Blog

  • Tale of Two Missions

    Absolutely amazing piece of work about Chicago’s failing schools.

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmnFQkD0Eg0]

    I have considerable new found respect for Mr. Williams after seeing this.  I always thought we was railroaded out of NPR unfairly.  But I also thought he was a little light intellectually.  Whatever his faults (and we all have faults) it’s clear he cares about the children and wants to make things better.  Kudos.

  • How Big Should Government Be?

    A government big enough to give you everything you want
    is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
    — Gerald Ford, Joint Statement to Congress, August 12, 1974.

    I had not heard this before two days ago (yes, I don’t know where I’ve been either.)  But it struck me.

    We, as a people, are giving up more and more control over our daily lives to governments.  This is frightening.  It’s not about parties; both the GOP and the Dems are more than willing to take away your rights.  The Left wants to control what you think and say and eat and buy (a/k/a consumer protection) while the Right wants to read your emails and observe you 24/7 from drones in the name of protecting you from some hitherto unknown spooky terrorist (a/k/a personal protection or national defense.)

    Both sides make the person, the individual, a slave to the government:

    • The Left would have the G provide you with housing, medical care, food, water, schooling, day care, or in other words everything you need for daily life.  And when you misbehave… well then the G can take all that away.
    • The Right would have the G provide you with constant protection from fear or the unknown, “Someone out there’s going to try to hurt you.”  Whether it’s a black kid in a hoodie, a terrorist organization, or rouge nukes, you need to let us into your personal lives so that we can keep you safe.

    Both sides have killed personal responsibility in their own way.  We’re a nation of nit-wits waiting for the government to tell us that we’re going to be safe instead of protecting ourselves.  We get the government we deserve.

     

  • Pentagon Smears Critics

    The first casualty when war comes is the truth.
    — Hiram Johnson

    No one knows this better than the folks at the pentagon.

    The newspaper USA Today said Friday an editor and reporter probing Pentagon propaganda efforts have been targeted by an online “misinformation campaign.”

    Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created under the names of the reporter and editor with postings denigrating their professional reputations, according to the daily.

    The timing of the online harassment coincided with stories by Pentagon correspondent Tom Vanden Brook, who has written about the military’s “information operations” program that spent large sums on marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The program has faced criticism in and outside the Defense Department as “ineffective and poorly monitored,” the paper said.

    The false online accounts, including a fake Wikipedia entry, started appearing only days after the reporter first contacted Pentagon contractors for the story, the newspaper wrote.

    Two weeks after enterprise editor Ray Locker’s byline appeared on a story on the same subject, a fake website under his name — RayLocker.com — popped up, the paper said.

    You see?  you go writing things about the pentagon that they don’t like and misinformation about you will magically appear out of this air.  But worry not…

    A US official confirmed to AFP that the Defense Department had made inquiries to contractors doing public relations work to ask them about the false online accounts.

    The contractors denied any such activity, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

    But the websites were taken down following the Pentagon’s inquiry. Some other accounts were removed for violating Internet providers’ terms of service, USA Today said.

    The Pentagon said Friday it had not launched a formal investigation of the case.

    No no… why would a formal investigation be necessary?

    “We’re aware of the allegations and are not dismissing them outright to be sure,” press secretary George Little told reporters.

    via Yahoo! News Canada.

    Uh huh, right.

    Know this:  If the misinformation department at the pentagon is willing to take on a reporter and an editor from the USA Today — the nation’s largest paper — who have research staff and other resources at their disposal to fight back, then it would have no problem whatsoever totally destroying an ordinary citizen who exposes the truth.

  • Keith Olbermann Wanders Aimlessly in NY

    Unemployed, perennially confrontational talking head Keith Olbermann aimlessly wandered around Central Park South earlier this week, seemingly looking for a friend or a purpose.

    Our spies snapped unflattering pictures of Olbermann decked out in a giant red pullover and clownishly baggy jeans as he strolled 59th Street near Seventh Avenue, smelling the roses — or, in this case, the horse manure, allergens and aromas from a nearby food cart.

    via NYPOST.com.

