You can see a bigger image by clicking on the chart. As I pointed out in my first post about sequestration, the fraud is that THERE ARE NO CUTS. The alleged cuts are only a one time 2.5% reduction in the growth. The advantage of this chart is the detail about the growth rate for defense, Medicare and the rest.
The good news it the American public seems, finally,to be skeptical about the Administration and media hype. We instinctively know that, given the massive Federal budget, cancelling White House tours and messing with air traffic are temper tantrums by spoiled political elites. We can only hope that skepticism grows to include the rest of the big government agenda.
In my last post about gun control, Tyranny 101, I wrote about the futility of background checks and the hidden political agenda that motivates recent legislation. Let me again emphasize that none of the recently proposed gun legislation would have stopped any mass shootings or bombings. Today, I’ll focus on another popular gun control fad.
Magazine Restrictions
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s BIG IDEA is to stop crime by restricting how many bullets a magazine can hold. Like most politicians, Cuomo has no practical knowledge of the world around him, particularly about those things he seeks to regulate or control. So, as this article in FrontPage magazine explains, he had to backpedal on magazine bans.
But the theory that fewer rounds equals greater safety is false on many levels. First of all, guns, magazines and bullets are made by people. And people can manufacture them and modify them. Of all gun parts, magazines are among the easiest to modify by the mechanically inclined thug in a home shop. Second, it’s pretty easy to carry a second or third revolver or semi-auto pistol. Finally, as the video below shows, even an inexperienced shooter can reload fast enough to maintain a murder spree.
Tyranny
But, as I said in my last post, the gun grabbers are immune to arguments such as I’ve made here. Observe how they even try to use the Boston Marathon bombing to further a gun ban agenda. I believe it’s because their real goals are not their stated goals.
I claim their real, and sinister, goal is to disarm the innocent and the law-abiding. But how do magazine restrictions advance that goal? Simple. Magazine restrictions are a way to soften up public opposition and establish a principle, the principle that the state can control what we own and how we are allowed to defend ourselves. And more importantly, magazine restrictions make the argument that we are subjects of the government and not citizens. Once that principle is established, the rest is easy.
The armed citizen is the biggest impediment to their goal of a collectivist, utopian dictatorship.
Many of my readers will likely have read about the recent embarrassment of two well-known Harvard economists, Rogoff and Reinhart, who published a tour de force book about government debt. It turns out that one of their spreadsheets had an error (leaving out some data). Worse still, an economics student writing a term paper made the discovery. Ouch!
The error was in the statement that when government debt reaches 90% of GDP it has a significant impact on GDP growth, bringing growth down to near zero.
Roy Filly says it all regarding our debt. The time bomb of debt has been ticking for a while now. Future, unfunded liabilities arising from Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, not to mention Obamacare are estimated to be $90 to $120 Trillion with a "T." That is six to eight times our current GDP and six to eight times our current debt. There is no question that a collapse is coming unless we do something radical now. The only question is what form the collapse will take, mega-inflation, government default or something else.
Following the horrific bombings in Boston today near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, our “objective” news media was quick to speculate that a disgruntled “right winger” was responsible. Some examples are here, compliments of NewsBusters.
This is a classic rhetorical device used by the Left to smear people. In the absence of any evidence, speculate your political enemies are responsible. And be sure to ignore contradictory examples such as Bill, Obama’s buddy, Ayers and the Weather Underground bombings. When the truth is found out don’t expect many retractions from our elite media.
The proper response in this, and similar cases, is to think like an objective detective, ignore nothing but assume nothing. For instance, there are reports police are interviewing a “person of interest” supposedly a student on an expired visa. Don’t jump to any conclusions. They guy may be innocent but in the wrong place at the wrong time just like Richard Jewell was during the Atlanta Olympics bombing. Jewell was the talk of the media who assumed he was guilty as sin. But Jewell was exonerated after suffering at the hands of the media.
Being thoughtful and objective is difficult. But work at it. You will be better for it and more likely to separate truth from fiction.
So, yes, it could have been right-wingers or left-wingers or the government or Martians. When you have no evidence it could be anything.
Legislatures across the country are proposing bills and passing laws to “solve” the problem of mass shootings. Of course, none of these laws will work. I want to address just two of the more popular legal fads, one today, another later.
Background Checks
From Bloomberg to Obama politicians are calling for “universal” background checks, as if we don’t already do them. If background checks work so well to prevent murder and mayhem we should have seen a sharp decline in those crimes the first time background checks were mandated. Why do I think that didn’t happen?
But, as I said, we already do background checks. Every gun dealer does them on every gun sale whether at a retail store or at a gun show. Politicians are saying that 40% of gun sales happen without background checks. That’s a false statistic based on a lie and old, incomplete data. The real number is more like 12% and the vast majority of those transfers are within families, such as collections passing from father to son. NewsBusters expands on the source of the falsehood here.
