amendments being "limiting only to the Federal Government"?

How can anything like this be taken seriously? It is obvious that there is no rule or principle of law operating here at all, and WORSE, not even any rule of "common sense", let alone "natural law", the real foundation of the Constitution. We know that in fact the SCOTUS runs the OTHER way on nearly every issue -- abortion, environmental rules, BOcare, gay marriage, etc -- the general policy of the time is if the federal government decrees it, the states MUST obey. Oh, but wait -- the 2nd amendment is different! On what principle other than Stevens wants it to be so?

The "magic 5 words are here":

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

That's right. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton, etc REALLY went to the trouble of a 2nd amendment so the army could have weapons! They were such dolts that they thought it necessary to codify that in a written constitution! But they were just "bad writers" -- they left out the important part!

But they didn't, and they wrote that they didn't ... for example:

The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.
-- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188

One of the chief fears of the founders was a STANDING militia -- in other words, the very 5 words the insincere idiot Stevens would like to see added. To which George Mason said:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."
— George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788

So for 200 years the 2nd amendment was "understood" to mean that the army could have guns -- or so the ex justice says. But interestingly, not a lot of gun control seemed to be forthcoming in those 200 years!

How strange! Somehow I have a strong suspicion that if states in the American West were telling the pioneers that they couldn't have guns, they would have had a MUCH better response to guys like Stevens suggesting they give up their arms.

Tar and feathering really needs to make a comeback! Perhaps it is required to help the supposedly more intellectual understand common sense?

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Poll Number Bias By The Numbers

No News Is Good News | National Review Online:

A good list with some nice specific numbers, it's short, just read it.

A teaser ....

In the first eight months of this year, ABC, NBC, and CBS have conducted at least 15 national surveys asking people to rate Obama’s job performance. There has been an endless parade of other media surveys confirming that his numbers have cratered, now hovering at the 40 percent level, making him just as unpopular as Bush was, and so toxic that even Democrats running for reelection are repeatedly denouncing him. So how many stories on ABC, NBC, and CBS? In eight months, none — only two mentions. They are censoring their own surveys.

For most of 2006, W's low poll numbers WAS the lead story almost all the time on NPR --- forget the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they had served their purpose, along with Katrina, W was unpopular!!! Kinda like Crimson and Clover ..... Over and Over. The article only covers network news ... same time period in '06? 52 vs 2 in 2014.

The MSM isn't biased --- at least if you believe them.

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The Suicide Election

CHARLES ORTEL: America nears financial suicide as voters head to the polls - Washington Times:



A well written article that I find to be WAY too optimistic on what could possibly be accomplished by a Republican congress, but does a solid job of chronicling how a bit of desperate the situation is.

Will the legislative branch finally attain power required to bring President Obama’s lawless administration to heel? Or, is the American republic set to die an undignified death, drowning in debt, deficits, and dangers?

I'd say this is an election where the nation is already hung by the neck after ingesting a fatal dose of poison -- do we want to cut the rope in hopes that someone might get an antidote before we expire? Oh, I think adding about 3 stories of height to the fall might make the analogy more complete. I'm frankly not even sure that a Republican congress can manage to cut the rope, but if Harry Reid stays it, it is rumored that he is going to fumble in Uncle Sam's pocket for a .45 and put the gun in our collective mouth and squeeze one off.



A poisoned Uncle Sam hanging by the neck 3 stories up fumbling in his pocket for a .45 to "make it quicker" ... oh, and maybe Russia, ISIS, China, North Korea and Iran sitting below on the street aiming automatic weapons at him. That is the cartoon for this election in my brain -- well, do we feel lucky?



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Calling a Lt Col Taylor Swift

Ernst 'offended' by Harkin Taylor Swift remark - CNN.com:



TP (The Party, D) absolutely can't allow strong conservative women candidates to succeed. The same goes for conservative black men, and DOUBLE for conservative black women.



So the references to "Taylor Swift" and "Michelle Bachmann" (I'm surprised he didn't throw Sarah Palin in as well) are acceptable fare for a sitting senator attacking a Lt Col war veteran. Well, a TP sitting senator!



