I think it
doesn't matter how popular Jihadists are. While I generally detest Mao Tse
Tung, his saying that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a
gun" is generally an accurate description of how Jihadist groups influence
politics. Jihadists threaten not only opponents, but also their entire families
with torture and death. Very few people have the courage of Anwar Sadat, who
made peace with Israel, or the members of the plot to kill Hitler. Win or lose,
the results are usually fatal. Anwar Sadat was assassinated by the Muslim
Brotherhood. The members of the plot to kill Hitler were tortured to death,
executed slowly or, in the case of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox,
forced to commit suicide. Egyptian President Abdel el Sisi knowingly took an
increased risk of assassination when he gave a speech against Jihadist
terrorism at Al Azhar University on January 1, 2015. While such efforts to
change Islam from the inside deserve our sympathy and support, there is very
little we can do to influence the internal conversation. The only way the West
has of stopping Jihadist terror is to kill as many as we can as fast as we can.
Jihadists kill men, women and children indiscriminately if they don't worship
in an approved manner. Jihadists are rabid dogs, and rigor mortis is the only
cure for their ideology. If the casualty rate is high enough that the futility
of Jihadist terror is obvious, recruitment will fail to keep up with the
losses. I think the reason Osama Bin Laden is no longer popular is because he's
dead. We should be reducing the popularity of other Jihadist figures in the
same way
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A Call for Healing
Jan 24, 2015
Make a Deal? Obama's In Your Face!
Republicans
are still being told they have to compromise with the president even though
they shellacked the Democrats in the 2014 election. However, the Pravda
Press is not holding our Dear Leader to any standard of compromise.
“Barack Obama is in Your Face” was the title of Roger Simon’s column on the
State of the Union Address. Mr. Simon was thrilled about the President’s
fighting words and veto threats.
As
an ignorant redneck, I don't understand how fighting words and veto threats
show that the Chicago Machine Prodigy is willing to negotiate and compromise
with Republicans. In Montana where I grew up, if you're in somebody's face you
don't expect to make a deal with the guy. You defiantly expect to roll right
over him and there's nothing he can do about it. I've lived in Chicago for
years and I've seen this behavior before from several mayors when dealing with
Republicans. Chicago mayors can do this because they have the votes even before
the ghosts cast their ballots. Our Dear Leader does not seem to have made the
adjustment to the fact that the Congress is not the Chicago City Council. He's
in the Republicans' face, as Roger Simon points out. To me, this indicates that
the Smartest President Ever has decided not to compromise on anything. He's decided
he wants Harry Reid's gridlock to continue. The only difference is that this
time it's obvious the party of no is the Democrats.
The
question is whether this tactic will help the Democrats in 2016. I don’t
think so. The Republicans
did not get voted out of power in 2012, although they lost a few seats. They
more than made up for what they lost in 2014. The First Black President will
not be running in 2016. I don't think Hillary the Inevitable will turn out
anywhere near as many minority voters as President Obama did. As far as why the
President should compromise, I thought he said that's what he wants to do. My
point was that despite his hand wave towards compromise, he has done everything
he can to troll for angry Republican responses. Our Dear Leader likes gridlock.
That's why Harry Reid ran the Senate to avoid voting on anything, especially
bills that passed the House or Republican amendments to bills in either Senate
committee or on the floor of the Senate. The change is that blaming it on the
Republicans will no longer be possible. It's obvious where the no is coming
from now. No amount of Pravda Press obfuscation can hide Presidential vetoes.
Why
did Obama win in 2012? I think our Dear Leader's unsurpassed ability to
lie, backed by the Pravda Press motivated in part by their white guilt, got him
through 2012. "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,"
was the biggest presidential lie since the Vietnam war. The Benghazi lies in
support of the Barry the Magnificent's declaration of victory over Al Qaeda
were also a substantial help to his reelection. Everybody knew the Benghazi
attack was a terrorist attack by an Al Qaeda offshoot fairly soon after the
attack, but it became a protest of an internet video to support Obama's victory
declaration with a timely assist by debate moderator Candy Crowley. Now that
the true extent of the disasters in foreign and domestic policy are apparent,
polls show a large majority of voters wished they had elected Romney. The lies
made the difference, and white guilt in the Pravda Press got the lies crucial
media support.
