Paranoia on the rise, experts say

If you think they’re out to get you, you’re not alone. [snip]

“In a world full of threat, it may be kind of beneficial for people to be on guard. It’s good to be looking around and see who’s following you and what’s happening,” Combs said. “Not everybody is trying to get you, but some people may be.”

The question is not, “Are you paranoid,” but “Are you paranoid enough?”

Just asking!

All of the tax cut promises, starting at $250,000, are now down to $120,000 according to Gov Bill Richardson. They will have to be paid for somehow. Guess how?

About what hasn’t he lied? From the Aunt in Boston, to illicit campaign contributions (from the Aunt no less) he has evaded the truth with the help of the dying MSM.

He’ll be after your savings, IRA’s, then higher taxes on income so that those who wish not to work, the idle poor, can live like the working class.

The end result: the money and power winds up in Washington and everyone else are kulaks getting what ever the state decides one may have.

Here’s Helga!

Ain’t it swell!

Did someone slip Barack Obama some Sodium Pentothol?

“Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed “more and more for fulfilling the American dream.”

“It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success too,” Obama responded. “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody … I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Unless this plumber secretly leads a Fortune 500 plumbing company, there go all of Obama’s fallacious claims about helping small businesses.

I’m somewhat heartened by the fact that somebody is actually paying attention out there.  The last Democrat to propose and push a tax cut through—although posthumously—was John F. Kennedy.  Yet with 44 years of contrary evidence, many people actually believe Obama will lower their taxes.  Talk about the dumbing down of America.

But even more important and frightening than his lies about tax cuts are his economic theories.  Obama thinks that you can make people successful by giving them stuff.  It’s the same theory that led Democrats to give people houses with no documents, no jobs, no down payments, and no hope for repayment.  How’d that work out for us?  It didn’t exactly make them successful now did it, but that’s OK because the taxpayers can bail them out.

The fact of the matter is that socialist economic systems don’t work because rewarding low achievers doesn’t encourage them.  It does exactly the opposite, and it stifles growth because the achievers have less and less incentive to create.  Combine Obama with his socialist counterparts in Congress, and we’re in deep trouble.

Ed G. Mann has this post on Fashions for the Obama Presidency. He doesn’t say it in those words but given Obama’s loathing for the 2ndAmendment…

In Mexico, shopping for the right thing to wear at the wrong end of a gun

[snip]
Some people are trying to get their hands on weapons, which are tightly regulated here but widely available on the black market. To some, bulletproof fashion is the logical next step. [snip]

He points out that the clothing is not designed for the kind of warfare that is breaking out in some parts of Mexico, where drug assassins have used rocket launchers and grenades to wipe out rivals. [snip]

Mann writes:
Of course, even in a bastion of democracy like Mexico, gun control keeps weapons out of the hands of the truly malignant: i.e. the cancerous law abiding. It always works so well.

If the haberdasher cannot guarantee safety against RPG’s and grenades, I should probably request a refund. At least use put the expense on your credit card so your estate can contest the charge.

French PM says world ‘on edge of abyss’

PARIS/LONDON, Oct 3 (Reuters) - French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Friday the world stood on the “edge of the abyss”, gripped by a global financial crisis now threatening industry, trade and jobs worldwide.
Fillon’s words echoed a growing sense of alarm sweeping EU capitals ahead of an expected U.S. Congressional vote on Friday on a $700 billion bailout plan for the financial industry. Approval is far from certain. [snip]

Monsieur Fillon, the French economy has been in the cloacae since the German Chowder and Marching Society showed up in Paris a couple hundred thousand strong.

After that excursion into French diplomacy, France employed Marxist economics, which is why you are such an economic powerhouse today.
How about working on your end of the problem, like firing the dead wood and killing off the leech unions. France might even find productivity in that mess.

Listen to Sarkozy, You have a chance of getting out of the ditch.

 I posted in the past that this is not over. Here is more. I’m saying again, this is not over. Bush’s profligate prescription plan started it. Congress took the bit in it’s mouth and it got worse. After the 2006 election all was lost on fiscal sanity, we are reaping what has been sown.I believe the Bible said something about bitter herbs…

The government has socialized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. All loans in arrears but solvent sold off to institutions, foreign investors and private bankers protected from serious losses and the American taxpayer given the pipe. If one is smart, one will buy a half M house quickly and default so that you can get a great rate of interest and a write down on principal.