Were a Republican to have attacked a Democrat female that was a Lt Col war veteran, the story would be national news as a strong example of the made for political theatre  Republican "War on Women". For a female military leader to be compared to Taylor Swift is harsher than comparison of a male military leader to "Justin Bieber" ... it is a sexist slam, plain and simple, and would be hammered on unmercifully if an outgoing Republican Senator was to do it.



I've sent money to Joni Ernst, I've also sent money to Mia Love . It is hard to even imagine the courage of a black woman running as a Republican! Especially one that already weathered a huge barrage of negative attack ads in 2012 and losing by 768 votes. ... and her once big lead has tightened as well after a ton of work to take her down by TP and it's Utah media arm.

Ms. Love was ahead by 12 percentage points in August, but polls show her lead has eroded in the last two months. One problem she faces is that she’s still trying to repair the damage from the flood of attack ads in 2012 by national Democratic groups that drove up her negatives, Mr. Hansen said.

The treatment of republican women and blacks by TP is modern Jim Crow -- and one thing TP has expertise at (100 years) is Jim Crow! 




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Cancel The Midterms, Giving Bullshit a Bad Name

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/03/opinion/cancel-the-midterms.html?_r=1

We know the narrative -- Fox News and Talk Radio are horrible partisan "echo chambers", but the rest of the MSM, especially "The Paper of Record", the NYTs is completely unbiased. Just the facts Ma'am, like Joe Friday!

So I did some looking back in '06 for their possibly evolving position that midterm elections ought to be cancelled -- I'm certain it is an honestly held non-partisan position! Strangely, I could find nothing of the sort, even stranger, I found this ... which seems to indicate that the voting in the midterms in '06 was a very solid example of citizens taking effective action for excellent reasons! Why there weren't even any complaints about how much lower the turnout is in off-year elections. I was SHOCKED!

Doesn't the left ever get tired of this foolishness? Trying to claim that the NYTs isn't a left wing paper is like Cheech and Chong trying to claim that they don't smoke dope. It gives bullshit a bad name!

Chinese Lunar Probe Returns Safely

China lunar probe makes successful return to Earth | Fox News Latino:



The world is never static, someone is always advancing and someone is always declining. It is usually pretty easy to know which is which -- the decliners tend to report very little on the success of those that are advancing!



Oh, and what the decliners try to do tends to blow up, while the advancers tend toward "mission accomplished".



These races really aren't that hard to follow.



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A Righteous Haidter

The Power Line 100: The Commanding Haidt | Power Line:

Actually, it turns out his name is pronounced "height", not "hate" as I thought -- which was based on a joke from another psychologist, Martin Seligman, saying "when he wanted to understand love, he referred to "Haidt".

In any case, as I've commented in the past, Haidt is brilliant and writes brilliantly on important topics -- as in the highly recommended "Righteous Mind"

PL had already reported on the information in the current New Yorker article.

It's all well worth reading, but for those of you gainfully employed and/or not gluttons for reading reams of text, the cliff notes version:

• Morality is wired into humans -- it is how we operate like "sophisticated bees" (social). We have a moral instinct wired into our systems. Naturally, everyone already knew this, and religious people believe it comes from, God. So do atheists, it comes from their god, randomness. 
• How we react to our moral wiring is a huge determinant of "who we are" -- the official "modern / educated / progressive / atheist" position is to deny morality and claim to not even recognize the fact that their brains are screaming "WRONG" over practices that activate the built in disgust circuitry. 
• So they develop new "morality"(they have to, it's in their wiring) -- un-natural morality. They make disgusting things "rites" ... eg un-natural (meaning non adaptive / procreative) sex becomes a moral imperative, killing the unborn a sacrament, and natural things -- like loving and honoring your parents, religion, culture, or simply eating meat / traditional foods become "disgusting / immoral". 
• But the most disgusting thing of all becomes "conservative thought" -- so that which is actually natural, traditional, cultural ... wired into the brain, becomes abhorrent and the "not of my tribe" circuits are subverted  to operate against those things that are conservative. "Culture", and especially successful culture, is either a gift from God, or a "adaptive natural selection of culture" -- so destroying it is sinful, or non-adaptive in the extreme. The "progressive" seeks to label the very culture that enabled them to be "immoral", so attacks the roots from which they sprang. 