    Ha ha ha.

    I never cared for Olbermann.  He, much like Bill Maher, engage in gutter dialog; although Olbermann uses fancier language.  It’s one ad hominem attack after another with this guy.  He has no unique ideas or thoughts of his own; he only tears down, divides.

    I’d like to think that karma is serving Keith the dish he richly deserves however the Left always need a useful idiot like Olbermann around to throw bombs.  He’ll be back.

     

  • Climate Alarmist Says Burn Down Skeptics’ Homes

    Climate Alarmist Calls For Burning Down Skeptics’ Homes

    “Let’s start keeping track of them…let’s make them pay”

    via  Infowars.

    Really?!

    Ya, really!

    “We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices,” writes Zwick, adding, “They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?”

    What a dingle-berry.

    How about this:  how about we make a list of all the people who got the global warming thing wrong and then charge them for all of our energy bills (gasoline, coal, electricity, natural gas, etc.) going higher because of their stupid regulations?

    Let’s start with Al Gore who lives in a huge mo fo house using 10 times the energy of the average person and wants to drive up the energy costs of poor people living in everything from cheap apartments to public housing.

    From there we’d move on to all the folks who don’t want to drive for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and ANWAR.  There should be two prices for gas in this country:  $2.65 for all the folks who support drilling and $6.75 for all the folks who don’t.

    Morons.

  • We’re Dying — Another 5.4 Million Get SS Disability

    Yesterday I re-wrote about Tytler:

    A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.

    The post when on to cite recent news about how we’re nearing this point.  We have a record number of folks on food stamps, approaching a majority.  We also have a record number of folks who do not pay any taxes… also approaching a majority.  Therefore we are at the point whereby the majority will vote in their own self interest and sink the entire country.

    Today this story comes along:

    A record 5.4 million workers and their dependents have signed up to collect federal disability checks since President Obama took office, according to the latest official government data, as discouraged workers increasingly give up looking for jobs and take advantage of the federal program.  …

    Since the recession ended in June 2009, the number of people who’ve signed up for disability benefits is twice the job growth figure. (See nearby chart.) In just the first four months of this year, 539,000 joined the disability rolls and more than 725,000 put in applications.via Investors.com.

    Incredible.

    For those that don’t know, disability is something you’re on forever… as in until you die.  You basically become a drain on everyone else in society.  The story goes on:

    This is straining already-stretched government finances while posing a long-term economic threat by creating an ever-growing pool of permanently dependent working-age Americans.

    A long-term economic threat indeed!!

    As a result, by April there were 10.8 million people on disability, according to Social Security Administration data released this week. Even after accounting for all those who’ve left the program — mainly because they hit retirement age or died — that’s up 53% from a decade ago.

    We need everyone to understand that for every person doing nothing collecting a check we need 15, 20, or 30 people out there working and paying taxes for those that don’t.  Further, for every government worker, you need another 20, or 30 workers to pay for their salary and benefits.

    Our ratios of workers to non-workers and workers to government employees is out of whack and unsustainable.  Those who do can no longer support those who don’t (and those who do but do so for the government.)

    Big BIG trouble ahead.

  • Prescient or Racism?

    Again, a UK paper carries a story no U.S. media outlet would touch.

    In his three years as U.S. president, Barack Obama has been dogged by claims he is not patriotic enough.  …

    Now it emerges that similar fears were expressed about his father, who was categorised with others as ‘anti-American and anti-white’ when he moved to the United States in 1959.

    A memo … released today by the National Archives in West London …  sets out their concerns about the young Kenyans.

    Dated September 1, 1959, it says: ‘I have discussed with the State Department.  They are as disturbed about these developments as we are.  They point out that Kenya students have a bad reputation over here for falling into the wrong hands and for becoming both anti-American and anti-white.’  …

    Mr Obama Snr was among 100 or so Kenyan students brought to America by the African American Students Foundation.U.S. and British officials were deeply suspicious of this outfit, observing that the AASF – though backed by singer Harry Belafonte and actor Sidney Poitier – had links to a Kenyan nationalist leader.