I
guess we will have to do the experiment. The Prevaricator in Chief will
continue to proclaim his readiness to work with Republicans while he does
everything he can to provoke them and not work with them. He will continue to
tell whoppers like, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,
period." Republicans in Congress will pass reasonable bipartisan bills
which President No will veto. In 2016, the Republican presidential nominee will
have a legislative platform to run on. Hillary the Inevitable will run on lies
and Benghazi negligence. We'll see just how gullible the voters are. After all,
Democrat BS worked in 2008 and white guilt backed by BS worked in 2012. Maybe
more Democrat BS will work in 2016.
The Not So Hottest 2014 Climate Scam
This week the Pravda Press had screaming headlines
that 2014 was the “hottest year on record.”
However, if you dig into the numbers, the records referred to only go
back to 1880. They are the records of
land based mercury thermometers. Digging
further, you find that the difference between 2014 and the next hottest year
was under .04 degrees. So I made this
comment:
All years
are above average here in Lake Wobegon. If the best liberals can do is measured
in hundredths of a degree, we're dealing with statistical noise. The difference
is well within the margin of error. No thermometer available in 1880 was
accurate to .05 degrees. Even ignorant rednecks like me know this ain't a big
enough difference to talk about. In making a big deal out of this, liberals
sound like Pinky and the Brain have decided to use the threat of global warming
to do what liberals try to do every night, try to take over the world.
In defending
the “hottest on record” screaming headlines, some commenters tried to argue
that statistically the error of observation is reduced by the large number of
observations. One commenter told me I
needed to take a remedial course in statistics.
I had this response:
Me: MS
Statistics 1972 University of Illinois. You: MSNBC. Your comment makes no
statistical sense and ignores history. If individual readings are only accurate
to .1 degree, no amount of multiple observations are going to improve the
accuracy of your instruments. The observations come mainly from urban areas
which have gotten hotter over time due to increases in paved area. The time
span from 1880 to now is an eye blink in geologic time. Even if the readings
are as incredibly accurate as you say, they prove no connection between industrial
activity and temperature fluctuation. The models used to establish a connection
have no statistical significance. The logical conclusion is that you are a
disciple of Jonathan Gruber using complication to obscure a power grab (pun
intended) of unprecedented proportions. I don't want to live under a
dictatorship of East and West Coast Liberal idiots controlling all energy use
and forcing rednecks back to horse and buggy technology. You guys are rich
enough to pay for dikes to protect your property in the event that the oceans
actually do rise. I see no reason I should have to subsidize the foolish
superstitions of the 1% by paying exorbitant prices for alternative energy or
doing without energy altogether.
At ths
point, the liberal commenter complained that the above was a personal
attack. He also said he never watched
MSNBC and didn’t know who Jonathan Gruber was.
As always in these arguments, liberal commenters refer to the sanctity
of science and proclaim debate as unscientific.
So I hit back with this:
It would
seem that you can dish it out but you can't take it. If you tell someone they
are so ignorant they need to take a course to remediate their knowledge, that's
a personal insult. If you get a response in kind, you should not be surprised.
Jonathan Gruber designed Obamacare to be so complex nobody would figure out
that it was really a tax increase. The "science" you are pushing is
really a political program of increased centralized government control. If
government controls all energy use, they control the entire economy with no
checks or balances possible to keep them from becoming abusive. If your
education was so narrowly focused on gender studies that you can't see that,
then I feel sorry for you. Renewable energy is 11.2% of the total energy
generated in the United States. There is no way we can depend on renewable
energy for all of our energy needs in the near future. Forcing a rapid
conversion to all renewable energy would be prohibitively expensive. The only
way we might get to much lower emissions in the intermediate term is with
nuclear power. However, tree huggers like you don't want that either. We're
left with horses, which I can tell you from personal experience are not all
that much fun to clean up after. You are a victim of group think. Whether you
watch MSNBC or not, you really are spouting the party line on global warming.
The models that predict increasing temperatures due to CO2 emissions are not
statistically significant. Temperatures in the last 15-20 years have not moved
in a statistically significant way. Math is hard for Liberals, but it still is
there even if you ignore it. Just to be crystal clear, the burden of proof is
that you have to show 1) a significant increase in temperature and 2) a direct
provable link to burning fossil fuel. Since you haven't shown either one,
you've got no case that would warrant scrapping the Constitution to save the
planet. In order to remediate your total ignorance of economics, please
consider watching some video here:
(This is a
link to Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose PBS TV Series. It is a great introduction to Supply Side
Economics.)