So why the big fuss over background checks. Ann Coulter expounded on one reason on the Sean Hannity show, here, compliments of the Blaze. In part, she says: “Universal background check means universal registration. Universal registration means universal confiscation, universal extermination,” she continued. “That’s how it goes in history. Do not fall for universal background checks.”
Is Coulter being extreme? No. In fact, according to Dave Kopel, the real intent of the background check legislation is to make every gun owner a felon. That’s because the politicians are not just requiring background checks for sales. They are requiring background checks for all “transfers.” A transfer is you handing a gun to a friend at the range and then when your friend gives it back again. A transfer is a husband leaving a gun with a wife while he is away or a mom leaving a gun with a son for safe-keeping while she is away. You can read Kopel’s full article here, at National Review.
Let me emphasize this: Proposed background check legislation will criminalize innocent gun owners.
Tyranny
You may be wondering why gun grabbers are so immune to arguments such as I’ve made here. Simple. I believe it’s because their real goals are not their stated goals. They claim to be for public safety. They claim to want to stop murder. They claim they care about people.
None of that is true. If politicians wanted to stop gun crime, the first place to start would be to investigate the Obama-Holder Fast and Furious scandal that many of us think was part of a plot to demonize gun dealers and gun owners.
Instead, politicians admit that none of their proposals would have stopped any of the recent mass shootings. But their track record exposes their real and sinister goal, to disarm the innocent, the law-abiding.
In particular: the goal of background check legislation is to criminalize gun ownership and make confiscation easier. Felons cannot own guns. Make every gun owner a felon and voila. Why is criminalizing gun ownership the goal? Because the armed citizen is the biggest impediment to their goal of a collectivist, utopian dictatorship.
What else except sinister motives explains the reason for passing laws that do not solve the problem the lawmakers allege wanting to solve? If there is a benign explanation for their agenda, I’m willing to listen.
If you have been listening to President Obama and Democrats this is what you’ve been hearing about today’s anticipated budget sequestration:
They got the mass hysteria part correct. Here, thanks to Twitter and @kesgardner is a chart based on Congressional Budget Office numbers. I don’t know the creator so if you do please tell me.
Sequester Cuts Forecast
If you can find a reason for mass hysteria in this I’m interested in knowing where. The Wall Street Journal took a serious look at the sequestration issue in a Feb 27th article titled “The Sequester Revelation” available here: -The Sequester Revelation-
The author concludes by saying: “Neither the legal details of the sequester nor the practical work of reforming government are as interesting to the media as Mr. Obama’s invocations of plagues and pestilence. The real revelation is that if the world does end, it will be Mr. Obama’s choice.“
What is truly obnoxious about the sequestration story is the journalistic malpractice of the news media that serves to conspire with the Obama Administration to mislead the American public. Take another look at the above graph. There are no cuts! The whole debate is a fraud. There have never been real cuts, even during Reagan, only changes in the rate of growth. Today, almost every media story is a lie or spin to promote Barack Obama and denigrate Republicans. But what’s new? Here’s the debate in context:
The bottom line is that the real Armageddon facing us is a wildly out-of-control growth of Federal spending and power that will swallow all economic activity in the next decade or two and make the lives of our children and grandchildren a living Hell. The Federal Government alone absorbs 25% of all economic activity. Adding in another 20% to 25% absorbed by the States and we have a situation where half of your working life is spent supporting government at all levels. Moreover, your burden is getting worse, heavier by the year.
Perhaps you are having a problem understanding the, so called, Federal budget sequester and all of its ramifications. Those of you who have been reading this blog know that I am fond of charts and graphs and math to help explain complex economic subjects. So let’s see if I can clear things up for you.
When you hear President Barack Obama speak to the sequester or you hear government officials or media personalities explain the consequences of the sequester you can easily understand what they say if you translate their words using the Official LibertyPhysics Government Speech Translator. Unfortunately you can’t buy it in stores because the prototype is still in development but I can use it on your behalf and report the results.
So, let’s give it a try, shall we. Here is Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood explaining the consequences to air travel if the sequester takes place.
After I pass this speech through the LibertyPhysics translator, this is what comes out:
“Cut my proposed budget by even a little bit and I will make your life absolutely miserable. After all, I own you.“
That was an interesting result. Let’s try another one.
Passing that through the LibertyPhysics translator yields:
“You believed me then and you believe me now. You are a big chump.“
That was harsh. Maybe I should send it back through the prototype translator for a second opinion.