For the rest, who paid your mortgage on time, tough, you should have been a deadbeat. Or a liberal. Or a Democrat. That’s redundant, sorry.

Meanwhile, a 45% drop in share value pummeled Lehman Brothers over additional worries about the global financial system. If Lehman cannot raise capital, it joins Bear Sterns. Hey, maybe some taxpayers can bail it out! Isn’t that what we’re for, to save the fat kitties?

Monday the markets went up like a teenage boy looking at porn; yesterday down like his mother caught him. Many investors are buying US Treasuries seeking safety, while the list of clowns below are doing their best to destroy any value in bonds by out of control spending and onerous porking up legislation for pet projects in their districts and states.

We have serious inflation in progress from the idiotic ethanol program and oil jolt. Add to that job losses, the housing deflation, illegals taking available jobs from idled workers and the government is cooking a bad tasting soup.

To move the housing market, the Fed must lower interest rates. To head off rampant inflation, the Fed must raise interest rates. For those who think inflation isn’t bad, you haven’t been food or clothing shopping. Look at the COLA numbers the government uses to set next year’s increases. They have manipulated the items used to calculate the inflation rate for SS, Medicare, SSDI, Veterans Benefits and Government Pensions to avoid paying the real rise in cost of living. The government doesn’t have the money to pay the entitlement programs without borrowing more, which means printing more. (Inflationary) Something will give, likely to be the dollar on the world market.

All the while telling the gullible seniors vote us back in office, we’ll keep the cost of Mixed Grill down for you.

Want to blame some people, start with this list of suspects. Most are Dems, but there are some RINO’s in there too.

Top Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008

1. Dodd, Christopher J (S) D-CT $133,900

2. Kerry, John D-MA (S) $111,000

3. Obama, Barack (S) D-IL $105,849

4. Clinton, Hillary (S) D-NY $75,550

5. Kanjorski, Paul E (H) D-PA $65,500

6. Bennett, Robert F (S) R-UT $61,499

7. Johnson, Tim (S) D-SD $61,000

8. Conrad, Kent (S) D-ND $58,991

9. Davis, Tom (H) R-VA $55,499

10. Bond, Christopher S ‘Kit’ (S) R-MO $55,400

11. Bachus, Spencer (H) R-AL $55,300

12. Shelby, Richard C (S) R-AL $55,000

13. Emanuel, Rahm (H) D-IL $51,750

14. Reed, Jack (S) D-RI $50,750

15. Carper, Tom (S) D-DE $44,389

16. Frank, Barney (H) D-MA $40,100

17. Maloney, Carolyn B (H) D-NY $38,750

18. Bean, Melissa (H) D-IL $37,249

19. Blunt, Roy (H) R-MO $36,500

20. Pryce, Deborah (H) R-OH $34,750

21. Miller, Gary (H) R-CA $33,000

22. Pelosi, Nancy (H) D-CA $32,750

23. Reynolds, Tom (H) R-NY $32,700

24. Hoyer, Steny H (H) D-MD $30,500

25. Hooley, Darlene (H) D-OR $28,750

I wonder how they voted on the parachutes for the heads of Freddie and Fannie?

“All I know is that I am not a Marxist” - Karl Marx 

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” - Groucho Marx

Conservative radio pundits and some of their callers, along with a few bloggers, have described Barack Obama as a “Marxist. ”  If  by “Marxist” they mean that Obama’s politics are a brew of socialism, authoritarianism and radical egalitarianism, they’re right.  But I see no evidence that Obama believes in violent overthrow of our capitalist system, or in any of the real complexities Marxism aims at the stupid, the envious, the unbalanced, the power-mad and the credulous. 

True, the Black Liberation Theology of Trinity United is infested with Marxist class dynamics and socialism; it offers up some Marxian and Neo-Marxist musings on the subject of consciousness, hermeneutics, violence as means, and an entire honey bucket load of dialectical excreta.   But I doubt that Obama is a BLT believer; its spurious but powerful demands for charity and sanctioned humility compete with his personal vanity, his insight, and his desire for the good life.  We will not see Barack Obama in any real egalitarian arrangement.