This is the
article I was reacting to:
Jan 17, 2015
Shredding the Constitution for Small Tactical Advantage
Last month the New Republic article linked below was
bragging about how brilliant Obama’s executive order amnesty for illegal aliens
was politically. In particular, the author thought that amnesty ruined Jeb Bush’s
chances to win the White House. The problem is that our Dear Lear was willing
to completely ignore the Constitution for fleeting tactical advantage over
Republicans. If amnesty by executive order is legal, the next president can
legalize drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge with an executive
order. If postponing the Employer
Mandate tax collection in Obamacare is legal, the next president can decide he
will only collect corporate taxes at a 25% rate instead of the 39% in the law
passed by Congress and signed by the President.
So this executive order business is a threat to the separation of powers
and can lead us quickly to banana republic style government, and I'm not
talking about stylish summer clothing.
And the gain is so minimal that it's disturbing. It's not like Republicans can't find issues
beside immigration. Just to pick a few
areas at random, Democrats have only lies and excuses for their economic
performance, lawless regulation and national security meltdown. Democrats are moving as fast as possible
toward their goal of making the whole country as big a financial and physical
disaster as Detroit has become under their rule. It's also not that Jeb Bush is going to win
the nomination in a walk without beating a sitting Conservative Governor like
Mike Pence or Bobby Jindahl or Scott Walker.
Since the Constitution is now a dead letter, maybe Jeb Bush is finished
because our Dear Leader is going to sign a Bill of Attainder executive order
barring all potential heirs of George W. Bush from office since everything is
his fault. (Joke hint for clueless
liberals: Bills of Attainder are
prohibited in the US Constitution you are ignoring at the moment.) This whole thing is mindless destruction for
minimal temporary advantage. The
article's author does not seem to have any idea what's going on. No wonder the New Republic is losing money
hand over fist.
Obama Afraid to Go To Paris?
In my Air Force days, we had a
saying, "No guts, no glory." The administration did not have the guts
to send any important people to this open air event because they are cowards.
This administration has courage only when it refuses to negotiate with
Republicans. It will negotiate with just about anyone else. Terrorists, Muslim
Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Mad Mullahs, nuclear proliferators and Russin backed Ukrainian Rebels who shoot down civilian airliners are all
people this administration thinks it can deal with. The people the
administration will negotiate with have one thing in common. They all are armed
and extremely dangerous. Republicans, despite propaganda to the contrary, are
not a serious physical threat. So they are perfect targets for a no negotiation
stance. This is the most cowardly administration in history.
Democrats' Problems Dealing With Reality
This article in
Politico (see link below) shows how Democrats have a problem seeing and dealing
with reality. Their policies are destroying the economy and endangering the
country. Oil and gas prices have come down in spite of Democrats' efforts to
stop drilling, stop pipelines and limit emissions in the name of saving the
planet from global warming. Unfortunately, their climate models don't match
their data with any statistical significance, so we get expensive energy and Al
Gore makes millions off of his Mean Green agenda. The end results of Liberal
policies can be found in Detroit, where their one party rule lead to a spiral
of decay and finally bankruptcy. The reason Liberals see a war on women and
pervasive racism is that they really have nothing else to offer. As Mark
"Uterus" Udall found out in Colorado, the war on women doesn't work
anymore. The facts of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner refused to
cooperate with the Liberal narrative. The evidence showed Brown was the
aggressor. Brown tried to grab the officer's gun while the officer was inside
his car and Brown was charging the officer on foot when the fatal shot was
fired. The supervising police sergeant at Garner's arrest, a black woman, had
to be edited out of the picture. The Garner arrest turned out to be a cigarette
tax enforcement action, which got a lot of Conservatives to say that nobody
should die for cigarette taxes and that big government requires intrusive tax
enforcement. The election of Tim Scott, a Black Tea Party Republican, as
Senator in South Carolina was not covered at all. The Liberal narrative says
Republicans, the Tea Party and redneck whites in the South are all racist. Tim
Scott couldn't possibly exist, so he had to be ignored. The President said Al
Qaeda is on the run. So the Benghazi attack was a demonstration that turned
into a riot, not an organized terrorist attack by an Al Qaeda affiliate. The
Iraq War was over because the President said so. The administration then
ignored ISIS until it got so big it overran over half of Iraq. This article
reads like a pep talk by the coach of a 20 point underdog team before the big
game. It ignores the insults and injuries Democrats have inflicted on angry
white rednecks like me. Maybe they don't understand that why we are angry has a
lot to do with what Democrats said and did to us.
