It might as well be spring

Well, for one day at least.

One warm day

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve had so much subarctic jet stream air for weeks and weeks that a day’s break will no doubt be appreciated, and if realized, quite possibly feel like spring.

If you get a break, enjoy it.

 

 

Guitarists might want to start paying close attention at about 2:10.

So Far, The 113th Congress Has Done Very Little. Thank You.

There should be some rejoicing about this news the way I see it. It is believe that a “Good” Congress is one that passes an enormous amout of laws. But as we have seen, each law passed favors one group at the expense of another. Look 111th Congress that passe a lot of Bills plus one misnamed the “Affordable Care Act” at roughly 2000 unread pages that spawned 8 FEET of paper printed regulations when stacked with more to come. Would that rate then a “Productive Congress”? A Do-Nothing Congress in my mind is a good Congress. No new laws restricting more things in our lives. But then again, the resident at 1600 PA Ave., NW, Washington, Disease, and permanent traveler and vacationers seems to think he can do, and has usurped some Congressional Power.

Poll: Most Americans Say U.S. Congress Has Done Nothing
December 26, 2013 by UPI – United Press International, Inc.

ATLANTA (UPI) — Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the current Congress has been highly ineffective, while two-thirds say it’s the worst in their lifetime, a poll says.
Some 73 percent of those surveyed said current federal lawmakers had done nothing to fix the country’s problems, said the CNN/ORC International poll released Thursday.

One in four people disagreed with that assessment.

“That sentiment exists among all demographic and political subgroups. Men, women, rich, poor, young, old — all think this year’s Congress has been the worst they can remember,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director.

The poll also found Americans were not hopeful Congress would change for the better, Holland said.

Some 52 percent said Democratic leaders were leading the country the wrong way, while 54 percent believed the same thing about Republican leadership.

Fewer than 60 bills were passed in the first year of the current session of Congress, an analysis by CNN found.

Some 1,035 adults around the United States were interviewed for the survey, which was conducted Dec. 16-19 by ORC International. The margin of error was 3 percentage points.

http://personalliberty.com/2013/12/26/poll-most-americans-say-u-s-congress-has-done-nothing/

Merry Christmas 2

Merry Christmas

 

 

 

ARMY’s Inside Foe is Killing It – Army to Cut Up to 4,000 Captains and Majors

Army to Cut Up to 4,000 Captains and Majors
18 December 2013

The U.S. Army is sending roughly 19,000 active-duty captains and majors to a screening board for early separation this spring, the Army Times reported. Up to 20 percent of those screened — approximately 3,800 officers — could be scheduled to leave the service by the Officer Separation Board and Enhanced Selective Early Retirement Board.

Officers with fewer than 18 years of federal active service will have their screening process done by OSB, and those with more than 18 years of service will see the E-SERB, according to the Army Times.

Read more at http://minutemennews.com/2013/12/army-cut-4000-captains-majors/#OAAG8mZ5HKsohKeB.99

Cumulonimbus + AgI = ?? (revisited)

I’m reprinting an article I wrote 13 months ago. An article I wrote 13 months ago, I’m reprinting. An article that doesn’t even get into the most recent huge schadenfreudig spreading through the sane world. But an article I find especially prescient, given the Obama administration’s desperate efforts to prevent ObamaCare’s huge pains from actually hitting just yet…
___________________________________________

A dark cloud follows him wherever he goes.
Every cloud has a silver lining.

Farmers obviously need rain for their crops, so there are some who resort to cloud seeding, adding silver iodide to the clouds to try to force rain out of them. But it’s a bad idea to seed a thunderstorm cloud. Cumulonimbus clouds can produce nasty things like hail storms, massive lightning storms, micro-bursts, tornadoes.

And of course, there are those who always bring bad luck with them, like Bad Luck Schleprock, our current President.