Haidt, while still calling himself a "liberal"  is willing to go where actual data leads him, and has found ways of scientifically verifying the obvious bias in our current system relative to at least psychology. He seems to be even be aware of the danger of the "progressive project" -- the same as the obvious ultimate danger of Jim Crow, Apartheid, Muslims killing off Christians  -- but for the present in our nation, the problem of eliminating true diversity of thought.

Having people of different skin colors, genders, sexual preferences is quite meaningless next to having people interact who have different THOUGHT. The essence of humanity is not our skin color, gender, sexual preference, etc, but the diversity that counts is our THOUGHT! (especially if it is tied to wisdom, through spiritual connection to God or other transcendent principles as discovered by Plato)

One of the major lies / errors / destructive acts of the "progressive" movement is in claiming "diversity" in the areas of skin color, gender, sexual preference, etc, while attempting to completely suppress diversity of thought with enough vigor to give jack-booted thugs a bad name!

The whole Haidt lexicon is well worth the time to study if you have it. We may be in a race to understand the physical roots of morality, culture and religion and hopefully to honor them,  before we are fully dragged into a truly dark age of pagan materialism or pagan Islamic theism.

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If It Damages America, It is Good for The Party

If it damages America, it's good for Democrats | Human Events:

A good specific rundown of how The Party (TP - Democrat) encourages positions and behaviors damaging to America because such positions get more TP candidates elected!

Short, sweet and worth the read -- marriage, minorities, victimhood, dependency and assimilation. In each case, TP encourages the negative.

Because for them, it's the positive!

A teaser example on marriage:

Even today, after decades of feminism, most Americans agree that it is better for women (and for men) — and better for society — when women (and men) marry. Yet, when women marry, it is bad for the Democratic Party; and when women do not marry, even after — or shall we say, especially after — having children, it is quite wonderful for the Democratic Party.Married women vote Republican. Unmarried women lopsidedly vote Democrat.It is both silly and dishonest to deny that it is in the Democrats’ interest that women not marry.

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Want To Hire A Governor Fired From the Family Business?

Burke busted | Power Line:

The primary issue in the WI election has been TP trying to intimidate anyone that is so bold as to support the opposition ... covered here and in other posts.

The other key factor is that Burke is running as "Not Walker" -- because he is "divisive", a "lightning rod". Well, Duh ... he isn't a TP guy, and WORSE, has had the unmitigated gall to stand up to them! The way to get rid of "division" is a nice happy single party -- TP!!

 So he needs to be taken down -- the direct attacks have failed, so this time it is "stealth mode".

Thus, Mary Burke, multi-millionaire heiress to the Trek fortune -- heavily buttressed by off-shoring jobs, but who cares! She is TP in good standing! PASS!

Oh, oops ... she was fired from the family business! Now that is certainly a good indicator of competence!

And her vaunted plan for WI? plagiarized:

Just last week, the Marquette University Law poll showed the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in a statistical dead heat with incumbent Republican Gov. Scott Walker. But then catastrophe struck, as reports surfaced that part of Burke's much-touted jobs plan had been lifted whole cloth from other sources, without even changing much of the language.

But much as in IA against Joni Ernst, the negative ads against both her and Walker are running about 4 to 1 fueled by TP "Dark Money" -- an area that we are assured by the experts that Republicans have a HUGE advantage!

This election will give us one more indicator of just how far gone we really are. Has TP fully locked in one party rule, or in a off-year election with the world on fire, the economy weak, millions more insurance cancellations known to be headed out (but shamelessly politically delayed), can an opposition party eek out a few Senate seats and maybe hold a governorship against a fired plagiarist?

Oh the excitement in the dying husk of a once great nation.

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I'm Oldest In Warmest Year Ever!

