My Blog

Category: Society

  • Eat the Rich vs. Obama

    I was reading this story:

    President Barack Obama will officially launch the battle over the impending fiscal cliff this morning, announcing a plan to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for people earning under $250,000, while letting the rest of the tax cuts expire.

    via Business Insider.

    This got me thinking about how much money will really flow into the Treasury from “the rich”?  I remember this from awhile back.

    If you have not seen… it’s just plain excellent.
    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661pi6K-8WQ?rel=0]

  • John Kerry = Inside Trader and Profiteer

    Another oldie but goodie:

    For years, Kerry has invested millions in a number of green energy companies that have benefitted from the president’s efforts to aggressively subsidize the industry with taxpayer dollars.

    These companies include Exelon, which received a $646 million taxpayer-guaranteed loan in 2011 to build a solar facility in California and created only 20 permanent jobs, as well as Fisker Automotive, the fledgling electric car company that offshored its manufacturing operation to Finland after receiving a $529 million federal loan guarantee in 2010.

    The loan guarantees, approved by the Department of Energy, were made possible by funding allocated in the 2009 stimulus bill, which Kerry supported. According to Kerry’s own office, the Senator “played a key role” in crafting the portions of the legislation designed to offer federal support for green energy projects.

    Additionally, Kerry co-authored the controversial cap-and-trade legislation that would have effectively imposed a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions. Though the bill ultimately failed, the New York Times noted that Exelon and companies like it “would emerge as financial winners” if the legislation was enacted.

    Kerry has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a venture capital firm run by John Doerr, a prominent Obama donor who served on the president’s Economy Recovery Advisory Board.

    The firm, where former vice president Al Gore is a partner, invests heavily in alternative energy companies such as Fisker Automotive and Amonix Inc., a Nevada-based solar panel manufacturer that laid off two-thirds of its workforce earlier this year despite receiving nearly $6 million in federal tax credits.

    Amonix was one of 16 companies (out of 27 overall) listed in Doerr’s “green-tech” portfolio to receive some form of federal support under Obama.

    via Washington Free Beacon.

    People — the problem in NOT in Washington.  The problem in on Main Street.  The goofballs in Massachusetts keep voting for this guy (the Lord knows we have our own corrupt politicians.)  That said, how is the not a crime? And, where is the MSM on this story?

  • Your Home’s Router is Spying on You

    It must be spy on American’s week given posts on law enforcement asking for your cell data and how the NSA is going to expand its spying on Americans on a massive scale.  Now we have this:

    Cisco Systems told users of its new high-end home routers — in a roundabout way — they couldn’t use their routers for porn or to send certain types of e-mail and a whole list of other things.  …

    Last week, Cisco sent out an upgrade to the software that makes its routers work, called firmware. The upgrade affected two models, the EA4500 and the EA2700. Without asking, Cisco moved them to its “Cisco Connect Cloud” service.  …

    [T]he Cisco Connect Cloud Terms of Service forbids a whole bunch of things including porn, sending advertising e-mails — it won’t even allow you to “encourage any conduct” that would violate the law.

    Wait, there’s more. Cisco reportedly [also] deleted a portion of [its] privacy statement that said Cisco would keep track of Connect Cloud customers’ “network traffic” and “Internet history,” ExtremeTech reported.

    via Business Insider.

    Does anyone think any company could have gotten away with this in the 1960’s or 1970’s?  The outrage would have been tremendous.

    We’re failing as a society to realize that it’s not polite to air our collective and individual dirty laundry.  And we should be especially wary of sharing our family business with corporations that usually have a cozy relationship with the government.

    This is very very very bad.

    In addition to establishing Internet Freedoms and Net Neutrality we need to start a national discussion on Internet Privacy.

  • NSA to Spy on Everyone… Everyone.

    Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

    But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

    via Wired.com.

    Like most Wired articles this one goes into incredible detail about how the government spy’s on you and me.

    Frankly, it’s kinda terrifying.  I wrote in an earlier post about how we’re at the point in time where Fahrenheit 451 meets 1984.  The government now has all the data in needs to know everything about your life.  All they have to do now is choose to control it… oh, wait.  Check out the Obama health care bill.

    Somewhere right now a government jack-booted thug is ordering a few rat masks.

  • Cell Carriers Asked for Your Data

    In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.

    The cellphone carriers’ reports, which come in response to a Congressional inquiry, document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests.

    via NYTimes.com.