Supreme Court Should Force Congress To Rewrite Obamacare Law
The Obamacare law says that only
residents of states with their own insurance exchanges can get federal tax subsidies. Residents of states using the
federal exchange are not eligible under the law as enacted. Obama ignored that provision and has been
giving subsidies to everybody whether their state has an exchange or not. A case asking that the law be enforced as
written, King versus Burwell, is scheduled for Supreme Court review in March. Democrats argue that enforcing the law as
written will mean chaos as residents of 36 states without exchanges will lose federal
subsidies. The Democrats passed the bill
with this provision in it. By Nancy
Pelosi's own admission they didn't know what was in it and passed it anyway.
Perhaps next time Democrats draft a 2500 page bill they should take a little
more care in drafting it and be a little less hasty in passing it so they have
a chance to read it first. The Constitutional remedy for a poorly written law
resulting in chaos is further Congressional legislation. Since the One Not
Quite All of Us Were Waiting for has a policy of not negotiating with
Republicans, this poses a thorny problem that can't be solved by normal
methods. You can almost hear the Smartest President Ever going through his list
of shovel ready projects, fake red lines, drone attacks, Navy Seal Team 6,
blaming George Bush and lies like, "If you like your doctor, you can keep
your doctor." The Liberal solution is John Roberts has to violate his oath
of office and allow the subsidies to continue. The Supreme Court's job is to rule on what the
law is, not what they would like it to be. If their ruling means that the law
as written leads to chaos, then the problem is the way the law was written in
the first place.
Jan 10, 2015
Garner Arrest About Revenue, Not Racism
The Eric Garner arrest was about
revenue. It was a cigarette tax enforcement crackdown. The outcome had nothing
to do with race and everything to do with big expensive nanny state government.
Liberals want big expensive government and want the police to enforce tax
collection. However, they also need to play the race card whenever they can
because that's all they have left as far as getting votes. Liberal results for
minorities are bad schools and crime ridden neighborhoods. Bankrupt Detroit is
the Liberal endgame, the end result of a generation of one party control of city government. Minority voters need to be distracted from the bad
outcomes by constant racism allegations. The police are tired of being ordered
to enforce tax laws and then being thrown under the bus when they do. The
supervising police sergeant on the scene of the Garner arrest was a black
woman. This is ignored because of the Liberal need to see racism everywhere.
Liberals were quick to blame the Gabby Giffords shooting on Sarah Palin, but
are outraged when New York police blame the murder of two cops on Mayor Bill de Blasio using the
same logic with a lot more justification. Liberals are being destroyed by their
own internal inconsistencies.
Yucky Lunches Will Yield Next Generation of Republicans
Michelle
Obama's nutritious but unappetizing lunch program guarantees a generation of
young Republicans in the near future. These kids are not going to forget who
gave them a choice between yuck and hunger. They will want to get even and
could spend a lifetime doing it in the voting booth.
An Obvious Answer and the Hard Truth of Charlie Hebdo
There
is one obvious answer to terrorism in support of censorship. We have to deny the
terrorists what they want. The terrorists wanted to limit the distribution of
cartoons that make fun of Jihadists. We can deny the terrorists their goal by
distributing the cartoons to as wide an audience as possible. I think Charlie
Hebdo should put out a collection of translated anti Jihad cartoons in electronic
editions in various languages and sell them on a web site. I would buy one in
English. I am sure many other customers would buy them in their languages as
well. I apologize that my French is too rusty to be useful anymore. Charlie
Hebdo can raise funds to help the families of the victims and make a statement
about freedom of the press at the same time. If every time terrorists attack to limit cartoon distribution, the cartoons just go viral on the web, it will tend to discourage them.
The only real solution to Jihadist terrorism is to kill the Jihadists wherever they are until there are none. Jihadists are rabid dogs and there is no other solution. They have declared total war on everybody who does not worship exactly the way they do, including Muslims who are not sufficiently strict in their observances. Jihadists have claimed a divine license to kill every man, woman and child who does not meet their requirements. Jihadists have repeatedly engaged in mass slaughter, demonstrating that they really mean exactly what they say about killing anyone who doesn't measure up. Hash tags and "Je suis Charlie" signs are not going to stop these killers. Only rigor mortis is an effective cure for what's wrong with Jihadists. That's the hard truth.
