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Archive for June, 2011

Ponder this…

Friday, June 17th, 2011

Howard Aiken said these oh so true words:

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

One thing I learned in decades of working in corporate America and attending a highly rated graduate business school is that Mr. Aiken understated the problem.

Oh, and yes, to answer the question of the fellow in the back waving his arm and squirming in his seat, the inverse is true.

How is that Hopey Changey thing working for you?

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

“Misery Index” Up 62% Since Obama Took Office.

The annual inflation rate for May climbed to 3.6% as price spikes spread beyond oil and food. At the same time, May’s unemployment rate edged up to 9.1%, yielding a Misery Index of 12.7.

That marks the fourth straight monthly increase in the index, which is now 62% higher than it was when Obama took office…

Regulation: In just his first 18 months in office, Obama imposed 43 regulations that will cost, by government estimates, $26 billion. And that doesn’t count the avalanche of costly new rules headed our way courtesy of ObamaCare.

Taxes: While Obama grudgingly acceded to keep all of Bush’s tax rates in force for two more years, he agitates endlessly for massive tax hikes on the “rich.” His debt plan calls for raising the top tax rates to pre-Bush levels and squeezing an additional $1 trillion out of them under the guise of “tax reform.” All of the tax cuts he has approved have been gimmicky and short-term.

Spending: Federal outlays have risen more than 25% since Obama took office, and they’re on track to eat up almost a quarter of gross domestic product for the foreseeable future — a spending level not seen since World War II. Annual deficits, meanwhile, have topped $1 trillion every year since Obama took office.

Debt: Gross federal debt has climbed more than a third under Obama, topping $14 trillion. His budget plan puts it on a course to reach $20 trillion by 2016.

Don’t expect any “change” in the path to self-destruction that our Dear Leader, Barack H. Obama is bound and determined to drag the country down from him. The American electorate is going to have to force change in November 2012.

Quote of the Day

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

“Since this is an era when many people are concerned about “fairness” and “social justice,” what is your “fair share” of what someone else has worked for?”

— Thomas Sowell

Imagine the uproar if a Fox News anchor had said this

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

File under yet another example of how bad liberals are at history.  Perhaps that is because they tend to rewrite it in a blatantly Orwellian fashion to fit whatever they think will assist their next grab at the brass ring of power, but I digress slightly.  The topic at hand is in your face ignorance of the party that is constantly telling you how stupid anybody who dares disagree with them are.

Listen to this clip of a MSNBC talking head, i.e. a “News Anchor”, attempt to “educate” his listening audience and get a key historical fact about an elected democrat President completely and utterly wrong.  This isn’t a slip of the Talking Head’s tongue, he’s reading from a prepared script, in a produced segment, complete with background graphics. The fact that JFK was assassinated in November of 1963, requiring LBJ to have been elected in November 1964, in order to decide not to run in 1968, is completely lost not only by the “News Anchor”, but the also by: the person or persons who wrote the segment, the producer of the segment, as well as anybody in the entire production team that set the segment up for presentation on the air.

Given that MSNBC’s business plan is to “out fox Fox News, but from the extreme left”, it is doubtful that  there is a single Republican or conservative in that list of people involved in the production of the so-called “news segment” in question. One possible explanation is that the entire crew is so indoctrinated in the liberal “group think” or “herd mentality”, that none dared question the obvious and glaring error.  A large C Conservative or Libertarian would have stood up and pointed out the error.  The leftists have been conditioned not to question authority from “their betters.”

Then again, as one of the people commenting on the post I’m referencing there points out, it was a production team at MSNBC who let one of that network’s political “commentators”, Rachel Maddow, “mock Boehner for saying the Constitution has a Preamble.”

Perhaps MSNBC is betting that their audience is woefully ignorant about actual American history.

Beware of Obama’s upcoming More of the Same

Monday, June 13th, 2011

As noted before, our Dear Leader‘s economic policies, i.e. Keynesian economics theory that only really works in a classroom environment, has resulted in a noted and sharp increase in inflation, while doing little or nothing to spur real economic growth.