    We’re very close to the junction of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.

  • More And More Americans Are Leaving

    Last year, nearly 1,800 Americans surrendered their citizenship. In a nation of 300 million folks, 1,800 émigrés is hardly a rush for the exits. But the recent trend is, nevertheless, intriguing.  …

    Who knows the exact reason why 1,800 Americans chose to leave last year — nine times as many as left four years earlier. Certainly, each one of them had their reasons. But like a corporate insider that sells his own stock, there’s one thing you know for certain about his motives: he is not selling because he believes the stock will go up. Maybe he doesn’t believe the stock will go down, but no one sells a stock they believe will go up.

    via Business Insider.

    I wrote about this before.  Still no mainstream press on this issue.

  • Muslims Attack Christians in Dearborn MI

    Very bizarre behavior on the part of the young Muslims.

    Very bizarre behavior on the part of the local police.

    The whole thing is very disturbing.  I frankly don’t know what to make of it.

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJBW49afzg?rel=0]

  • Chicago’s Unreported Race War

    We’ve gone national!

    According to a statement in the Chicago Tribune, reporting on the race of individuals involved in news events, such as mobs attacking, robbing and vandalizing, is irrelevant.

    A news anchor at the ABC affiliate in Chicago goes even further: Anyone who reads or writes about the epidemic of racial violence in Chicago is an “idiot” who engages in “meaningless … race baiting,” says Ravi Baichwal.

    City officials and the media might be the only two places left where people still deny Chicago is under assault from more than 50 episodes of black mobs attacking, beating, robbing and vandalizing over the last three years in and around downtown. Many of them are on display at YouTube.

    via NWD.

    We as a society have to figure out how to handle this.  It’s not a political issue — it’s a fabric of society and a media issue.

    The facts are pretty clear:

    • There have been a great number of crimes committed by mobs of black youths in the greater downtown area.
    • These sorts of crimes have been going on for years in other parts of the city and the media turned a blind eye to it.

    As to the first part, we know damn well that if a band of pick-up truck driving white dudes wearing confederate flag bandanas sent a group of old black businessmen to the hospital with broken bones the media would be all over it.  There would be marches, and rallies, and protests in every part of the city.  The double standard when blacks commit crime on whites is obvious.

    The media has a responsibility to its consumers/customers to disclose the race of the perpetrators of these crimes so that others can protect themselves.  Especially ludicrous are the stories devoid of any details on race yet end with, “police are seeking anyone with information to come forward.”  No one is well served by removing race from articles about crime.

    This is the Tribune, SunTimes, and local ABC (and all the others) just pandering to the liberal overlords that run this place.  They don’t want this information getting out.  And the media needs access to local politicians in order to make its job easier.  So media doesn’t want to make politicians angry; lest they be cut off and have to actually work for a living.  Most media in this town is not journalism, it’s public relations.

    That mob thuggery has been going on for years doesn’t help the media’s case to withhold race from news stories.  The black community should rightfully be upset with local media outlets about covering these events when they occur on tony Michigan Ave but ignoring similar crimes in Englewood & West Garfield Park.

    The vast majority of crime in the City is black-on-black crime.  That’s where we need to focus more police attention.  We need black children to grow up and know that they can live in a crime free neighborhood.  That dealing drugs is not normal.  That knowing ten people who’ve been shot is not normal.  That burying a brother or sister is not normal.

    You cannot reclaim Michigan Ave and make it “safe” when bullets are flying 5 miles to the west and no one says a thing.

    Of course, the stunning lack of leadership from Jesse Jackson, Fr. Pfleger, Mary Mitchel, and the liberal choir of media voices is disappointing as well.

  • Teens Employment Lowest Since WWII – Obama Not Helping

    This article was published yesterday about the same time that Obama was in the Rose Garden making the situation worse:

    Fewer than 3 in 10 American teenagers now hold jobs such as running cash registers, mowing lawns or busing restaurant tables from June to August. The decline has been particularly sharp since 2000, with employment for 16-to-19-year olds falling to the lowest level since World War II.  …

    The drop in teen employment, steeper than for other age groups, is partly a cultural shift. More youths are spending summer months in school, at music or learning camps or in other activities geared for college. But the decline is especially troubling for teens for whom college may be out of reach, leaving them increasingly idle and with few options to earn wages and job experience.Older workers, immigrants and debt-laden college graduates are taking away lower-skill work as they struggle to find their own jobs in the weak economy. Upper-income white teens are three times as likely to have summer jobs as poor black teens, sometimes capitalizing on their parents’ social networks for help.