    ‘The motives behind this enterprise, therefore, seem more political than educational,’ warned a letter from the British Embassy in Washington.

    It added: ‘The arrival here of these students, many of them of indifferent academic calibre and ill-prepared for the venture, is likely to give rise to difficult problems.’

    Mr Obama Snr, who died in 1982, is not singled out for concern in any of the documents.

    via Mail Online.

    My first blush at this is that it’s nothing more than racism.  A bunch of upper-crust government types don’t are much for a bunch of African kids polluting their fine universities.

    Further though makes me wonder though, we know what kind of life Barack Sr. (and Barack Jr.) made for himself.  But we don’t know how any of the other students did.

    The comparison I’m thinking of is where a law school (or other academic institution) will let in a student based on race who’s not performed well in the past  (i.e. affirmative action.)  It is sad but true that some (not all but some) of these students simply cannot handle the rigors of law school and end up dropping out.  Sometimes affirmative action is education is just setting someone up to fail.  That’s not helpful to anyone.

    So maybe it’s not racism, it’s a sense that having these African kids is not helpful to anyone.  It’s not helping them do anything in Kenya.  It’s not helping us with any issues we’re having.  And further it denies the spot to someone who could really use it to make the world a better place.  i.e.  It’s not serving the greater good.

    But then maybe… just maybe…  these government types back in the 50’s weren’t like the fools we have today.  Maybe the government knew that these kids were really up to no good.  That they were just biding their time, working the system, until the moment was just right when they could make their play.

    Maybe it would have been better to not allow students selected by a national socialist political leader into our system if for no other reason than to separate politics from higher education.  We know locally that when politics and higher education mix it’s with bad consequences.

    We may never know what motivated the memo back in ’59.  But it is odd that not one U.S. media outlet covered this story.

  • Food Stamps & Taxes Suggest We’re Nearing the End

    A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

    Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

    attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler.

    I first published that quote nearly two years ago.  I thought it was true then… perhaps even truer now.

    The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007. It said the number of people receiving the benefits, commonly known as food stamps, would continue growing until 2014.

    via WSJ.

    And there is this:

    Out of the 143 million tax returns that were filed with the IRS in 2010, 58 million – or 41 percent – of those filers were non-payers.

    In other words, only 85 million actually paid taxes.

    via CNSNews.com.

    We cannot — and will not — survive when ‘net givers’ are outnumbered by ‘net takers’.  Two days ago I wrote that a record number of Americans have renounced their citizenship.  The U.S. is dealing with intellectual flight of massive proportions.  We are facing a perfect storm of breakdowns in both the economy and society.  The poor rarely have the ability, the means, to leave.  The rich however can easily move to wherever they like.

    We are only a few bad decisions away from the wheels falling completely off the bus.

  • The Catholic Church Engages

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9vQt6IXXaM]

    A friend of mine, who also happens to be a Baptist minister, once told me that despite being a life-long Democrat he had to endorse Bush over Kerry.  Kerry was just simply not compatible with his religion.

    There is an undoubted war on religion — all religion — in this country.  It’s time that all religions stood up to the bullies who want to remove God from all of our lives.

  • Chicago Teachers’ Union Closer to Strike

    Both sides have agreed to the appointment of a fact-finding panel that has 75 days to issue a report recommending terms for settlement of the labor contract.

    Once that report is issued in the middle of July, the parties have 15 days to accept or reject the panel’s recommendation. If its rejected, the fact-finding panel can publish its recommendation. Thirty days after that, the union is free to strike.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    Things are heating up, the battle lines have been drawn.  Everyone loves the teachers (who basically babysit their children all day,) but the cost is simply out of control.  The union drives wage inflation which it turn drives tax inflation.  So even though there are far fewer students than a few decades ago, the cost of educating these fewer student is considerably higher.

    Chicago continues to slide into Gotham.  A teachers strike could seal the deal.