Who’s The Warmest of Them All? | Power Line:

Coincidence? I think not!

Naturally, it really isn't the "warmest year ever" -- but even if it was, on average (factoring out various short term fluctuations due to ocean currents, sunspots, volcanic eruptions, etc) that has been true for a lot of years since the last ice age -- 8-10K years and counting. Newsworthy if you are a glacier.

In similar amazing fashion,  I've hit a record age in each successive year of my life! So it actually ISN'T a coincidence (or wouldn't be if it was true), the rising global temps and my age are CORRELATED! My age is correlated with global warming, WOW!  -- and best of all, it is SETTLED SCIENCE!!. Well, sort of -- math is more of a "language" -- like English or Java. It allows us to describe things, and if the description is correct, predict some  -- the data is something else.

So speaking of the data, while the media will no doubt say AGAIN "it's the warmest year ever" -- or in the top 5, or some such meaningless malarkey, the chart in the article shows that even using the cooked thermometer data, it isn't -- oh, and even if it WAS, it is like reporting my age in seconds. They are reporting things in tenths and hundredths of degrees which is meaningless to anything living since every life form on the planet (save maybe the ones clustered around volcanic vents thousands of feet under the sea)  has to deal with temperature variations of at least 10's of FULL DEGREES.

We have become a nation of way too credulous people, and those sort of people lose the ability to do complex things like launch things into space, have a growing economy, keep their executive branch computers from being hacked, have an honest election, keep their people from dying from Ebola, etc, etc.

It may well be the most foolish year ever -- if one counts a lack of wisdom as foolish.

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White House Computers Hacked By Better Nation

BBC News - White House computer network 'hacked':

Color me incredulous, Power Line was reporting on this last week! Apparently "The Party" (TP - Democrat) media arm has been willing/able to keep this under wraps, and it is STILL a smaller story than our latest attempt to put a rocket in space blowing up on the pad!

The computers at the WH being hacked by a "foreign power" -- possibly Russia in the week preceding an election is a sidebar story on American "news" outlets?  Hello?? Anybody home??

My jaw is on the floor. I have a pretty iron clad rule about not blogging on right wing media "scoop" stories until I see them in lefty sources -- like CNN, NPR, etc  in addition to Power Line, Fox, Drudge, etc, but this makes me wonder. Perhaps more stories are just never going to appear in TP controlled media?

There have been a lot of "strong hints" on how much the bias / media control has gone up under BO -- Gun Runner, Benghazi, IRS, journalism spying (it was ONLY Fox spied on, apparently until now at least), etc, but this is a nice simple rather amazing story. The computers at the seat of our executive power seem to have been hacked by a foreign power -- that certainly means we are VULNERABLE!!

Shades of "Atlas Shrugged", the once great nation is falling apart -- so far, no specific symbol quite as potent as the US rescue mission to Tehran burning in the desert with 8 dead Americans, not even able to reach Tehran, aborted by the great swimming rabbit warrior, Jimmuh Carter. An event I refer to as "The Jimmy Carter Desert Classic".

The lack of any specific symbol with quite the specific summary of our woes as the Carter Classic doesn't mean there are no candidates though. Even in the Carter Malaise we were a space faring nation -- not relying on Russia to hitch rides and watching China consistently operate as a manned space power. BO the anti-colonialist has to dearly love the optics of how far the mighty have fallen every time Americans ride up with the Russians. Hey, if the nation that controls the space over your head decides to hack your computers, shutting up seems the only valid option.

ISIS continues to grab territory while we (ostensively) attempt to slow their advance from the air -- an exercise in futility most likely to fade away after the election like more of our healthcare and our paper mache borders.

Perhaps the best symbol of decline so far in the BO takedown of the US is the head of a US citizen rolling on the ground, hacked off by an ISIS warrior as our laughing "Commander in Chief" enjoys a round of golf. SUCKERS!

WH computers hacked by Russia? TP and it's media arm are fine with that -- move along, no story here!