    Overall, more than 44 percent of teens who want summer jobs don’t get them or work fewer hours than they prefer.

    via HeraldNet.com.

    Holy Cow!!  Three passages worth repeating:

    [T]he decline is especially troubling for teens for whom college may be out of reach,
    leaving them increasingly idle and with few options to earn wages and job experience.

    Just who are these kids who are now left with few options?  My guess is urban city kids.  In the country there’s always work on the farm.  But in the city & suburbs we have thousands and thousands of idle kids.  Hanging around with noth’n to do; just look’n for trouble.

    Older workers, immigrants and debt-laden college graduates are taking away
    lower-skill work as they struggle to find their own jobs in the weak economy.

    Isn’t this the truth.  Have you ever been to a Wal-Mart where the greeter was under 50?  And now everywhere you go, every single stinking fast food place, sit-down restaurant, Target, Wal-Mart, grocery store, and nearly everywhere else has adult immigrants working there.  In the ’70s and ’80s these jobs were good (great) jobs for kids to get.  Two people I know very well worked at Jewel when they were in high school.  One put herself through college; the other bought a Camaro.

    With the new (unconstitutional) Obama plan on immigration the job market will now have another few million young people who are eligible to work … but will struggle to find decent employment.  It serves no one when you just set people up to fail.

    Upper-income white teens are three times as likely to have summer jobs as poor black teens….

    This is what I wrote yesterday; inner city kids are going to be one of the biggest losers in the immigration debacle.  Contrary to what some people believe, one cannot just walk into a job that pays $100,000 per year.  Everyone has to start somewhere.  Usually that means that kids bus tables at a local restaurant, caddie, work retail, mow lawns, wash cars, whatever.  These jobs are important because they teach critical lessons necessary to move up in the world: show-up on time, look nice, smile, how to deal with conflict, how to deal with a boss, etc.  You can’t just wake-up one day and think you’re going to get a job as a banker without having decent people skills.

    Obama is dooming generations of inner city kids to lives of and on government sustenance.  These kids will never reach their full potential because they have so many factors stacked against them: poor educational systems, uneducated parents, no access to jobs, and a president who’s bargained their futures for political gain.

  • Personal Safety Demonstrated by Two Cases

    Two different stories in the papers recently on the same day (April 25, 2012.)

    The first:

    For nine years the “teardrop” rapist was one of Los Angeles’ most prolific serial predators, preying on women from Melrose Avenue to Manchester Boulevard.

    The assailant, sometimes described as having a teardrop tattoo below one of his eyes, targeted girls and women walking alone in the early-morning hours. He would force them into a secluded area at the point of a gun or knife before raping or sexually assaulting them.

    via L.A. Times.

    And then there’s this:

    Authorities in Georgia say a grandmother foiled a robbery attempt by two armed men by getting into a shootout with them, injuring one man.

    Police told The Telegraph that Lulu Campbell just dropped off her grandson at her daughter’s house early Saturday morning when someone demanded money outside her car, threatening to shoot her.

    “(The suspect) shouted, ‘Give me the (blanking) money and open the (blanking) door!’” Campbell told The Telegraph, describing her ordeal. “I said, ‘Oh my God, somebody is going to rob me.’ I said, ‘Baby, you’re going to kill me anyway, so I don’t have to open it!’”

    Campbell says the man fired at her, missing. The 57-year-old fired back, striking him in the chest. Her truck sustained eight bullet holes in the hood, one in the grill. Both front side windows were destroyed. The second man fled after she shot at him.

    “I thought that the only way to protect myself was to run him down,” she told The Telegraph. “Otherwise, he would have gotten away.”

    via CBS Atlanta.

    Note the differences:

    In LA, much like Chicago, people are not allowed to carry guns for their own personal protection.  And in our LA story, we have young fully able bodied “girls and women” are a serially sexually assaulted by some piece of scum while walking along city sidewalks.  Running away could not save them.  Yelling for help could not save them.  The police could not save them.

    In Macon Georgia, where people enjoy their Second Amendment rights, a 57 year-old woman was able to defend herself against not one but two stone cold criminals.  Grandma didn’t need to run, in fact she was trapped inside her car!  Grandma didn’t yell for help.  Grandma wasn’t helpless until the police showed up to survey the damage.  Grandma had a gun.