 
So, today I am telling you about the seeding of a 3,000 mile wide thunderstorm cloud hanging over the US — and the silver lining that comes with it. It’s painfully schadenfreudig. Painfully schadenfreudig, indeed. (Multiple stacked redundancy intentional.) Barack Obama and the Democrats, very cynically aware that their grand scheme to shove the US headlong into Socialism could cause them to fall out of power, set up a series of Laws and programs that would save most of the very bad results until after the 2012 election. After having blamed Bush for all the Democrat-and-Socialist caused travails, they would have a way of avoiding responsibility for the looming mega-disaster. It works like this:

• Set up a Socialist system with all the false positives front-loaded and all the negatives back-loaded.
• Get possibly voted out of office before the negatives hit, so the Socialist-caused negatives would hit when Conservatives were in office.
• Blame the Conservatives in office for the economic disaster the Socialists caused.
• Get the Socialists re-elected to complete the evil transformation of the Free Market US into a Socialist state, with the Conservatives forever blemished by the results of Socialist actions.

But a strange thing happened along the way. The Socialists got re-elected by a completely ignorant, envious, slothful, free hand-out seeking crowd. And all the back-loaded disasters will hit while the Socialists are in power. (By the way, did you know that tornadoes are also backloaded? They are on the back end of cumulonimbus clouds, and not up front.)

ObamaCare is one such program. As most of it is set to kick in now that the election is over, total disaster is on the horizon. Businesses, who cannot pay the cost of ObamaCare and stay afloat at the same time, will be laying off massive numbers of workers nationwide. Other businesses will be cutting their low-level employees (the working poor) to under 30 hours a week so those businesses can stay in business. Very little expansion will be happening, if any at all. It’ll be full-on contraction.

A nice little poisonberry in ObamaCare — that “make health care cheaper for all” lie — is a 2.3 percent excise tax on all medical devices, such as crutches, wheelchairs, heart stents, etc, etc. And an excise tax is far worse than a profit tax or income tax. It hits the gross revenue and not the after-expenses cost. For example, suppose it costs a business 5,000 dollars for the raw materials to make a single product. Add in the labor costs, the health insurance costs, the retirement costs, the social security tax, the medicare tax, the property tax for the building itself, the electricity cost, the property insurance cost, the transportation cost, the bookkeeping cost, and all other costs associated with getting the already developed product to market and the final cost to the business is 6,800 dollars. The business sells the product for 7,000 dollars because that’s what the market will bear. The business gets a profit of 200 dollars per sale.

In comes the 2.3 percent excise tax. Another 161 dollars off the top. The new profit for the 7,000 dollar item falls from 200 dollars to a whopping 39 dollars (an effective tax rate of 80.5 percent of the profit). Not enough to make the company a going concern. Kill the Research and Development department of the company — the life-blood of all businesses that want to survive, for if a business is not growing and moving forward it is necessarily dying.

But it doesn’t stop there. No, not at all. That same company also has to pay the new, higher costs involved in providing ObamaCare to all its employees (instead of the less expensive insurance plans which were optional, which fair portions of employees did not opt into). That 39 dollars per product, which used to be 200 dollars per product goes negative. It costs more to produce than it can be sold for.

But, again, it doesn’t stop there. Obama’s declaration that electricity costs must necessarily skyrocket and he’ll bankrupt coal-fired electric plants necessarily means the energy-intensive manufacturing industry will get hit hard with skyrocketing overhead costs. Costs that cannot be reduced merely by laying people off. So instead, the companies will shutter its doors and either go off-shore or cease to exist, providing a double-whammy of forcing the products to become far more expensive than they are now and far more difficult to obtain.

Small businesses will collapse. The middle class will become working poor. The working poor will become the unemployable destitute. Products the middle class used to be able to afford will become luxury items. Items that were luxuries for the working poor will become nothing but unreachable pipe-dreams. Inflation will go into hyper-drive. Interest rates will climb, making the cost of borrowing prohibitive. And deficit spending, which has been kept artificially low (yeah, I said it), will explode.

How is 1.2 trillion dollars (or more) in deficit spending “artificially low”? That’s a good question. And I have a good answer for that. Two words: “debt” and “service”. Debt service.

Historical view of the Prime Rate from Forecast Chart.com (8 percent line added).

Above is a chart showing the historic levels for the Prime Rate, from Forecast Chart.com. I added a red line at 8 percent for reference. Below is a chart showing the historic levels for the Discount Rate, from a 2009 article on Apin Talisayon’s Weblog (data obtained from the Financial Forecast Center). I added a red line at 6 percent for reference.

