The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Obama

I’m finally clearing out my reading backlog.  This book came out late last summer, and in fact, Laura Ingraham has written and released another book since then.  So The Obama Diaries is old news.

Something about TOD strikes me as just not right.

If you’re Team Obama and all his drones, and you sincerely believe that you’re all a bunch of evil Machiavellian rat bastards that want to all-but-communize America slash we’re even worse than the right wingers’ worst invective about us BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA~!, would you be so dumb as to write these things down in a medium which can so easily be absconded, like dead tree and ink diaries?  If you’re Joe Biden, and you’ve got really nothing going for you in the dating game should Jill Biden dump your ass, would you create a paper trail to your own statements saying that your wife is 60 years old but doesn’t look a day over 58, and that she’s lucky to have you for a husband?

If you’re some supposed secret black hat type that works in the White House, and you want to expose Team Obama’s private diaries to the world, what would give you the notion to put photocopies of all the pages in a plain manila envelope and put the envelope on top of Laura Ingraham’s car in a parking garage, then, Deep Throat-style, wait around for her and give her a clandestine verbal message?  Laura Ingraham, not even in the Top 5 of conservative talk radio ratings, and whose only TV face time is filling in for O’Reilly?  Why not someone more important in the conservative media?

And just how do the private diaries of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, HRC and Vladimir Putin end up being in the White House at all for this “Deep Throat” supposed person to pilfer along with those of Obama, Michelle, Biden, Mother Robinson, Rahm, Axelrod, Plouffe, Desiree Rogers, Gibbs, Summers, Reggie Love, Jarrett, Orszag, et al.?

Sorry, but this whole book and the whole idea sounds way too Protocols-y to me.

These so-called “diaries” seem to describe Team Obama and others not in the way they describe themselves, but in the way we, their critics, describe them.  That only means one of two things:  Either Laura Ingraham made them up out of thin air, or someone in the White House decided to play her for a sap.  A number of years ago, someone spray painted the words “Abortion on Demand” on the entrance of a Pro-Life organization office here in St. Louis.  Everyone suspected some Pro-Aborticide personality did it, except that the Pro-Aborticide crowd never uses the phrase “abortion on demand” to describe their own position, it is the way pro-lifers describe the pro-aborticide position.  I figured that pro-lifers did the graffiti as a false flag operation.  I don’t know what became of that story, we never got a follow-up.

Ingraham intersperses the text from the “diaries” with her own commentary, but they’re mostly conservative boilerplate or non-political common sense, you’ve heard both a zillion times already.  Nothing profound.

Read this book if someone gives it to you, but if you spend as much as one penny in order to do so, you’ve ripped yourself off.

Two Convicted Murderers Were Executed Yesterday

One was a cause celebre for the anti-death penalty crowd and fellow anti-white travelers, and the other might as well not have happened if you only paid attention to them.

I’m glad to hear that most lamestream conservatives have finally picked up on the racial double standard of all this.  Therefore, I need not repeat it.

This Troy Davis thing just popped out of nowhere, and within a day of his being executed.  That makes me suspicious — I think the left wing is trying to stir up shit and provoke black race riots, or at the very least, a string of anti-white hate crimes at the hands of blacks upset at the “lynching” of a (not so) “innocent man.”  You know who would love that; I’ll give you a hint, he currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.  Not for much longer, I “hope.”

As POed as I am at Ann Coulter lately, she nails the Troy Davis issue.

As for that other execution yesterday, what little media attention it got continues to get the circumstances of the murder of James Byrd wrong, from what I understand.  Byrd and his three white assailants were all in prison at the same time and in the same prison together, and the dragging death of Byrd was really nothing more than an extension of their prison feuds.  The media keep harping on the dearly departed’s none too politically correct attitudes about non-whites, to put it charitably.  Yes, all that is true, but doing the proximate causation (“but for”) test, I don’t think race was the driving factor per se.  Needless to say, the dearly departed got what he deserved; nothing ever became him in life like the leaving of it.

UPDATE 9/23:  My suspicion has been confirmed, somewhat.

UPDATE 9/24:  There was a protest at Brewer’s execution.  It’s just that the media blew it off.

Brent, Meet Sherman

Obama campaigns at the Brent Spence Bridge on the Ohio River at Cincinnati.

What they’re not telling you is that a replacement is already in the Ohio/Kentucky/Federal DOT program, though construction won’t start until 2015 and finish by 2022 at the earliest.  The most any sudden infusion of Federal money could do is to get it started next spring.

If Obama is worried about failing bridges, he should have been more than a hundred miles down river.  The Sherman Minton bridge, which, like the Brent Spence Bridge, is a double decker interstate highway bridge over the Ohio River that goes between a central business district on one side of the river in one state to residential suburbs on the other side of the river in the other state, not to mention the inter-city traffic, is closed as I write these words, and might not re-open, on account of support beam cracks.

At least the Brent Spence Bridge is mostly healthy from a structural standpoint.  Its problem is that it has two few lanes for the traffic it handles.

If the Sherman Minton Bridge is closed for good, this means that its replacement has to go at or near the top of the list, pushing everything else back.  At the same time, Louisville needs a new Ohio crossing east of town, and ideally needs to replace the John F. Kennedy (Interstate 65) bridge.  I’m thinking that the problems with the Sherman Minton Bridge have helped 86-64’s cause a lot.

UPDATE 9/23:  Turns out that replacing the Brent Spence Bridge is a far bigger deal than just replacing the bridge.  It will also involve reconstructing the two interstate routes that lead to it on both sides of the river in both Ohio and Kentucky.

Marauding Bands

Rush Limbaugh did a pretty good job today deconstructing Elizabeth Warren’s rant from a boilerplate lamestream conservative standpoint.

Only two things I can add:

First, she’s campaigning against a near- if not total RINO in the person of Scott Brown, not Ludwig Von Mises.  She’s constructing the straw dog that everyone not named Elizabeth Warren and everyone not with a D next to their name is an Anarcho-Capitalist.

Second, this was from her rant:

I hear all this, “You know, well, this is class warfare. This is whatever.” No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody! You built a factory out there? Good for you! But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You, uh, were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did.

Emphasis mine.

“Marauding bands.”  Sorta like black flash mobs.

Newsflash, Miss Warren:  A lot of business owners have had to worry about that in the last few years.  And the cops and firefighters were useless in the face of it.

All in the Family

Ron Paul would consider having Dennis Kucinich in his Presidential cabinet.

A few problems with that proposal:

1.  They agree on only about one-half of one issue.  That doesn’t justify giving him control over a whole cabinet-level executive department.

2.  Where would you put him?  I really can’t consider him qualified for any of the existing cabinet slots.  And most of the cabinet slots are related to domestic policy, on issues where they’re worlds apart.

3.  If it were up to Ron Paul, and I agree, there would be fewer cabinet level agencies, so the problem in #2 is even more compounded.  You have fewer Cabinet options for Kucinich.

4.  Oh, and, by the way, Dennis Kucinich is a big spending big government liberal.

5.  Dennis Kucinich has his own Presidential campaign to worry about.

Rand Paul, if you’re reading this, take over your father’s Presidential campaign STAT, a hostile takeover, if necessary.  Send dad to public relations boot camp for a few weeks, and clear out the goofballs who are egging him on to say things like Dennis KOOKcinich belongs in the Cabinet.  That’s the only way he’ll ever have a chance of winning.

Don’t think chrome and polish and PR aren’t important?  Rand Paul has won two statewide public elections in his life, the Kentucky Senate election and the preceding Republican Primary.  Ron Paul has won zero statewide elections of any kind.

Saving Your Bacon (Today’s Headlines)

Your Jewish News:  Africa bans Chinese condoms, they are too small.

No, no reason for stereotypes at all.

5:  Sex club uncovered in north St. Louis County

There’s sex happening in North County.  Really?

P-D:  Burglar caught frying bacon in UCity kitchen

Dana Loesch will demand leniency.

Daily Mail:  Forest boy Ray is a ‘normal boy who uses cutlery, takes showers and even enjoys bowling’

Wrong.  Forest boy Ray is a normal hen-pecked middle aged man.

 

UK Telegraph:  World’s smallest aquarium holds just two teaspoons of water

Good luck finding a filtration system for this thing.

Tuesday’s Tidbits

LOCAL AND REGIONAL

*  It’s really a national story, but I’m putting it in the local stack because MoDOT gets a metion.