The only real solution to Jihadist terrorism is to kill the Jihadists wherever they are until there are none. Jihadists are rabid dogs and there is no other solution. They have declared total war on everybody who does not worship exactly the way they do, including Muslims who are not sufficiently strict in their observances. Jihadists have claimed a divine license to kill every man, woman and child who does not meet their requirements. Jihadists have repeatedly engaged in mass slaughter, demonstrating that they really mean exactly what they say about killing anyone who doesn't measure up. Hash tags and "Je suis Charlie" signs are not going to stop these killers. Only rigor mortis is an effective cure for what's wrong with Jihadists. That's the hard truth.
Economic Policy: What Should We Have Done In 2009?
Government
spending does not stimulate the economy because government is far less
efficient than private enterprise. Tax rate cuts would stimulate the economy because they would reward productive investment with a better rate of return and ultimately put more resources in private hands.
The crash of 2007-2008 was due to over leveraging. To unwind it, a lot of debt
needed to be converted into equity. A couple of changes would encourage that. First
would be to lower the capital gains tax rate to encourage more equity investment.
Another thing that would be to make dividends tax deductible to corporations,
just as interest payments are. This would remove the bias in favor of debt
financing for private firms. The way to prevent too big to fail banks is to
force them to have bigger capital reserves than small enough to fail banks.
Dodd-Frank could be replaced by a simple rule that says that if the bank is
larger than 1% or 2% of the overall banking assets of the United States it needs to
have a 10% capital reserve. To make this a little easier, the law could allow
banks to sell a special class of bonds that are convertible to equity in the
event of regular capital reserves falling to zero. Regular capital reserves for
big banks could be 5%, with the additional 5% coming from the convertible
bonds. None of the banks that failed or were bailed out would have needed
federal help if their capital reserves were this high. Big banks will dismantle
themselves quickly to get away from high reserve requirements and the problem
will be solved. Republicans should remember who Wall Street backs with
political contributions and do the right thing on requiring big reserves from
big banks.
Recriminations Are Required on Vietnam War
I really
can't stand the casual assumption that we were the bad guys in Vietnam. We left
all of Indochina to its fate in 1975. The victorious Communists killed about 2
million Cambodians, and hundreds of thousands of other ethnic groups. Two
million Vietnamese fled in leaky boats. There had never been any such mass
exodus from Vietnam before. Ten to a hundred times more people died after we
left than died during the war. I was in Air Force ROTC from 1968-1972 and on
active duty from 1972-1976. In college arguments, I always said that if we lost
there would be a bloodbath. It was obvious after the Tet Offensive. The Viet
Cong left several mass graves of thousands of men, women and children that they
executed. The Vietnamese knew about it, but it was not widely reported in the
US. Anybody who took the time to look into it could have easily predicted the
subsequent mayhem. Here it is 40 years later and the anti-war left has yet to
even notice the havoc they unleashed, let alone apologize for it. The willful
ignorance is so bad that our Secretary of State, who testified under oath to
Congress that Americans commonly committed war crimes in Vietnam, gets a pass
for his obvious perjury and is appointed to the highest level cabinet level
post in the federal government.
What about
war crimes in Vietnam? The Vietnam War
Crimes Working Group was a Pentagon task force set up to investigate. They found 320 substantiated cases. At the
height of the war, there were over 500,000 American troops in Vietnam. This
number of war crimes were a low productivity hour or two for Pol Pot and the
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. American war crimes were
hardly as common as John Kerry testified they were. He lied.
I think that
the post WWII policy of trying to contain communism made the Vietnam War almost
unavoidable. I agree that the stated objectives of Kennedy and Johnson did not
include stopping the killing that accompanied any communist takeover of any
country. However, the anti-war protesters loudly proclaimed that they wanted to
stop the killing as one of their major slogans. I heard them loud and clear, up
close and personal. They claimed that the killing would stop if the US withdrew
from Southeast Asia. The actual outcome did not match their stated goals at
all. Worse, the "Peace Movement" didn't even bother to look to see
the damage the withdrawal actually did. They patted themselves on the back for
making "peace" and went on to their next causes with enthusiasm. They
took no notice of the fact that they facilitated massive slaughter. When
peacenicks look back, it's with nostalgia for the righteousness of their cause. They are oblivious to their actual results. And they are running US foreign policy today with the same disastrous results in Syria, Iraq and Nigeria.
Vietnam War Crimes Working Group link:
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