The lack of growth, is evident in these three figures pointing the change since our Dear Leader took office:

  1. Unemployment: up 25%
  2. Debt: up 35%
  3. Price of a galleon of gas: up 104%

The source for these numbers, that tool of the Vast Right Conspiracytm, NBC News’ own “Meet the Press.” Oh, sorry, NBC is a decidedly left leaning News organization, so these numbers must be pretty damn solid in order for David Gregory to rub DNC spokesperson Rep. Wassermann-Schultz’s nose in them.

There is also this informative graph.

As you can clearly see, the affect our Dear Leader‘s economic policies have had is to make things worse than if he and the Congressional democrats had done nothing at all!  Also keep in mind, that it was in our Dear Leader‘s best interest to take the worst case scenario for the  “Without Recovery Plan” numbers in this graph.  Thus the odds are that if the federal government hadn’t done a damn thing, including not violating the rule of law and letting GM & Chrysler file Chapter 11 without making sure the UAW got paid off before the bond holders, the unemployment numbers would not only be lower than what they currently are, they would be lower than the “Without Recover Plan” projections the chart listed above.  Not just lower, but probably closer to the “With Recovery Plan” numbers, which I can see the Keynesian addicted White House “economists” considered their “safe” number projections for economic performance based on their years of classroom experience.

The the democrat’s so-called “stimulus plan” failed came as surprise to nobody who was 1. Paying Attention, 2. could do some basic mathematics, and 3. ever held a job in the real world.  Even if you take the White House numbers on faith, i.e “created or saved” jobs does not equal new jobs when you recount the same jobs as “saved” multiple times, the basic math doesn’t work.  Economic Policies for the 21st Century points out one of principle flaws.

[E]ven if you buy the White House’s argument that the $800 billion package created 3 million jobs, that works out to $266,000 per job. Taxing or borrowing $266,000 from the private sector to create a single job is simply not a cost effective way of putting America back to work. The long-term debt burden of that $266,000 swamps any benefit that the single job created might provide.

In the face of the obviously failure of their policies, what do you think our Dear Leader and the Congressional democrats are offering?  Yup, that’s right.  More of the same.  Yet another “quantitative easing” (i.e. printing money with nothing to back it, an inflationary tactic) is being planned.  Despite that the results of such a policy were clear back in March of 2009, when this cartoon was published.

Hmmm….looks like the nice men at Cox & Forkum nailed it right on the head with that one.  It makes one wonder, if the label on the outside of the box was our Dear Leader’s ultimate goal, and that he really didn’t care what the effect on the economy would be.  He knew that he wasn’t going to be bothered by it, as Mark Steyn pointed out:

“I’m not concerned about a double-dip recession,” Obama said last week. Nor would I be if I had government housing, a car and driver, and a social secretary for the missus. But I wonder if it’s such a smart idea to let one’s breezy insouciance out of the bag when you’re giving a press conference.

To use a phrase our Dear Leader is fond of, he just doesn’t have any “skin in the game.” He has never worked a day in his life in private sector economy and he never will. Prior to running for President, he managed to go $300,000 in debt on a family income of half a million dollars a year. Is there any surprise in the fact that he has done the same with the US economy?

Quote of the Day

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”

—  Milton Friedman

Obama administration’s monetary policies a major cause of rising gas prices

Saturday, June 11th, 2011

Not a surprise to anyone who has taken a graduate level economics class and pays attention, but since that is probably a small slice of the population, let’s review.

The Obama administration’s monetary policies have added approximately 56.5 cents to the price of every gallon of gas you pump, according to a report by members of the congressional Joint Economic Committee.

Estimates suggest that had the dollar maintained the value it had when Obama came into office, gasoline would cost approximately $3.40 per gallon instead of around $4 per gallon in many parts of the country.