And as far as the question, the answer is almost always the latter.

*  The anti-tobacco nuts are going to try for a cig tax hike again.  They whine about Missouri’s cig tax being the lowest of all the states in the union.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

NATIONAL

*  There’s also a practical angle here.  The reason this particular judge of the 9th Circuit so easily equates “habitual drug users” to “career criminals” is because (A) Habitual drug users usually are or wind up being career violent criminals, and most importantly, (B) Those whose rap sheets only seem to have drug crimes really did commit a lot of other crimes, were arrested for other more serious violent crimes, but the prosecutors pled everything else out and down to the drug crimes because drug crimes have no victims that are too embarrassed to testify in court or are too intimidated to testify.

*  Vincente Fox in Oregon, or rather, the Mexican province that used to be called the American state of Oregon.

As an aside, what is now Oregon was never part of Mexico, so the Raza-Reconquista kooks can’t have a bug up their asses about that.

*  This is sorta what I have been saying — Terrorism is becoming passe and counterproductive for the Shari’ah crowd.

Would you spend time, money, blood and reputation to do something that someone else would be willing to for you for practically free?  Why should Muslims commit terrorism anymore to spread Shari’ah Law (aka Islam) when the Obama Justice Department, Obama’s judicial appointments and Obama’s favorite media outlets are willing to spread Shari’ah Law through the power of gavels, lawsuits and propaganda?

*  Oklahoma wants drug testing for welfare recipients.  In passing, we find out that almost one in ten new applicants to Florida’s welfare system have been turned down for a flunked dope test.

*  Really?  No money down/interest-only/no insurance required mortgages are a bad idea?

Did you just arrive from Mars, slappy?

*  They don’t call it “Filthadelphia” for nothing.

The Deputy Mayor’s excuse is that the bad economy is causing the city to get behind on “30 years of maintenance issues.”  Except the economy hasn’t been bad for all of the last 30 years.  Let me guess, the city was diverting police physical facility maintenance funds to Mumia’s LDF?

*  On the heels of the news that Texas TPM activists and TPM activists in general are finally getting over their honeymoon with the Rickroller, and busting his chops on amnesty and open borders, their Alabama counterparts are organizing street theater in support of the state’s immigration crackdown legislation.  The TPM isn’t everything I want, but at least it’s coming around on the immigration issue.  Now all they need to do is to get over their Herman Cain slash Allen West slash Tim Scott “Mandingo” love affair, and we’ll really have something to work with.

*  I told you earlier not to fall into the “Jewish” trap and instead to analyze NY-9’s sudden color change in light of the economy.  Forbes confirms — NY-9 is the least wealthy white Congressional district in NYC.  This is a bad barometer for Obama in the rust belt swing states next year.

INTERNATIONAL

*  “We let them down.”  Cue every violin ever made to play the saddest song ever composed.

It’s official — Clegg is my least favorite “Nick” of British politics.  Just in case you were wondering, Griffin is my favorite.

*  WSJ worries about what Europe will look like after the fiscal hangover:

Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It’s a long, likely parade of horribles.

Again, those are features, not bugs.

*  Today’s England:  Movie scenes of people smoking ciagrettes are too traumatic for people under the age of 18 to watch, but full frontal sex scenes?  You’re practically committing a hate crime if you don’t let your six-year old watch them.

*  A number of years back, the Republican Party organization of Carroll County, Maryland had a raffle where a pistol was the first prize.  The anti-gun nuts in the state legislature whined and moaned about it, and threatened to enact a state law prohibiting firearms from being a raffle prize — AFAIK, that went nowhere.

I wonder what all those bigmouths will say about this.  Prediction:  Nothing.  In fact, they’ll call you a bit for bringing this up.

TECHNOLOGY

*  I’m not quite that old, yet.  My first scientific calculator was the TI-30 STAT.  While my mother was nothing close to a math whiz, she did anticipate my almost outgrowing the four function, and plopped out the ten bucks for this in January 1988, halfway through my fifth grade school year.  At first, I thought it was an actual sin to touch “sin.”

*  HA!  Samsung might patent troll the iCabal’s next “smart” phone to death in Europe just like the iCabal patent trolled the Samsung Galaxy Tab’s second versions to death in Europe.

Payback…it’s a female dog.

*  What does all this mean?  Nobody will really want Windows 8 as a desktop OS, because it will be too much like a tablet or phone OS.  And nobody will want Windows 8 as a tablet OS, because it’s going to be underfeatured.

*  The Netflix auto-bifurcation into DVD-by-mail and streaming divisions I think wasn’t its only attempt to wean people away from physical media and toward streaming.  I think their most recent price increase was designed to do just that.  I’m a Netflix subscriber, formerly with the 3 DVD by mail plus unlimited instant streaming plan, and I noticed that, after the new price increases, if I downgraded from three to two physical DVDs, I would have the same monthly price.  That’s not a coincidence, IMHO.  In fact, the customer service rep who processed my request to do this seemed happy.

What You Talkin’ ‘Bout, Willis?

NYP:

Schools with high poverty level negatively impacts student performance

The performance of city students on state tests is not just impacted by their poverty level – but remarkably, by the poverty level of their schools as well, according to a wide-ranging analysis of city schools data.

The report by the Independent Budget Office found that students in grades 3 to 8 from low-income families scored 16 percentage points higher on reading tests in 2010 if they attended a low-poverty school rather than a high-poverty school.

The difference for students from high-income families who attended a low-poverty school rather than a high-poverty school was even greater – of 31 percentage points.

In fact, the effects of a school’s poverty level were so great that poor students in a low-poverty school scored 4 percentage points higher on reading tests last year than did students from high-income families attending high-poverty schools.

I’ve had this story in my stack for awhile, and I figure I better do something with it before it gathers too much dust.

Trouble is, me and my usually sharp-as-a-tack mind is having trouble making sense of these conclusions.  My only instinct is that this is all a sap for deseg.  If this data are true to any extent, the reason students tend to do better in “low poverty schools” (read: white) rather than “high poverty schools” (read: black and Hispanic, and in New York City, Hispanic generally means black-mulatto Caribbean) is because whiter classrooms actually get more work done and more forward progress in the syllabus.

Or maybe there’s something I’m missing.  Which makes this the perfect first post in the comment-taking era of this medium.

Discuss among yourselves.

Should I Start Taking Comments?

I’ve been thinking that I should allow comments.  The only drawback is that I really couldn’t participate much in the conversation, I simply have too much to do.  However, I have come to understand that some comments can be really good and informative, from reading AR, Steve Sailer, Eric Raymond, Jew Among You, and others.

So I’ll put it in the form of a poll.

UPDATE 9/21:  Alright, here goes nothing.  I’m allowing comments on new posts, starting today (but not including this post or any older ones).  Ground rules:  Stories are closed to comments after three weeks, and no more than four URLs in a given comment, otherwise the comment is presumed to be spam.  Also, like I said above, don’t expect me to participate very much.

The reason I didn’t allow comments at first is that in the first several years of this URL, it served not as my soapbox, but as an official voice of an organization.  Therefore, I didn’t allow comments just in case some leftist saboteur posted laudatory comments about a certain German dictator, and the SPLC would make hay of it.  This URL has not been anything but my personal soapbox for some time, but I hesitated on comments because of time concerns.  I still have those time concerns, so comments are mainly a courtesy to my readers.  If you need to get my relatively immediate attention, direct contact is still the better route.

New to the Blogroll

The American Scoop.  This is the D.C. correspondent to James Edwards’s radio show.  Here’s hoping for James’s sake that the D.C. area has a lot of Chuck-E-Cheese locations.

Tuesday’s Tidbits

LOCAL AND REGIONAL

*  The truth, the half truth and halfway to the truth — SLPD moans about the usual North St. Louis mehe of “fifty people saw it all but nobody saw anything,” but can only express “sadness” in earnest, and say that “we have more work to do.”

Among that “other work” you have to do is telling the whole truth, the whole racial truth, about that sort of thing.

*  Just look at the sign for a quick split second without reading any of the words.  That by itself should tell you what this story is about.

*  Mark this down in stone:  One or more people who have relevant power and decision making authority in the Parkway district have some sort of financial or other links to the ACT corporation.

*  Sorry.  These schools aren’t really that bad, it’s the students which make them bad.  To paraphrase Mark Kasen, if the Imagine Charter Schools were in Chesterfield, they would be very good schools.

*  Remember, the state of Illinois is out of money.