As for Marxist orthodoxy, it’s difficult today to find any political philosophy, Left or Right, which doesn’t incorporate some of the prejudices, social values and processes which shaped the pseudo social-science built by Karl Marx.  Some hard, utilitarian market-love adored by conservatives is, in ways, Hegelian/Marxist.  It’s impossible to define or isolate Marxist “thinking” as the sole property of Marx.   

That’s because so little that Marx wrote about, or formulated, was actually original or creative; it consisted of pages of intellectual theft, and the elaboration of ideas and concepts broadcast by his predecessors, collaborators and contemporary superiors, among whom the primary concerns were human liberty and dignity.  The elements of “Marxism” were everywhere before Karl Marx grew his first beard.     

His ideas floated atop an age of rationalism, where eventually Darwin and Freud would add their own gears and wheels to the “scientific” study of mankind.  That Marx’s clockwork absurdities, his  observations and predictions have survived at all into our age of deconstruction is puzzling.  A lot of it is simply obvious and mundane, while its emotive theorizing and puffery continue an egalitarian road blazed by Rousseau, and the communard, utopian silliness of thinkers as far back as Plato.  

The reason I doubt that Obama is a Marxist is that Marxism has fallen on hard times and Obama is no consumer of the second-rate.  Marxism appears in a few places, like shiny scales dropping from a rotting fish - leftist riffraff, for example, who gorge on the lard of weirdo capitalism, then show up to protest in mass-marketed fancy-dress, and assert their devotion to a dead, 19th century socialist failure and crank. Laughable.  

You can also find Neo-Marxism in that intellectual burger joint, Critical Theory,  where brainy work is found for otherwise unemployable socialist academics. Critical Theorists question everything, including Marxism, except the dialectical process which makes Marxism possible.   Hello? Why?  Because without it, Critical Theory would be 100% charlatanry rather than just 99%. 

No, Obama is worse than a Marxist.  He’s a modern “progressive”,  a clever, wildly ambitious believer in the ever-progressing good society.  He believes that group life is a process, and that he’s going to have something to DO with it!  In his world, nothing can be left alone to develop, mature or even regress on its own.  He’s interested in YOU, and that should scare the hell out of you.    

When someone has such a intuitive grasp of how the economy works, it is believable that he can pluck a fix out of the hat to cure our woes, clean up the sub-prime and soon prime congressionally caused debacle, and drive energy prices down to 1932 levels.

Here is the first result in Obamanomics as taught everywhere except the Milton Friedman Institute.

GM Has $15.5 Billion Loss on U.S. Sales Drop, Leases

Aug. 1 (Bloomberg) — General Motors Corp., the largest U.S. automaker, reported a second-quarter loss of $15.5 billion because of plunging U.S. sales and the declining value of truck leases.
The deficit of $27.33 a share marks GM’s fourth straight quarterly loss and compares with a profit of $891 million, or $1.56, a year earlier. Excluding costs GM considers one-time, the per-share loss was 4 times bigger than analysts projected. Labor strikes contributed to a $9.9 billion drop in North American revenue, and sales worldwide tumbled 18 percent to $38.2 billion. [snip]

Big Oil rapes the Public

Exxon Mobil reported today its best quarterly profit in history…[],,,Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) reacted in remarks prepared for a Senate floor speech:

“Today there is some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that oil is at $123 a barrel and working people are paying $4 for a gallon of gas, and this coming winter residents of the Northeast could be paying over $5 for a gallon of heating oil. But there is some good news. Today, the CEOs of Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and ConocoPhillips are celebrating. They’re feeling pretty good. And, they have good reason to feel that way. [snip]

Senator Sanders made no mention of giving GM any windfall loss tax rebate.
Rather curious that he thinks in that way, isn’t it?

Another thing Senator, the animal rights faction here at NER
want to know why you are wearing a lamb pelt on your head.

Now that the Chosen One has flitted about the Holy Land, managed to upset most of the inhabitants, and is heading to Germany to instruct them on proper social principles, the question which needs answering is, “Will Obama detour to Bulgaria to instruct his Socialist comrades on the error of their taxing ways?”