Here is the short form for those who haven’t studied macro economics.  Oil is traded on the open market with the US dollar being the standard currency used for for that commodity. Our Dear Leader’s monetary policy of just printing money to pay for his massive spending increases ( the so-called “quantitative easing” programs are good examples of this) has caused inflation, which means the US Dollar has less value than it did before.  To make this even simpler, things cost more when you buy things using US dollars.  Not because the value of the item being purchased has gone up. It is because the amount of goods and services a US Dollar can be traded for has gone down.  This includes crude oil.  Your dollar is worth less, so you pay more dollars for things like gasoline, a crude oil product.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke claimed this printing money scheme would actually “grow the economy.” Fed Chairmen Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan disagreed, stating that the Obama/Bernake plan would weaken US currency and result in inflation.

Clearly, Volcker and Greenspan were right, and Obama and Bernanke were wrong.

The Obama administration is calling for another round of “”quantitative easing” in spite of the clear and obvious facts of the matter.

Quote of the Day

Friday, June 10th, 2011

The US Constitution.  I read it for the Articles.”

What did Maddow know and when did she know it.

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

Hardly surprising was that MSNBC “commentator” and far left extremist, Rachal Maddow was stanch and aggressive supporter of Rep. Weiner as he lied to the press, his constituents, his staff, his wife and the rest of the world every time he opened his mouth.

Maddow put forth every moonbat conspiracy theory on exactly Weiner was hacked by an evil “vast right wing conspiracy”  posted on the DailyKos, every single one of them were empirically proven wrong BTW, as the “Gospel Truth”tm.

Not that Maddow let the actual truth slow her down.  She is now trying to down play the whole thing with her sex scandal chart

The real question, however, is “What did Maddow know and when did she know it?

One of Weiner Cyber-Mistresses had contacted the Maddow show back on June 3, 2011. The Maddow show wanted nothing to do with this information.  Perhaps if the Cyber-Mistress had said the dirt was on a Republican, the Maddow team would have been all over it.  Or was it the last thing they wanted to, ahem, touch was news about a political sex scandal right when the democrat party‘s attack congressman’s online habits were just hitting the news?

 

Not all humans are weaselly Weiners

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

For a change of place, I came across a bit of pure awesome RPG fiction over at Leslie Bates’s Living in the Surreal World. Go read the whole thing, but here are some of my favorites:

We poison our air and water to weed out the weak. We set off fission bombs in our only biosphere. We nailed our god to a stick. Don’t fuck with the human race.

We drink poison too, and derive enjoyment from the temporary malfunctioning it causes in our higher brain functions. The higher the toxin level the greater the beverage; diluting the toxin with water is severely frowned upon.

Humans are so hardcore their first innovations were ways of making killing easier. Don’t mess with homo sapiens sapiens.

Humans consider one of the greatest career paths available to be piloting conveyances that use explosions for thrust.

The human capacity to change is fascinating.
I myself have witnessed a human military officer, who is tasked solely with the purpose of abusing his subordinates until they bond, take a group I suspected of severe genetic ailments – excess fat tissue, panic during crisis situations – and turn them into the perfect murder machines that we have come to know and fear. We have long suspected that humans in their homelands are weaker than those we regularly encounter, but it is clear that even the weak ones can become dangerous with minimal effort.
I would not advise an invasion of any human-controlled system at this time.

Not just good advice…take care not to tease the apes. They will fling more than poo when angered.

Just one more, from the page Leslie got the source material from:

“I once met a Human at a waystation on a Class 1 world. It did some kind of rough work for one of their colonies. It called itself a “search and retrieval expert” but I’m guessing the translation software couldn’t find the proper words. A few weeks later, it returns to the waystation, sans its trans-grav (rented, I might add). Apparently the people it was hunting took down its transport, but it continued on foot after escaping the wreckage and patching itself up. The scary part was that it was wearing clothes fashioned from Tharge pelts, had its targets’ ears on a necklace (DNA proof, I guess), and had fashioned a spear from a jagged piece of the trans-grav’s hull and an Iron-root. And it was honestly none the worst for wear, just sauntered over to the AENet terminal and collected on its kills.”