It can’t be out of money too badly if it’s going to start a “save me from deportation” hotline.

BTW, cut the crap, Illinois — We already know that next to nobody actually gets “deported” in the physical sense of the word.

NATIONAL

*  Look at the second photo.  There is a sitting U.S. Senator in that picture.  Can you spot him without reading the caption?

*  Most of the political attention to Fast and Furious is on the 2nd Amendment issues.  I’m ringing the bell that it might have also been designed to affect the immigration debate.  Someone has finally heard that bell.

*  Do you have some important purchase to make?  Get it done soon, before it suddenly becomes more “expensive” just based on the pieces of paper in your wallet being less valuable.

QE3 is on the way.

*  Everyone has been analyizing Beaver Cleaver’s statement from a purely racial angle.  Which is good — Obviously, someone like me in a blog like this wouldn’t oppose such a thing.  But what turns my stomach a little bit is when Beaver Cleaver implies that if this were Bill Clinton in the White House with this horrible economy, the CBC would be marching along Pennsylvania Avenue.  I don’t buy that one bit, because the post-1994 (supposedly) “triangulatory” President Clinton did a lot of things that (at least on the surface) seemed to be “bad” for blacks, and there was nothing more than a slight grunt of disapproval from various CBC members.  Much less any marching on the WH.

There’s no way in hell the CBC would be that openly hostile to ANY Democrat President, white, black, red, yellow, green or polka dot.

*  When I was younger, several older people (“older,” in relative terms, they were by no means elderly) kept using a phrase that I didn’t quite grok at the time:

“Poor people have poor ways.”

The “older” I get (again, relative terms), the more I actually grok the point.

Case in point…

*  The TALA Syndrome:  Notice that this pilot study took place in Charlotte, Austin and Tucson.

*  Hello?  Your city has an old Spanish Catholic Mission where swallows return every March 19.  And you have a problem with Christianity all of a sudden?

*  Hey, Dad, take a hint — There is no honor among thieves or thugs.  They don’t care what kind of uniform or clothes their intended victim is wearing, or who signs their paychecks.

*  Finally, the love affair between the Rickroller and the TPM is over, and thankfully, for the best of reasons.

*  You might write off Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s bold statement as insular arrogance.  That it might be, but it seems to be true at least from the standpoint of recent history — John McCain virtually won the Republican nomination when he won the Florida Primary in 2008.  And, need I remind you, 2000?

*  PJB:  The real worrisome statistic in the recent “rising poverty” report isn’t the rising poverty rate, but the stagnating (and in fact, falling) median household income.

INTERNATIONAL

*  We’re making progress.  Next step:  Deport the kind of people that want to wear burquas, and don’t let them legally immigrate into Holland to begin with.

*  Muslims in Switzerland bitching about the cross in the country’s flag.

Don’t like it?  I’m sure there are a lot of countries whose flags have the Crescent.

BTW, Switzerland never really adopted “multiculturalism,” or to term it more properly, multiracialism.

*  What is it with this British obsession with terming violent crime in terms of the weapon used?  While “gun crime” is used on both sides of the pond, (mainly as a distraction from the race of the perpetrators), “knife crime” and “knifeman” is almost entirely used in British media.  Now, they’ve found someone who committed “hammer crime.”

And yes…

The moral of this story?  Don’t do the hammer crime unless you can do the Hammer Time.  (Rimshot)

*  Newsflash:  “Tea Party” isn’t a pejorative.

But all I can say is that if you think it is, have at it.  The sooner the Odd Couple splits up, the more likely it is that we’ll soon end up with Prime Minister Nick Griffin and a BNP majority in Parliament.

*  Funny thing — I agree with them.  I don’t want a return to “Howard-era politics” either, because I don’t want immigration control happening only in the 30-60 days before Parliamentary elections.  I want it happening ALL the time.  To get immigration control happening all the time, you must repudiate “Howard-era politics” and embrace Pauline Hanson-era politics.

TECHNOLOGY

*  Faster, please.  When I found out that an American digital TV transmission channel was the equivalent of a 19.3 Mbps digital information stream, light bulbs (yes, the incandescent kind) went off in my head.

Not only is this a good idea for large scale broadband deployments, but I can also see small scale operations (household WiFi networks and routers) making use of TV white space as well, as secondary “backup” frequencies.  Though they wouldn’t really be primary, because a DTV channel and its 19.3 Mbps top speed would be about the top practical speed that 802.11g gives you, and we’re already up to much faster 802.11n and maybe about two years away from even faster 802.11ac.

*  Cool.  Crowdsourcing old photographs in order to overlay images of the way things used to look into GSV.

*  Me likey.  However, thanks to the “technological and legal” challenges mentioned in this article, I think the real future of driving isn’t fully automated and automatic, but more of a semi-automatic mode, where car and driver will fairly evenly split the work of driving, and the car will be smart enough to alert and yield to the human driver when real human intervention is needed.  And I think the semi-automatic mode will be adaptive enough such that there are situations when there the action will be far more automatic and situations where it will be far more manual, with varying scenarios in between.  If you’re driving along Highway 50 in rural Nevada, mostly automatic is good.  If you’re driving in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis on Mardi Gras Saturday, and most of the streets are blocked off, then a lot more human intervention is appropriate.  But I doubt driving will ever be fully automatic, even though the days of fully manual driving are just about over.

Day of Fail

Pajamas Media has this to say in its victory lap:

In American politics there are two strong currents of anti-capitalist thought: Marxism/communism/socialism versus Anarchism/far-left-libertarianism. The problem is that these two ideologies are fundamentally at odds; one advocates hyper-centralization of political and economic power, while the other advocates hyper-decentralization.

In earlier times, the communists and the anarchists hated each other; they are natural enemies. But in recent decades they have formed an uneasy and deeply unstable alliance; since they both hate the status quo of American capitalism, they feel they ought to band together and smash the system as a unified front, and worry about how to pick up the pieces later.

But the Day of Rage revealed that this alliance can never succeed, because it can never offer a consensus philosophy; it’s impossible to draw the sympathy of the great masses when you offer two completely divergent philosophies as your “unified message.” In truth, there is no unified message, and there never can be; that’s why the “Day of Rage” organizers couldn’t even decide on what their one single demand would be at the protest.

I feel this is a turning point in the anti-capitalist movement; the failure of the much-hyped Day of Rage proved that the communists and the anarchists never will be able to smooth over their differences, and the far-left will necessarily fracture in two. The anarchists will break free of their socialist bedmates and drift more toward honest extreme libertarianism and anti-authoritarianism; while Team Marx will no longer feel the need to temper their collectivist message with a bunch of dishonest slogans about freedom and independence.

This is fine to talk about from a purely academic standpoint.  The problem is, I wouldn’t spend so much time and so many column-inches describing a “debate” between two rinky dink loser factions within loserville.  The “fight” between the “Marxist” far left and the “Anarchist” far left is about as germane as a wrestling match between two four-year olds, for much the same reason.

Another problem with this analysis is that it assumes that the omni-everything model of government of Marxists and the nihilistic model of government of the Anarchists are “at odds.”  In reality, they’re the same thing — “No government” usually loops around and becomes ultra-big government, (think:  ordo ab chao)  and, at least in classical Marxist theory, it’s true in the other direction — Ultra-big government is only supposed to be a temporary and unfortunately “necessary” institution to reconstruct society such that it is ready for no government.

Profitability

AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Is it ever OK to tweet that a girl’s a “slut”? How about using an offensive name for gays on Facebook? Or texting a racial slur? Most young people think it’s all right when friends are joking around with each other, according to a new poll.

Jaded by the Internet free-for-all, teens and 20-somethings shrug off offensive words and name-calling that would probably appall their parents, teachers or bosses. And an Associated Press-MTV poll shows they don’t worry much about whether the things they tap into their cellphones and laptops could reach a wider audience and get them into trouble.

Seventy-one percent say people are more likely to use slurs online or in text messages than in person, and only about half say they are likely to ask someone using such language online to stop.

“On Twitter, everybody’s getting hit hard. Nobody really cares about nobody’s feelings,” said Kervin Browner II, 20, a junior at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. “You never know how bad it hurts people because they don’t say anything.”

But young people who use racist or sexist language are probably offending more people than they realize, even in their own age range. The poll of 14- to 24-year-olds shows a significant minority are upset by some pejoratives, especially when they identify with the group being targeted.