US Discount Rate From 1950 as found on Apin Talisayon’s Weblog (6 percent red line added).

From Apin Talisayon:

As I said, central banks had recently been dropping interest rates, and so we cannot use the abnormally low prevailing interest rates (0.5%). I plotted the historical data of discount rates set by the US Federal Reserve since January 1950 from the Financial Forecast Center[.]

As you can see in the above two charts, the Prime Rate and the Discount Rate differ in levels, but mirror each other. And they’re not only at historic lows; they’re far below historic norms. That means the future necessarily will provide much higher rates on borrowing than today. And the Federal Government’s debt service costs absolutely must skyrocket. Couple that with the US credit rating crumbling — and will continue to crumble — and the interest on the debt will become astronomical. Even a fairly normal rate of 6 percent with our current 16,000,000,000,000 dollar deficit means 960 BILLION DOLLARS in interest payments alone. By 2015, our national debt will be 20 TRILLION DOLLARS and the interest on that debt will be 1.2 TRILLION DOLLARS. That’s before paying for roads, bridges, high speed trains to nowhere, free birth control pills for Sandra Fluck (phonetic spelling), free abortion pills for Sandra Fluck (phonetic spelling), free ObamaPhones, free health care, free foodstamps, free college tuition, free housing for the poor and forever pregnant single mothers, free Big Bird, free NPR propaganda, bailing out California, Illinois, Maryland, New York, free cowboy poetry, and oh yeah, paying for our national defense.

1.2 TRILLION DOLLARS SPENT TO PAY FOR ALREADY SPENT MONEY WE DIDN’T HAVE BEFORE PAYING FOR ANY CURRENT PROGRAMS AND EXPENSES!!!

The Socialist who ascended the throne in DC, along with the Socialists in the US Senate who have adamantly refused to produce a Federal Budget since April, 2009, in direct violation of Federal Law and the US Constitution, have successfully Cloward-Pivened the most prosperous nation in the history of the world. The most prosperous nation this world has ever seen has been successfully brought to financial ruin by the Leftists in power who have no use for a document that is “over 100 years old”. The aim? Destroy the Free Market and implement Socialism worldwide.

The silver lining? Conservatives have not been responsible for any of it. Conservatives have not been in charge for any of it. I know, little solace for the loss of a once great and mighty and FREE nation. Will there be anything left to save by 2016? And will there be any conceivable way to save it and return to prosperity from the Abyss of Destitution Obama and the Socialist Democrats have created? Or will it already be too late? I, for one, am not looking forward to the disaster these next 10 years will provide us. (UPDATE: Nice Deb performed her Karnac impression and answered my questions before seeing them. Go to her site to read her answers.)

RELATED
This medical device tax is just not going to end well
Economics 101: Schadenfreude!
Video: What free-market medicine looks like
2013: A Century Of Progress
Gee, why do you think the Obama administration waited until after November 6th to mail these letters?

The Rich Pay Their Fair Share

From CNBC (owned by that radical left wing NBC, which owns MSNBC) comes this nugget:

Buried inside a Congressional Budget Office report this week was this nugget: when it comes to individual income taxes, the top 40 percent of wage earners in America pay 106 percent of the taxes. The bottom 40 percent…pay negative 9 percent.

The bottom 20 percent actually pay a negative fifteen percent federal income tax rate! it’s time that the bottom 40 percent pay their fair share. It’s time the bottom 20 percent stop getting more back in income tax returns than they pay in. Because, as the lovely lady from CNBC said, “the rich aren’t only paying their fair share, they’re paying everyone’s share.”

Cathedral of San Juan

We spit in your Christian face

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve not thoroughly investigated this for the back story, but rather stumbled across it while dealing with another matter.

The proximate source for this was the always provocative Michael Voris of the Catholic site “Church Militant TV”, though it’s been floating around the Internet for almost a month now.

I first came across Voris himself when a militant atheist troll dedicated to disrupting philosopher Professor Edward Feser’s moderate realist oriented blog (Feser is himself a Catholic) , mockingly inserted a link to a Voris polemic as an example of a “Real Catholic”.