Obama considers himself the “Leader of the‘Free World” pre-ordination. Therefore, by divine right he must travel to straying socialist countries and correct their governmental missteps.

Thankfully, one member of the MSM dutifully enumerated Bulgaria’s miscues for us to fathom.

They listed the delinquencies, the rationale for those reshuffles, the results of repositioning and the dangers to Socialism accruing from those alterations.

I expect Obama to thoroughly chide the malefactors and wag the Holy Digit under their collectivist nose. Will he force the issue by fiat of “More Taxes or More Tanks!”
Here are the insufferable changes.

[snip]
“The situation was getting desperate in Bulgaria. We were losing our population and our best workers. They were leaving for Western Europe to find jobs and the No.1 form of foreign capital came from remittances.” All that began to change when the corporate tax was cut to 10% in 2007 and the personal income tax to 10% in January of this year. “We told the politicians that it was symbolically important for Bulgaria to have the lowest flat tax. We were surrounded by flat tax countries, we wanted to be the nation most friendly to capital and business.”

[snip]
“These countries understand that the flat tax is the key to their prosperity — even the former communists.” Only stultified political tactics — certainly not clear thinking — explains why somebody like Barack Obama could be running on a platform of making America’s tax rates among the highest in the world when other nations are proving the competitive advantages of flatter tax systems.

Difficult to figure out isn’t it.

This has to be one of the more humorous articles published about socialism in some time. No attempt at humor seems to be a cause to write this article, but reality has a way of inserting twists never intended by the penman.

I experienced that “Groundhog Day” moment reading these words, until I realized this is what scribes always write about how socialism turns out.

Sadly, we read about it here too. In Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, etc.; the list goes on. Our housing troubles, trucking, bad roads, oh pick it. Some entity wants a handout from another’s pocket via pork spending. The government has the solution, right over in that sand pile. Must be, that’s where their heads are.

Read the whole article to see our destination with the Donks, bring tissues:

Spain Smacked by a Dose of Economic Reality

Spaniards, used to socialist largesse, are struggling with market economics — and their prime minister is in heavy denial.

A national truck driver’s strike in Spain may be winding down, but it has brought the already-troubled Spanish economy to a standstill. It has also highlighted what happens when a welfare state goes wild. Some 90,000 self-employed hauliers…[snip]… are betting that the government will cave in to their demands. After all, the Spanish government always gives in to labor unrest. [snip]

Spain complains

[snip]
Considering all these grievances, it seems strange that Spanish voters in March gave Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero another four-year term in office. After all, pre-election polls showed that the majority of Spaniards knew full well that Spain was not on the right track, economically or otherwise.

Maybe they allowed themselves to be persuaded that everything would somehow be okay, thanks to Zapatero’s postmodern relativistic political discourse, which posits that all problems are by definition imaginary. Or perhaps they were bribed by the 22 billion euros — a whopping 2.1 percent of Spain’s GDP — in handouts that Zapatero promised to bestow upon them if re-elected. [snip]

During the past 20 years, Spain cashed in on some 100 billion euros — equivalent to nearly one percent of its GDP every year — by way of EU Structural and Cohesion Funds, which are designed to narrow the gap between the EU’s wealthy and poor countries. But now that Spain has reached a per capita GDP of 98.5 percent of the EU average — it was 72 percent in 1986 — the country will begin paying more into the EU than it receives back.

The implication is that Spaniards will have to strike less and work more. But that seems an unlikely prospect. Spain recently led a block, including Belgium and Greece, which sought to prohibit British workers from working more than 48 hours a week. Spanish Socialists complain that if Brits work more than Spaniards, Britain will have an unfair competitive advantage. (emphasis added)

Can’t have productivity, can we?

Problem? What problem?

Just before the March elections, Zapatero insisted that the Spanish economy would grow by 3.3 percent in 2008; since his re-election, however, the government has revised that figure downwards on an almost daily basis. [snip]

So far Zapatero’s post-modern approach to Spain’s economic crisis seems based on three reality-evading pillars: denial, passing the blame, and more denial. His Plan A has involved a pop psychology campaign advising Spaniards that “pessimism does not create jobs.” Plan B blamed “radical liberalism,” which in euro-speak means the free market. Zapatero now wants to implement Plan C, a global advertising campaign in the world financial press designed to highlight his economic management skills.