That, and the “you offended me, go directly to sensitivity training, do not pass go, do not collect $200,” or the “stamping out bigotry and fill-in-the-blank-ism,” industry is very lucrative.  Until that industry dissipates on its own, or its leaders get sent to Federal prison for wire and mail fraud (Hint to the next Republican President), these jokes will never be just jokes.

Among African-American youth, however, 60 percent said they would be offended by seeing the N-word used against other people.

Somehow, that does not preclude them from using it among and about themselves.

Fish and Carnahans…After Three Days

Fox Business:  Texas Instruments Raises Dividend 31%

Newsflash:  A company that makes graphing calculators does well during back-to-school season.

5:  One man suspected in nine crimes in two hours

That figures to 4.5 crimes per man-hour.  That’s some sort of St. Louis City record.

Arizona Republic:  Brewer to attend border meeting in Mexico

She really doesn’t have to travel, she’s got plenty of Mexico right where she is.

P-D:  Russ Carnahan chosen to attend UN meeting

We won’t have to worry about getting out of the UN — They’ll kick us out after that.

FNC:  A Former Cheerleader Says, Don’t Let Today’s Cheerleaders Wear Their Short Skirts to School

But once they get older and they get jobs with the Fox News Channel, then it’s fine.

Un-Slippery Slope

Taxes are a big item in the news today.

In 1992, Ross Perot proposed a “stair stepped” capital gains tax.  What that means is that the longer you hold a capital asset before you sell it relative to when you bought it, the lower the capital gains tax (CGT) rate would be on the marginal profit (capital gain).  Perot’s reasoning was that CGs realized from very quick buying and selling should be taxed at a higher rate than your parents’ house they bought 25 years ago and are selling now that the nest is empty because rapid buy-sell capital gains are usually shares in larger publicly traded corporations.  A higher tax on quicker asset flips would discourage quick asset flips, and would act as a deterrent to job outsourcing, which is usually a favorite short term tactic of short term CEOs of larger corporations (their average tenure isn’t that long anyway, about six years according to 2008 statistics) to get corporate profits up in a hurry, ergo the company’s stock price up in a hurry — The CEO’s performance bonuses are usually tagged to the stock price, and his or her golden parachute usually includes a lot of the company’s shares.

As it turned out, a stair stepped CGT would have deterred a lot of the real estate “flipping” of the last decade.

Perot wanted a ten percent drop in the CGT rate per year that the asset was held, with five “stair steps.”  What that means is that an asset sold within a year of being bought would be subject to a 50% CGT, 40% if between 1 and 2 years, 30% if between 2 and 3 years, 20% if between 3 and 4 years, 10% if between 4 and 5 years, and no capital gains taxes if the asset is sold more than five years after being purchased.

The only problem I have with that precise setup is that you might have situations where, in order to wait out a 10% rate drop, assets are held back then dumped onto the market all at once on their “anniversary.”  That will result in an artificial but ephemeral price collapse in certain assets, including but not limited to common stock and real estate, every once in awhile.  The reason that might not actually happen in the real world is that such a market glut of available assets resulting in the temporary price crash will mean less actual CGs upon sale.  But it’s something I wouldn’t want to risk if I were Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

I think the better idea is to stair-step the capital gains tax NOT by year, but by day.  For instance, let’s say the top capital gains tax rate is 40%, and you want to stair step down to 0%.  (Actually, it would be more like a slippery slope, instead of a staircase.)  You could stair step it down from 40 to zero over 2,000 days (about 5.5 years), which would mean a 0.02% CGT rate discount for every day the asset is held relative to when it was purchased.

Example:  You buy 10,000 shares of XYZ Corporation today, September 19, 2011, at $18 a share.  On February 27, 2013, you sell them all for $34 a share.  What you purchased for $180,000, you sold for $340,000, meaning a $160,000 capital gain.  Since you sold it 527 days after you purchased it, you get a CGT rate discount of 527 x 0.02%, or 10.54%.  40% minus 10.54% is 29.46%.  And 29.46% times $160,000 is $47,136 that you owe Uncle Sam.  As an aside, 2000 days after today is March 11, 2017, so if you sell your XYZ shares on or after that day, your CGs are tax free.

Audit

One of the first things the next Republican President should do is have the IRS audit the personal finances of both Warren Buffet and his secretary.  I think there’s a better than even money chance that his story about how his effective personal income tax rate is less than hers is at least a mild deception if not total bullshit.

Buffet’s corporate arm, Berkshire Hathaway, is currently in the middle of a gigabuck level taxes in arrears dispute with the IRS.  You know how that goes — An Obama-friendly soundbyte a day keeps the IRS away.  Political protection Buffet probably loses on January 20, 2013.

UPDATE 9/23:  Sounds like someone’s been reading my blog.  Good shot.

Bifurcation Blocking

Does anyone know who was able to register questiondiversity.wordpress.com?  Just for grins, I wanted to reserve the *.wordpress.com URL that matches my AmRen screen name, in case I had any future designs.  But I found out that it is already taken — Someone whose WordPress handle is “merryheretic” registered it on January 20, 2009, the day Our Odoacer was inaugurated.  And there are no posts and comments there since the perfunctory first ones than the “Hello World” stuff that WordPress puts on every newly registered blog.

T.L.T.L.

Harrumph harrumph.  He With Half His Brain Tied Behind His Back finally said what we’ve been saying for years, that California is permanently blue because of demographics and immigration (hint, Rush:  In last year’s red wave elections, not a single California U.S. House seat flipped from blue to red, and Democrats swept the statewide offices), and that if Texas and Florida go, combined with New York being unwinnable, Republicans will never be able to win the Presidency.  The occasion for this was Rickroller Perry’s open borders problems.

This is the same Rush that, just a few weeks ago, and repeatedly since then, told us to ignore the WaPo expose of illegal aliens getting EITC, because it’s supposedly too much a distraction from jobs and the economy.  As if immigration, jobs and the economy aren’t intertwined.

The main reason why California is permanently Hispanic and therefore permanently blue, so much so that Reagan wouldn’t be able to win it today (a theory that his adopted son seems to want to test next year) is because of Reagan’s 1986 amnesty.  So, to end his missive, Rush said we need another Reagan.  MASSIVE EPIC LAMESTREAM CONSERVATIVE FAIL.

The moral of this story?  Too little, too late.

Sunday Wrap-Up

LOCAL AND REGIONAL

*  Mother’s boyfriend not the kid’s father kills the kid.  Like I have said.

*  Remember, all the contracts for the New Mississippi River Bridge have been let and all the work is underway, therefore all the people needed for the job are already hired.  So if Gov. Quinn has delivered “good news” to the rinky dink black “contractors” that want to “shut it down,” then it must be nothing but pork barrels unrelated to this project.

*  “Attack Watch” is a national story, but I’m putting it in the local stack of stuff for a reason — It reminds me a lot of the Boyer-Joyce-McCulloch “Truth Squad” story of about three years ago, a story which I broke on the internet, in another medium.

*  This narrative is way too suspicious.  A dozen guards versus one hoosegowbird armed with impromptu “nunchucks” that wouldn’t hurt a fly.  Mark me, there is some kind of relationship between this escapee and one or more of these guards.

*  Steve Sailer mentions the Cahokia Mounds.

*  “I want Cindy,” but Channel 5 doesn’t want her at the same price.  Remember, this is the same “Cindy” that blamed the New Years Eve tornado this past December 31 on “global warming,” while Dave Murray informed us that the deadliest tornadoes in St. Louis tend to happen during the winter months.

NATIONAL

*  Just in case you weren’t reading, I have already discussed my feelings on these new Sarah Palin rumors.  I think they’re 90% bullshit and 10% truth.  The reason why I think some of this is truthful is that where there is smoke, there is usually at least a little bit of fire.  Any 10% of this being true should end her political career, no matter which 10% it is.

What I find interesting is that a leftist author who perched himself next door to the Palin house then dug up these rumors thinks that he can torpedo her with rumors of her having interracial sex.  Don’t all these libs love miscegenation so much?  If anything, if the Glen Rice rumors are true, it might be a lot easier for Palin to win the Democrat nomination for President.

Really, what’s going on here is that this author probably doesn’t find anything wrong with interracial relationship, it’s that he thinks most Republican voters do.  It’s the Mark Foley thing all over again — Libs pretending to be aghast at the same kind of behavior they really support in order to depress Republican turnout.

*  Racial gerrymandering, it’s a good thing.