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Automated Voting, It's Time

The voting so far: Not so hot for Republicans | The CLog | Creative Loafing Charlotte:

Why should anything in life require any effort at all? I mean if there are any form of "standards", specific dates and locations for an activity, or even some minimal action required that may interrupt daytime TV, video games, being drunk or stoned, or some other "individual choice of activity", isn't that "unfair"?  It is worse than unfair, it is suppression!

It seems that we have reached a national, and increasingly SCOTUS supported standard where voting must require less effort than taking a dump.  Will there be a universal right to have somebody show up with a bedpan to make that horrible burden of nature less onerous? It seems strangely likely these days.

I was expecting to be out of town on election day, so clicked a couple of screens and got my pre-addressed fully paid return envelope and ballot mailed to me. In the past I've (horrors!) trundled down to the massive Taj Mahal like Government Center to have them hand me a ballot -- no ID required of course. That would be "voter suppression"!

Why DO we actually have people take the effort to fill in their ballots? We know that Blacks for example vote like 93% Democrat, Felons are even higher percentage D voters, and the Dead are 100% -- it is convenient that the election is so close to Halloween, it means that the non-living don't need to go to the trouble of coming out twice! I suspect they likely hang around Democrat HQ in the interim days till the election where they probably fit right in with the low energy / low information / low hygiene standard. Oh wait, they can just vote early now.

Perhaps the whole Zombie thing was just some of the more enterprising departed going out door knocking with the rest of the D's in the bad old days prior to early voting  -- it would be completely non-PC to make any comments about "rotten appearance" (and I do mean rotten). Perhaps convenience is the ultimate good? -- so fitting after all the time that philosophers and sages wasted trying to discover "the good" over thousands of years. Plato was a putz.

The linked article helpfully points out that the no effort, no ID, no specific date voting is overwhelmingly Democrat. Wow, now there is a shocking news item!!!

 The Dead vote 100% Democrat, I'd guess the comatose are at least 99% D ... one could likely run a scale from the Dead, through the comatose, illegals, felons, unemployed, uneducated, stoned, drunk, etc ...  to the most active, moral, focused, employed, attentive, regular church attending, etc which would be 100% Republican. We have the statistics, we know how everyone votes -- take a look at how they line up with cable networks and shows http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/10/16/the-cable-networks-that-draw-the-most-partisan-ads-arent-the-ones-you-expect/ ... 93% of the political ads on E! are for D's. I think we knew that already.

Oh, and the imaginary voters ... the kind that only exist as ballots that  show up in big boxes in back rooms or trunks of cars, or as the other couple thousand ballots from a building that has a couple hundred real residents  --- they seem to vote 100% D as well. I'm certain that MANY of the imaginary voters are really enjoying the convenience provided by all the early / easy / no id / mail in / etc voting!

Perhaps we ought to survey them? BTW, none of that is "evidence of vote fraud", because you can't PROVE that those ballots in the trunk of the car were not legit, nor that there really were not a couple thousand real voters that filled out the building address by mistake. How WOULD you prove it? No ID's required anywhere through the process -- no way to trace any of the ballots to a voter. PERFECT! "No evidence of fraud"!

But can't we do better?  YES WE CAN! We are the people we have been waiting for!  We  can just automate it. Sorta like Google Drive for voting.

Maybe the networks still want to have people staying up late and watching beer commercials on election night, and I suppose that the influx of money for negative ads prior to the election is a boost (Joni Ernst and Scott Walker are cannibals! Can't do without that "information") But we can cover that. Just print up a few more pallets of money and ship it to the networks / cable every election year -- THEY are certainly at least 90% reliable D's, they deserve the extra cash.

The ultimate good is convenience and ease. Everyone should have a HS diploma, heck, why not a college degree? Maybe a Masters or a PHD -- seems "unfair", "elitist" and "unequal" to deny what can clearly be a self esteem booster. Guaranteed income is a great idea -- why not make it at least a million? Hell, why think small?? What are Gates and Buffet worth these days? $60B or so? Let's make that the BOTTOM wealth in America!!!

Let's vote on it.

Oh, and please warm up the bedpans -- anything less would be "suppression".


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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?

'via Blog this'