Spaniards, having grown accustomed to three decades of spoon-feeding by Socialist largesse, are in for a long, hot free-market summer.

Good, big pain might bring some reasoning gain, like getting out of the EU.

A basic tenet in the prog playbook deals with outcomes at variance with wishes. Lie to yourself about what you see. Works every time; ask Gorbachev, Castro, Jong-Il. Or ask the chink leaders who gave up pure socialism in favor of capitalism, why the Great Leap Forward put them on their butt.

From under rocks and the backs of dank caves comes this crowd, like the living dead, all moaning:

Don’t settle for chump change: vote socialist!

Don’t be seduced by the hype. You can proudly resist the manipulations of the fat cats by voting for a bonafide socialist candidate. This beats voting for the lesser of two evils or “none of the above,” because you choose a real alternative. [snip]

The candidates of socialist parties call for ending the war now, full reproductive rights for women, pensions and healthcare for all, rights for peoples of color and immigrants and shifting the economic burden to the rich. [snip]

The only intricacy with this scenario is getting the rich to go along.
The amputation of the opulence from prior owners produces this quandary, who holds the appropriated hoard for the people? How does beneficent leaders solve this problem? Perhaps they become the rich.
Talk about permanent revolution; the peasants can perpetually rise up to remove the assets from the rich.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), running Gloria La Riva, is advancing some especially worthy demands, including a $15 minimum wage and an end to police brutality. If only PSL, which leads the anti-war group ANSWER, collaborated with others in the movements!

What, where are the free condoms, rubber tire sandals or shovels? How does $15/hour gibe with reducing the holdings of the despised rich? I suspect this needs more thought.
Does the end of police brutality cover those holding opposing views?

The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) in California also has an anti-capitalist program, although not all of its candidates do. PFP will choose this time’s candidates in August.
Casting a vote for a candidate who is truly independent from the system will let you brag that you took a step fixing this murderous system we live under. Vote socialist in 2008!

Would not living under such a murderous system as ours, cause all the oppressed socialists to flee to a haven such as Cuba or Venezuela? We have no barriers to emigration. There they can live in idyllic life of shared poverty and ownership of a shovel.

You can read the whole article here, it isn’t too long. The schadenfreude quotient in this piece is delightfully high.
By the way, why haven’t we seen his fat face anywhere, pontificating his point of view?

Climate facts to warm to

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.
Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.” [snip]

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along. [snip]

THE Age published an essay with an environmental theme by Ian McEwan on March 8 and its stablemate, The Sydney Morning Herald, also carried a slightly longer version of the same piece.

The Australian’s Cut & Paste column two days later reproduced a telling paragraph from the Herald’s version, which suggested that McEwan was a climate change sceptic and which The Age had excised. He was expanding on the proposition that “we need not only reliable data but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics”.

What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: “Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. (emphasis added)[snip]

The missing sentences do not appear anywhere else in The Age’s version of the essay. The attribution reads: “Copyright Ian McEwan 2008″ and there is no acknowledgment of editing by The Age.

Why did the paper decide to offer its readers McEwan lite? Was he, I wonder, consulted on the matter? And isn’t there a nice irony that The Age chose to delete the line about ideologues not being very good at “absorbing inconvenient fact”?

With all the above going on, we get these fools:

At island retreat, Branson and friends seek to save a world ‘on fire’

“So, do we really think the world is on fire?” Branson, the British magnate and adventurer, asked several guests, as a manservant scurried off to fetch him another glass of pinot grigio. [snip]
Branson does - and so did most of his guests. So on this recent weekend on his private hideaway in the crystalline waters between the islands of Tortola and Anegada, they tried to figure out what to do about it and perhaps get richer in the process.

Yeah, like with the Gorbot, it is all about money.

Anyone willing to discard the person who raised them needs a generous helping of damnation.

So wear this solidarity button in good spirits.

Let Hussein know what you think!