This analysis insinuates, but does not directly suggest, that NY-9’s sudden change of color had far more to do with its working class whites, orthodox Jewish voters included, voting as working class whites and against Obama, reacting to the bad economy.  I didn’t dog whistle around that point a few days ago, I stated it directly.  This was a referendum on the economy, not Israel or Jewish ethnocentricism.

*  Why is Darden Restaurants signing on to the Blackie O health nut agenda?

Answer:  Quid Pro O.  Her husband gave Darden Restaurants an ObamaCare waiver.

*  Obama to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus:  “I’d like to work my way around Congress…” to get amnesty passed, but “we’ve got laws on the books that have to be upheld.”

You already have, and you don’t care about those laws.  Two words:  Administrative amnesty.  (AKA refusing to enforce immigration law)

*  Maryland Governor Walter O’Mexico hearts the Rickroller.

In a sane world with a sane Republican Party, this would end the Rickroller’s Presidential campaign.

*  Five, six, seven, eight…

…Illiberalism is a dangerous mental disorder.

Or maybe, poetic justice?

Or maybe both.

*  Bloomberg warns?  No, more like Bloomberg wants, so he (and Obama) can turn around and blame it on Republicans, capitalism and guns.

*  Feh?  This is simple compared to a lot of other IRS forms.  I actually think most people would grok the quadratic formula better with this pseudo IRS worksheet than with the way most algebra teachers teach it.

*  More Obama razzle dazzle on taxes.  Warren Buffet doesn’t pay a lower personal Federal income tax rate than his secretary because there’s a problem with the rates themselves, it’s because he can game so many deductions and write-offs that he gets his taxable income far lower than his real income.  Increasing the rates is just a smokescreen.

INTERNATIONAL

*  Belgium finally getting a government after more than a year of negotiation and horse trading.  Though what it’s getting seems to be even more tenuous and impossible than the Cameron-Clegg Odd Couple.  Just sit back and watch the wheels fall off.  Then maybe they’ll get it and partition Belgium by language.  Then the Brits will get it by sweeping the BNP to power.

*  On another medium, I used to do a daily tracking of the Zim$-US$ exchange rate.  I gave up on it when I realized that the daily number had a Potemkin quality.

Amazon to the rescue.

*  Here’s another impasse I can solve easily — No refugee processing, either on shore or off shore, restore the White Australia Policy, and vote for Pauline Hanson and One Nation.

See, that wasn’t hard.

HISTORY

*  Both relating to local education.  Judging by today’s impossible standards, I fail to see how Langston’s second, corrected statement is any less “bigoted” than his supposed first.

*  P-D profiles the heated but (unfortunately) ephemeral reaction that St. Louis’s white Catholic population had toward Archbishop (and eventually Cardinal) Joseph Ritter’s school integration edict.

I think the reason why the resistance died down so quickly is because actual integration would affect very few Catholic schools.  St. Louis’s Catholic school system couldn’t afford daily transportation, much less a cross-town desegregation scheme, either then or now.  Even today, the high school named in Ritter’s honor is the only local Catholic H.S. that is majority black.

MISC

*  This might not be the kind of “Star Wars” planet they’re making it out to be.

It is possible (in fact, now confirmed) that double star systems can have planets.  However, it is thought that the two stars in double systems, while orbiting around their common center of gravity, the barycenter, have to be far enough away from each other, such that any planet that could support liquid water and therefore life would be far closer to one of the two stars than the other, and therefore would be orbiting that star, with the second star being a distant bright light source that “seems” to be orbiting the same star as is the planet.  (If Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar neighbor, has any habitable planets or moons around planets, it would be that kind of setup.)  In theory, you can have a two-star system where the stars are close and a habitable planet is orbiting the barycenter of the two stars — That’s what you would need to have a true “Star Wars” type planet, to have dual sunsets a la the movie.

This article implies, but does not state directly, that Kepler-16b is orbiting the stars’ barycenter as opposed to one of the stars.

Recommended

Pale Moon.  Firefox optimized for newer versions of Windows and newer processors.  It’s significantly faster and more responsive than official Firefox.  You’ll want to make sure your machine meets the specs before you try it out.  But if you’re running XP SP2 or newer on any multi-core CPU, you’re good to go.  There is even a tool available to help you move your existing Firefox profile to Pale Moon.  Most Firefox extensions will work in PM.

Fun With Apocalypse Now (Size Matters)

P-D:  Normandy school district honors 70-year teacher

She has been teaching in the Normandy district for so long that she can remember when it was the best and most desirable district in North County.

P-D:  St. Louis is a top city for singles, says social networking site

You’re welcome.

LAT:  Scarlett Johansson nude pics: The FBI investigates

I bet there were a lot of volunteers inside the Hoover Building.

Yahoo Music:  Justin Bieber Wears Women’s Jeans

If the pants fit…

FNC:  Chicago to Publish Crime Stats Online

Take what you see, multiply by four, and then you’ll arrive at the truth.

KCBS-2 L.A.:  LA Porn Studio Begins Construction On ‘Post-Apocalyptic’ Underground Bunker

There isn’t much space in that thing, so every inch will matter.  Literally.

WLS Chicago:  Michigan [Governor] to Track Kids’ BMI

Whew.  Good thing it wasn’t New Jersey.

Sydney Morning Herald:  Men banned from female-only council events

Oh please don’t throw me out of the briar patch.

Thursday’s Toestubs

LOCAL AND REGIONAL

*  Cherish.  There hasn’t been this much racial sense in the P-D in a long time.

*  IDOT:  Racial minorities comprise 23% of the person-work-hours on the new Mississippi River Bridge.

Now, governments lie, Illinois more than most.  But these are those ever-precious racial minorities Illinois loves so much.  I doubt they would want to lie about this.

*  I’ve had this story collecting dust in my stack for a few days.  It doesn’t require much commentary from your ever-loving blogmeister, but by the same token, I would have to treat it as a separate blog post for one really obvious reason.  But I don’t feel like doing that, (too nice outside), so I’m just going to “devil may care” provide the link, and hope you miss the obvious blunder.

NATIONAL

*  Expanding on the tax withholding discussion I had a few days ago right here, Rush took a caller from a young woman toward the end of his show today, about personal income tax withholding.  Along with all the points I made, Rush said that most people deliberately engineer over-withholding because the concept of owing the IRS money scares them.

Trust me, it’s not scary.  Just write them a good and valid check, and they’re happy.

*  Why I’m voting Bachmann.  She might not have realized how profound her point was.  Believe me, the far left will soon let her know, and won’t let her forget.

*  Why I’m not voting Gingrich.  The last paragraph discusses his current wife — She might want to realize that when it comes to Gingrich and marriages, past performace is usually indicative of future actions.  My advice to her is don’t get sick.

*  La Raza ends its Arizona boycott.  We all know the real reason, because it was a flop.  Officially, though, they say they were successful in discouraging other states, such as Alabama and Georgia, from enacting similar legislative packages.

*  House wants national reciprocity for CCW.  Other than the obvious Constitutional problems, I doubt this bill will really go anywhere.  Even when the House, Senate and President are all Republican, this kind of bill goes nowhere.

The better idea would be for CCW issuing states to join together and form a uniform convention on conceal-carry, sort of like the Uniform Commercial Code.

*  California:  A group of four people, two whites and two Hispanics, are accused of burning a cross on the lawn of a black occupied residential dwelling.

So much for the universal brotherhood of man.  And so much for the black-Hispanic coalition against the honkey/gringo.

*  President Obama will appear at the Brent Spence Bridge, the double-decker bridge on the Ohio River at Cincinnati that carries Interstates 71 and 75 jointly between Ohio and Kentucky, to lobby for his “jobs bill.”

He must not realize that just a bit down river is a bridge that is actually closed at the moment because of serious cracks and damage, that being the Sherman Minton Bridge at Louisville, that Interstate 64 uses.

*  Two words:  Keep dreaming.

Our diversity is too important not to fund.  Who needs space travel, anyway?  After all, it’s just another white flight conspiracy.

*  My personal instincts tell me that this junk trash “expose” of Sarah Palin, the one that claims she had sex with and snorted cocaine with Glen Rice, among a lot of other things, is 90% obvious made-up bullshit and 10% truth.  If I’m right, though, just the 10% of this that is true should pretty much end her political career.

*  The victim, a 13-year old CPS eighth grader, is said to “[play] basketball, soccer, football and [swim] in addition to going to church.”