The mockery might have backfired on him since although no one could call me a “Catholic in Good Standing” I found Voris’ observations and plain spoken manner of argumentation almost always entertaining, and quite often acute.

Voris’ point was that the people in what he calls the Catholic “Church of Nice” consistently underestimate the vehemence of the anti-Christians.

And I must say, that this event certainly comes as a shock to me. I cannot imagine how it did not break out into violence. Someone spray paint into my face and I would probably kill them in instant retaliation. But then these young men, praying the rosary around the church they were protecting, come from both a different culture, a different religion, and a different spiritual sensibility, than I do.

I’m mortified at what they have endured, but for some reason not contemptuous of them as I would be for those who otherwise passively submit to assault, when they need not endure it.

http://gloria.tv/?mediafile=unEJHL1xyfbGAHeJylpaG

From YouTube

 

I don’t know what is going on here. But I have never seen anything like it before.

Eyes Only

The NSA Tree

Colin Powell fan club proven to be imbeciles

 

Do you prefer Obama or Obama lite?

U.S. News and World Report has an article that reminds us of the catastrophe that is likely to ensue when a morally degraded population tries to exorcise certain social demons through political self-flagellation.

Remember all those excitable and emotionally immature Republicans who were big supporters of Colin Powell? Remember experiencing the dizzying feeling that they were driven vastly less by what freedom compatible policies and ideology Powell was known to embrace, than the fact that he served as a blank screen upon which they could project their moral redemption fantasies?

In rather obvious search of someone who could stamp their “I’m not a racist” ticket, they giddily latched onto Powell in a paroxysm of hand flapping wish fulfillment.

If you asked them what his positions were on critical political issues, they couldn’t say. They could not, because he cannily would not. Fortunately for the Republican party, saner heads realized this. Well, more or less, given the fact that an almost equally destructive John McCain somehow became the party’s nominee.

Of course it was not too long before Powell felt drawn to demonstrate where his real allegiances lay; and it was not with freedom. They lay with Obama who he endorsed for president, and with the collectivist social manager class with which he identifies as a part.

Probably should not have been much of a surprise. Not everyone who seeks a career in the U.S. military is a libertarian constitutionalist sacrificing his personal daily liberty in order to guarantee it for the larger political community. Powell’s silence should have been a warning. Just like John Roberts’ should have been. But wish fulfillment Republicans have long been in the habit of assuming that just because people don’t speak up, they are somehow fans of liberty. Kind of strange and actually incoherent a thought if you reflect upon it for a moment: “X is so much a fan of freedom he fears to exercise it personally lest he be deprived of the opportunity of defending it at some future date …”

Yeah, just look how well that assumption has played out …

Now Powell, the closet-leftist-masquerading-as-a-closet-conservative is helpfully advancing the cause of freedom and self-direction by advocating the introduction of an even more comprehensive form of fascistic-leftism, than Obamacare: with what is euphemistically called a “single payer system”.  As we a all know Single Payer is actually a government payer system wherein you get tagged for the medical expenses of the obnoxious through taxes; meaning that even the option of your striking back against a fascist system like ObamaCare through civil disobedience or economic subversion, becomes hardly possible. “A new poll shows 28 percent of uninsured Americans intend to pay a fine rather than enroll in a plan. as required by the Affordable Care Act.”

But Powell likes a system with no functional opt out. It worked for him.

” ‘I don’t see why we can’t do what Europe is doing, what Canada is doing, what Korea is doing, what all these other places are doing,” Powell said at the Dec. 5 event. “I am not an expert in health care, or Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, or however you choose to describe it, but I do know this: I have benefited from that kind of universal health care in my 55 years of public life.’ “

I want, you will provide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[US News and World Report Image]

He doesn’t see what the problem with fascism is. He likes it in fact.

What moral subspecies of man are these collectivists?

Unconditional, redistributive, no escape social “solidarity”. What worthwhile person would want such a shit life, or demand it of everyone else; and why?

Hell on earth for edified men; emotional paradise for the “last man” … the soulless man of nothingness.

Maybe that explains it.

Kate Smith Introduces “God Bless America”

I doubt we’ll ever see the likes of this type song under BO. Might be some heathen god smite amerika