Pardon me, but where does a 13-year old who has an appreciable amount of homework, sports practice all year long, and a bit of Bible study sprinkled in for good measure, find the time to hang around on street corners at 7:30 PM with hard core gangbangers?  (See one of the first comments).

CANADA

*  PM Harper stumbled on the truth, Muslims upset.

He said that “…Canada keeps an eye on home grown Islamic radicals.”  He would do better to deport them.  And better than that not to let them in to begin with.  But that’s just me, I have the proper attitude about diversity not.

*  A majority of Canadians in a scientific poll think that there are irreconcilable differences between Islam and Occdential civilization.  However, the “slight ray of hope,” as this article puts it, is that a slight majority in the same poll think it’s wrong to profile Muslims at airports.  As time goes on, even that statistic will swing our way.

Now, if there were only some legitimate way for Canadian voters to translate these feelings into actual governance.  (Hint:  Sounds like “Paul Fromm.”)

BRITAIN

*  Misnomer.  I don’t think the rioters filling the prisons are joining gangs to “protect themselves,” think most of them were already ganged up, and are merely hooking up with their sort when they get to prison.

*  Probably not the brighest bulb in the box.  But he’s closer to the truth than he realizes.

*  Smarmy language, true.  But at least they’re implicitly admitting that there are human rights abuses in Zimbabwe, which they tried to deny or dismiss until now.

*  The UK never adopted the Euro.  So why should the coming collapse of the Euro be a problem?

Maybe they’re expecting a lot of Greek “refugees.”

*  Translation:  Patterson’s First Axiom.  Nothing cures the thirst for diversity like a good dose of diversity.  (Actually, those weren’t Bob Patterson’s exact words — You’ll have to use your imagination.)

*  Two-thirds of people who become legally permitted to enter the UK on a marriage visa are entering for the very first time.  Proving that these marriages are more or less immigration scams.

*  He is Mayor Boris Johnson’s adviser on equality and social justice issues.  Yet, he makes “racist” jokes.  How unsocialjusticey of him.  What did I tell you about Patterson’s First Axiom?

OTHER INTERNATIONAL

*  Germans protesting against the Euro.  Being as the Euro is more or less the Greater Deutsche Mark, this would be like Texans swearing off beef.

This goes to show you that the Euro’s days are numbered, and by numbered, I mean a small number.

TECHNOLOGY

*  This reminds me of one of the early scenes in the 1983 Barbra Streisand movie, Yentl.  “Picture books for women, sacred books for men.”

When it comes to Android apps, women tend to social media, while men tend to mapping and e-mail.  Kinda reminiscent of the stereotype that the women are back in the cave gossiping and getting the fire ready when the men are out on the hunt trying to club a Mastodon to death.

*  Yes, it portends to Flash becoming passe.  See also:  Java.

MISC

*  Rather than send free boxes of condoms to quarterbacks who get sacked too often, they should send them to cornerbacks who have lots of kids by lots of women.

*  “Mantie.”  What’s all this “mantie” business?  (Think:  Man + Pantie).  In my day, they called these “briefs.”  They even had them available in colors other than white.

Mantie shmantie.  If you’re a man and willingly agree to let your underwear be called “manties,” then you really don’t need to bother wearing them, because you have nothing in that region to cover up.

Auld Lang Syne

Almost a mahogany mob at SIUC.

Channel 5’s is the only video from any St. Louis or Southern Illinois source that shows the truth.  Start at about 1:10.

Having lived in that area for almost all of 2009, and having a job in a private firm that relied heavily on SIUC, this does not surprise me.  I bet that some of the participants in this near riot weren’t all black students — Carbondale has a significant domestic black population, mainly on the northeast side of town.  I know that Carbondale’s domestic blacks and the student blacks like to mingle a lot, for on-campus parties, drug deals, etc.  Probably in the stampede to get out of the suddenly dark dorm, various rivalries among the city’s domestic blacks turned into fights, and aligned students fell in and took sides, and it almost developed into a full-on riot.

I have a call in to a few ex-co-workers and someone who (I think) is still an employee at SIUC, I’m hoping they can fill me in on the rest of the story.

Everybody’s Got to Step in Doggy Doo

Obama and the Democrats are about to.  Which suits me just fine.

In the postmortem of losing NY-9, a circa 40% Jewish electorate, the Dems are analyzing their loss way too simply.  They’re assuming that Jewish/Israel issues made the difference.  Therefore, according to the NYT, Team Obama is going to start pandering to Jewish voters big time.

Foot, meet dog shit.

First off, from what I understand, NY-9’s Jewish voters are mostly Orthodox, and Orthodox Jewish political sensibilities are themselves a minority in the greater Jewish American body politic.

Second, and most importantly, while I think NY-9’s Jewish voters and their sudden partisan swing made the difference, I don’t think Jewish and Israel issues per se were the reason why.  I think it’s all the economy.  Consider this — The winner, Bob Turner, is Catholic, while the Democrat that lost, last name Welprin, is himself Orthodox Jewish.  If all these Orthodox Jewish voters were self-obsessed over J/I matters, then it stands to reason Welprin would have gotten a higher percentage of their votes.  But no, they voted for a Roman Catholic, and traditionally (maybe not now), that’s like any Hatfield voting for a McCoy.

If Team Obama is going to go balls to the wall with pandering to Jews based on the J/I issue base, then not only is it not going to work, it might be counterproductive in the long run.  Want to see what happens when someone who isn’t Jewish gets too interested in the Jews, even in a positive manner?  Two words:  Glenn Beck.  That’s not counting the miscalculation on what issues made the difference.  Like I have said in this medium in the past, Israel is really not a big deal for most Jewish voters, and to the extent that they care, the center of gravity is slightly anti-Israel/Zionist.  True, Orthodox Jews might be different, but until this election in NY-9, the Democrat pandering to the Palestinian lumpenproletariat and their precious “peace process” never bothered them before.  Proof:  It’s the economy, stupid.

That means that Team Obama is going to pander to Jews big time on an issue most of them care nothing about, trying to appeal to a mostly secular/left voting block that comprises only a small percentage of the national voting population, and is only a signficant factor in three states, (NY, CA, FL), two of them he is pretty much guaranteed to win anyway, and pandering using a set of issues that only really appeals to a conservative minority within that minority, that same message going over like a lead balloon with the majority secular/left of American Jewish voters.  All the while, he’ll miss the obvious naked emperor right in front of him, the economy.  I’m going to laugh when it all backfires on him.

Hard Row to Hoe

I looked up NY-9’s previous election results on Wikipedia.  Since 2002, the first election under the previous decade’s district boundaries, the Democrat (Anthony Weiner) won by margins of 31.4, 42.6 and 21.6 points, in the circumstances where there was a Republican opponent, in 2002, 2004 and 2010, respectively.  In 2006, Weiner was unopposed, and in 2008, he only had a token third party opponent.  In 2010, Weiner’s 21.6 point victory was over Bob Turner.

Sure, Democrats, NY-9 is really difficult for you.  It never used to be, but it is now.

Netting it all out:  Democrats lost the Schumer seat, not even two years after they lost the Kennedy seat.

Fun With Kyrie Eleison

WBBM-CBS-2 Chicago:  Islamic-American Group: Link Between 9/11, Muslim Religion Must Stop

That’s right.  Muslims had nothing to do with 9/11.  It was all the fault of those damned Presbyterians.

Daily Mail:  The hip hop cop shop: Police opened fake rap music store and snared 30 gangsters for drugs and gun offences

Now, what sort of evil racial profiling would lead cops to believe that hip hop and drug/gun/gang crimes have any strong correlation?

UK Telegraph:  Thousands of inmates to be called “Mister” under prison service rule

WTF?  Might as well call them “Your Excellency.”

5:  SpongeBob in hot water from study of 4-year-olds

In my day, Voltron was causing all the kids’ problems.

Daily Mail:  Are the Tweets paved with gold? London hedge fund uses social network to ‘see the future’

Using Twitter to see the future?  That means our future is one ruled jointly by an immature barely pubescent man child and an oversexed out-of-work lush who calls losing “winning.”

NRA:  New Mexico: Village of Ruidoso Violates Constitutional Preemption!

I wonder whatever happened to that obnoxious Pink Flamingo woman.

 

In dedication to one of my headlines above, here’s a musical blast from the past:

Tuesday’s Tidbits

LOCAL AND REGIONAL

*  Arson at the library at Mizzou?  This is the first I’m hearing about it.  I guess the local and statewide media couldn’t find the space to report about arson at Mizzou, when cotton balls lying on a sidewalk at Mizzou were way more important.

*  They’re still looking for a motive.  They’ll look for a long time and won’t find anything, even though racial hate is dancing in front of them so gregariously and singing so loudly that it might as well bite them in the nose.

*  Red Herring, Claire.  We already know that “Mark” is really Umesh from Pradesh.  You would do better to introduce legislation to bring the call centers home, AND to force them to hire native born white Americans, not truck back the Indians using H-xB legal immigrant visas.  BTW, this has been going on for years, and you’re just NOW personally experiencing “Mark?”

*  Billboards advertising a weekend gun show in St. Charles appeared in North St. Louis.  Somehow I get the feeling that whoever purchased the billboard space forgot to stipulate a favorable location.

*  Not surprising.  Aside from being abject failures for the most part, urban charter schools tend to be hustles and scams.  But the bigger story for the long term here is that City Treasurer Larry Williams is in the thick of this.  Whether or not that “thickness” involved criminality remains to be seen.  Even if there is evidence of criminality on his part, he might be too politically important for Federal prosecutors that ultimately work for President Obama to touch.

NATIONAL

*  Rush Limbaugh says ignore “distractions” such as this and focus on the real issues like jobs and the economy.

Uh huh.

Like immigration isn’t a jobs and economy issue.

I vaguely remember back in 2003, when Rush got into his little drug problem, that some supposed illegal Hispanic maid of his was rumored to be a crucial link to him scoring his Oxy fixes.  Can anyone corroborate?

*  Martin Luther King said upon seeing Jackie Kennedy bow in front of her husband’s casket on the day of the funeral, “there she goes, sucking him off one last time.”

I bet Hoover played that recording back to her.

And you wonder why she had no use for MLK.

*  What this story doesn’t tell you, or doesn’t seem to want to answer, is whether this “racial bias” among (mostly white) umpires toward white batters actually exists.  I think it’s all a paranoid phantom in the heads of these non-white pitchers.

*  The University of North Dakota sports teams will still be called “The Fighting Sioux,” if the Sioux have any say in the matter.

This mania about de-Nativizing sports team mascots seems far more to be a white liberal obsession than an Indian cause.

*  Blacks and Hispanics to the Fort Worth P.D.:  Don’t enforce the law on us.

*  This is the same Phil Gordon that popped off against SB 1070 for a good part of last year.

Immigration and Phoenix usually illicits thoughts of Hispanics, but Muslims are a fast growing immigrant group in the Valley.  Methinks Gordon is mining for votes.

*  The first comment on this story stole my thunder.

*  I’ve been racking my brains for ten years now trying to figure out “the rest of the story” when it comes to 9/11.  Guess what?  Game over.  Diddy did it.

*  Not spending money on something that has nothing to do with race:  The new racism.

*  Poverty increasing, median household income declining quickly, health insurance rates declining.

I searched this story for the keyword “immigration.”  Surprise, zero results found.

*  Federal “jobs trainings” programs — Just another word for “workfare.”

*  MSNBC catching on to something I’ve known for years — Firearms purcahses and NRA membership go up when a Democrat is in the White House, and go down when a Republican is in the White House.

*  I have always engineered my personal income tax withholding schedules in such a way that I either owe governments a small amount or get a small refund when I file my tax returns, preferrably the former.  The reason is that if you let the Feds and your state over-withhold, all you’re doing is giving them an interest free loan, and using the power of the Federal and state governments to compensate for your lack of ability to save money.  If it turns out that I get a slight refund, I want the refund dollar amount as low as possible, a dollar amount I won’t miss if I never get.  Because as governments get more and more desperate for money, they’re going to drag their heels more and more on sending out refund checks to those who overpaid.  I lived in Illinois for 2009 and 2010, and Illinois actually drug their heels for quite some time in both years, more so 2010 than 2009, to remit refund checks.  I’ll technically have to file a 2011 return for Illinois in in early 2012, including my Missouri return and my Federal return, for the approximately one week I worked in Illinois after this past New Year.  Because my Illinois income in calendar 2011 will only be that one weeks’ worth, ergo my IL income in 2011 will be low, I know that every penny withheld from me during that week will come back to me.  But, it’s a refund check I doubt I’ll ever see, and an amount I won’t miss — Illinois’s state budget is even worse this year than last.

Why do I bring this up?  H&R Block will not offer Refund Anticipation Loans for the 2012 tax season.  I think they’re finally realizing what I have for some time — That you can’t count on some states, and you soon won’t be able to count on the Feds, actually to get your refund checks.  Even in good fiscal times, RALs are a ripoff, because you’re paying interest to an underwriting bank to get an advance loan based on your own effective interest-free loan to the Federal and state governments.

Once again, I’ll say it — Engineer your withholding tables to create a situation where you either slightly owe or get an insignificant refund.

Notice that this story is dateline Bangalore.

*  University of Wisconsin has affirmative action.  Not a surprise.

Someone wants to do something about it.  About time.

If you think the left wing kooks in the state were unhinged-a-rooney over the wee slight little unionized public employee reforms from Gov. Walker earlier this year, wait till this fit hits the shan.

Fortunately for us, the politics of affirmative action are far less ambiguous than the politics of public employee unions, and far less susceptible to leftist agitprop.

INTERNATIONAL

*  Bratton didn’t get the Met job.

Who did?  Someone who is said to have “zero tolerance for gun and knife crime.”

All you guns and knives in metropolitan London — You better start behaving yourselves.

*  Speaking of British cops…

Pray tell, why?

Since this is a British news source, the phrase you want to look for is “positive action,” (what they call affirmative action).  Surprisingly, that phrase nets zero search results.

*  I have a cute and clever phrase for this:

Sand N***a Rich.

Pardon my French.

*  This investigation will go nowhere.

Why?  We know that the victims are non-white, but because this is the NHS, which loves hiring minorities, the incompetent medical professionals are probably also non-white.

*  House of Commons to decrease from 650 to 600 seats.  The conventional wisdom is that the reduced numbers and the new boundaries will help the Tories.  Unfortunately, I think it also hurts the BNP, because larger districts with more people make it marginally harder to find a constituency where the BNP can win with a plurality.

TECHNOLOGY

*  Adobe is coming out with a hack which “might” mean that Flash (somewhat) works on the iCabal’s handheld devices.

You can deal with hacks and mights and maybes and somewhats.  Or you can get an Android phone or tablet, and get Flash working straight-up and above board.

HISTORY

*  Color photos from New York City, mostly 1941-2.

I won’t blame a British source for stating that these photos were taken while WWII was going on, because WWII had already going on for Britain for about two years.  But most of these photos were taken before December 7, 1941.

Two Debates, One Straw

Within a week’s time, we had two different Republican debates.

After reading the Twitter reaction last night during the debate and after it, I finally got fed up enough with the few neo-cons and lamestream conservatives I (used to) follow to unfollow them.  I long ago gave up on the lamestream conservative blogosphere, now I have done the same on Twitter.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was all their hatred of Ron Paul, though I’ll get to him in a few moments.

I wanted to bullet point these issues that were brought up at least once in these last two debates:

FOREIGN POLICY:  My only real grind with Ron Paul over these last two debates is what he said last night, re-hashing AQ/OBL’s official position for doing 9/11.  My problem with that mentality is that whatever legitimate concerns AQ and OBL could have bought to the discussion table and to the arena of above board foreign affairs, they forfeited their right to do so once they got into the terrorism business.  JewAmongYou had a great post a few weeks ago, imploring us not to read the manifestos of people like the Nutbars of Norway, Tucson, Columbine, the Unabomber, Oklahoma City, etc.  His point was that nobody would have ever cared what they had to say, think or write but for their violence and terrorism, so reading their words in earnest of their violence is tantamount to rewarding their violence and begging for more.  The literary equivalent of blood money.  It is for the same reason why I rarely if ever say the names of said Nutbars in a public medium, because I’m not going to give them the eternal infamy they were begging for.  Once OBL and AQ started engaging in terrorism, they gave up their right to participate in the legitimate arena of ideas.

Believe me, I don’t want our military in the Middle East even more than Osama bin Laden didn’t want us there.  But any decision we make to pull out should be made by us, for us, in our best interests, NOT because some seventh century terrorist ragheads have cowered us into hiding behind locked doors.

GARDISIL:  How much can Rickroller Perry be bought for?  Apparently, five kilobucks is all it takes.  That’s the best $5,000 Merck ever spent — They made a whole lot of money from Governor Perry’s near-mandate.

Lurking behind this Gardisil in Texas question is the really big unmentionable white elephant in the room — Race.  I wanted to cringe when all the other candidates referred to “little girls” being forced to get Gardisil.  When in reality, from what I have been made to understand about Hispanics in America, and what I already knew about blacks, they start early, if you know what I mean.  A 12-year old black or Hispanic girl in Texas isn’t really that little.

That said, I am not for this mandate.

IMMIGRATION:  I keep hearing some of these candidates say over and over, like a canard — We have to “secure the border” first (whatever that means) before we can address the rest of the immigration question (code words for amnesty).  If you’re going to give amnesty in the long run, it makes no logical sense to “secure the border” (quote-unquote) first, because what is there to secure after you’re just going to let everyone in after the so-called “security” happens?  (Or rather, pretends to happen).  It’s like putting the most sophisticated door locks in all the doors from your house to the outdoors, then never bothering to close the doors.

HUNTSMAN AND H-1B:  He popped off about H-1B visas at both debates.  Does he literally want native born white Americans shut out of STEM professions?  I suppose the answer is yes.  He also says this in context of needing to get real estate values back up — In my opinion, real estate values need to keep going down, because they got so high that native born working class white Americans were priced out of the real estate market during the mania of the last decade.  That’s the one thing I don’t bust Obama’s chops over.  Huntsman lauded Vancouver, B.C., Canada in last week’s debate — Believe me, I have secret squirrel sources in Vancouver who tell me it’s not quite the paradise he claims it to be, especially if you’re a native born white Canadian of limited means.

NEWT GINGRICH:  I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually look forward to Newt Gingrich’s answers in these debates.  On top of that, he’s winning these things from the standpoint of substance.  Though I know he’s a total phony, a crypto-globalist, and has personal morals that make Bill Clinton look like a monk by comparison, Gingrich is the only person on that stage who can think on his feet.  You know before he answers that he’s not going to give some pre-rehearsed canned answer.  I predict he’s going to have something of a surge in the polls, just probably not enough to win any state save his own Georgia, and even that’s a long shot.  I think he’s auditioning for the running mate.

RICK SANTORUM:  Sure, he tells us about the two Senate elections in Pennsylvania he won.  But he won’t tell you about the one he lost in 2006, by an 18-point blowout margin.  I find it ironic that he roasted Ron Paul over FP, because at least Ron Paul won his election in 2006.

MICHELE BACHMANN:  The more I think about it, the more I conclude she’s actually auditioning for Speaker of the House.  Still, if the Missouri Primaries were tomorrow, I would vote for her.  Best combination of electability and issues, though far from perfect.  And certainly not good enough for me to send her any money.

FEDERAL RESERVE:  All eight people on that stage last night (including the one who used to be part of the Fed, even as irrelevant as the Kansas City district is), are on record this season as being in favor of auditing the Federal Reserve.  Fifteen years ago, that position was “too kooky” or “too far out” for seven of them.

WEALTH GAP:  In last week’s debate, one of the moderators (I think it was Brian Williams) asked the field what they would do about the wealth gap between black and white households.

The good news is that politicians don’t directly answer most questions they are asked in a debate format, so none of them, including the intended first recipient, Rickroller Perry, answered. The bad news is that even if they would have answered, none of them would have given the proper answer, that the wealth difference between blacks and whites (as well as the wealth difference between blacks and Hispanics, and between blacks and Asians), are almost entirely due to blacks’ gratuitous spending and the refusal to save money or engage in microeconomic actions which result in saved wealth. The next proper response would be political, that since Republicans get zero black votes for all intents and purposes, even if the economics were not the responsibility of blacks themselves, the politics are not the responsibility of the Republican Party and its elected office holders.

When I said as much on AR late last week, someone responded to me with an additional factor, that another contributing factor to the black-white wealth gap is age, that older people tend to have bigger nest eggs than younger people, ergo part of the race wealth gap is merely a function of whites being older on average than blacks.  That’s a good point, but still, it doesn’t change what my answer would have been — What are Republican politicians and Presidential candidates to do about people’s ages?

APPEALING TO HISPANICS:  That one was asked last night, and someone (can’t remember who) gave a really screwy and false answer.  Whoever it was said that Republicans could attract Hispanics by being against big government welfare programs.  Bill Richardson, former New Mexico Governor, himself Hispanic, said that Hispanic voters wanted “fully funded welfare programs” (almost an exact quote).  Besides that, there is the matter of percentages.  Hispanics are generally a 60s Percent Democrat constituency, and only once in a blue moon in a given state for a statewide race (including Presidential races, which are 51 implied separate races), will the state’s Hispanic population vote majority Republican.  And the trend is moving toward the Democrats, as the typical American Hispanic is becoming less white and more Chicano and Afro-Caribbean over time.

AFGHAN WOMEN:  WTF?  Why are we supposed to care about women in Afghanistan?  That’s the one question Ron Paul should have gotten, and should have knocked out of the park.

I’ll address Social Security later on, because it’ll take me quite a few words to develop the topic in the way I want to.

Forty-Eight Hours

If you started being patriotic ten years ago today, good for you.

If you were already patriotic ten years and two days ago today, that’s even better.

Ten

Visited my uncle late this morning at JB.  This is the same uncle I usually visit every Memorial Day.  Not that you could ever call a Veterans’ Cemetery “crowded,” but the patronage at JB late this morning was almost as high as it is on any given Memorial Day, so a lot of other St. Louisans had the same idea I did.

What is sorta ironic about what I did and why I did it this morning is that after the War of 1812, the grounds that are now JB were seriously considered for a new inland national capital of the United States.

It only aired once on TV.

If you would have told me ten years ago today that Anheuser-Busch would sell out at some point in the next decade, I would have called you crazy.  Then again, if someone would have told me that we would have a black President ten years later, I would have called the police and had them committed.  Barack H. Obama, Jr., then an Illinois State Senator, was only 13 months removed from not being able to get a floor pass to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles for a lack of real political connections, and having his own credit card rejected in the same city when he tried to rent a car.

Relevant news items:

Unreleased video footage taken by search and recovery teams at Ground Zero in the days after.

Bloomberg wants us to stop calling Ground Zero by that moniker.  Maybe we should eventually, but it would help if there were a functioning building open to the public on that site.  The good news is that One WTC is coming along rather nicely.

The children in the classroom where President Bush was reading when he found out are now themselves almost grown men and women.

I don’t know him personally, but my D.C.-based cousin, much more a roadgeek than I, used to chat with Jeff Kitsko frequently.  Search for “Shanksville PA” on Google, and Kitsko’s Shanksville page on his Pennsylvania Roadgeek site is sitll a top five search result.

Speaking of Shanksville and United 93, I have been (or was) comfortable in the personal conclusion that both the “Let’s Roll” story and Air Force jets shooting it down were true.  Now they can’t both be true, but what I mean by that is that both those things happened, it’s only a matter of which thing happened first in order to take United 93 down.  If “Let’s Roll” never happened, then the Air Force missiles would have.

Now we find out that the F-16s heading toward United 93 had no missiles, so their pilots were ordered to ram directly into the Boeing 757 Kamikaze-like.  That means three things:  One, on September 11, 2001, we had no Air Force jets with live missiles based domestically, two, “Let’s Roll” is what ultimately took U93 down, and three, we now know why the Feds were so evasive on answering questions about the Air Force and U93 — I guess they wanted to wait to admit to us that Kamikaze was their only option, as far as they knew.

Speaks for itself.  Pay close attention to the end — The EDL showed up, and the cops seemed to want to get them out as soon as possible to let the radical Muslims protest.  There’s no England now.

We haven’t learned much, either.  The money quote from Mark Steyn, IMHO:  On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed — CIA, FBI, FAA, INS — the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York.

If I were elected President, my first order of business on the morning of January 21 would be to fire the entire CIA and NSA.  In our damned hour of need, they either couldn’t see or wouldn’t see 9/11 coming.  I would hold those two agencies collectively responsible for 9/11.  My postscript would be this:  We tried to do things their way, and their way failed.  Now we’re going to do things my way.

This has been news locally for almost two weeks, but I wanted to save it for this day.  Organized Muslims upset that a locally-produced coloring comic book dares to suggest that Muslims had anything to do with 9/11.