“No, really. I’m a big fat liar and I get to say anything I want even if I contradict myself because none of my sycophantic media will hold me to account. Oh, and I own you and get to ruin your life with impunity.“
I’m not sure why the LibertyPhysics translator gave the results it did but perhaps it was because the Federal Government is running up trillion dollar annual deficits and “sequestration” cuts about $44 billion according to the Congressional Budget Office ($82 billion according to the media). Even the $82B amounts to 8% of the annual debt one time or 2% of the annual budget, enough to run the Federal Government for maybe three days.
But the incredibly greedy politicians, in both parties, would rather bankrupt you, your children and grand children with Federal debt than cut their power over you by just a couple of percent. The most egregious part of this Kabuki Theatre is that THERE ARE NO CUTS. The “cuts” are government speak for cuts in the rate of growth. SCAM. SCAM. SCAM. Moreover, Barack Obama, the community organizer, is a professional grievance agitator. He’s the guy in cowboy movies who gets the mob all ginned up to lynch the sheep herder over alleged harm sheep do to cattle. So, despite the sequester being his idea, he’s flipped positions so he can demonize Republicans no matter which position they advocate.
Here’s what the Cato Institute says about sequestration:
And here’s Rand Paul’s response:
Maybe the LibertyPhysics translator wasn’t too far off after all. Finally, check out this chart from Investors Business Daily published on December 20, 2012.
Federal Spending vs Population Growth
The accompanying article is titled, “Real Federal Outlays Up 78% since ’98; Spending Cap Key.”
I don’t usually engage in sarcasm as I have, above. But look at that chart. Our politicians are destroying our future and the future of our children and grandchildren while pretending to cut the budget. They should not be playing games but they are. The least you can do is recognize the game for what it is. That and vote them out of office in 2014.
Polylogism is the doctrine that logic and reason are not universal. Instead, polylogism holds that logical and scientific conclusions will differ, depending, usually, on the race or ethnicity of the person doing the analysis. The most egregious recent example of polylogism, in my opinion, occurred when Judge Sonia Sotomayor declared her judicial decisions would be biased by her being a “wise Latina woman.” So the facts and the applicable law isn’t enough to determine the outcome of a court case. Instead, the “logical” conclusion is dependent on the ethnicity of the judge.
Polylogism is usually associated with racism, the doctrine that some races are superior to others, but not always. We all know women and men think differently. Or do we? Men and women may be different in many ways but I doubt that Madame Curie’s discoveries are false because a woman made them.
As the Sotomayor example hints, the greatest proponents of polylogism today are on the Left. We are told over and over that the black experience is different than the white experience and the Latino experience is different than the Anglo experience, the female different than the male, independent of the individuals. This is because the Left accepts, without question, the philosophy known as Postmodernism, the idea that there is no absolute truth but only points of view determined by our ethnicities, experiences etc., F=ma and the rest of physics and chemistry notwithstanding.
Polylogism is a comfortable ideology for the Left because it dovetails so well with their Marxist dialectic notions of oppressor class and victim class. So no matter how hard you try, if you are an old white man you cannot understand young, black women and you definitely dare not have an opinion about abortion or reproduction or education or anything else that affects young black women. But for some odd reason, they can understand you. Go figure.
The Left is very smug and very proud they believe in polylogism and its relative multiculturism. I consider both ideologies frauds based on grains of truth. In particular, polylogism, taken to its logical consequences, lead to violence. If you have no hope of reasoning with that person from another race or religion because their brain is wired differently than yours, then an intellectual conflict can never be resolved and serious conflicts must eventually result in the horror of war and even genocide. Jewish science is, after all, different than Aryan science.
We interrupt our normal, political laced, commentary for this important message about the end of the world. Well, not the end of the world exactly.
Today is the day for the asteroid “2012 DA14″ to do its record-breaking near-earth flyby. NASA will be broadcasting on NASA TV with commentary starting at 2 PM Eastern Time. ===>>
The above links are live now. The commentary starts at 2 PM. The time of closest approach will be at 2:24 PM Eastern time, but, unfortunately, the asteroid will be too dim to see with the naked eye.
The asteroid is about 150 feet in diameter, which sounds small, but it weighs 130,000 metric tons and will be traveling at 17,450 miles per hour when it is closest to Earth. This is the biggest object to come this close to us (17,150 miles) since we’ve been able to track extraterrestrial objects. That distance is inside the orbit of some of our satellites and only about 4.4 times the Earth radius above the surface.
This asteroid will miss us by a mile (ok 17,150 miles). But what if the asteroid were really headed for a collision with earth? What could be done to stop it? NASA scientists will probably comment on this during their broadcast but allow me to anticipate one answer: Trying to blow it up will not help. There are two reasons for this. First, just getting enough explosives on a target the size of an asteroid isn’t an easy task. But, more importantly, if you break the incoming missile into several pieces, you now have several rocks coming at you on the same trajectory instead of just one. You can thank the principle of conservation of momentum for that.
You might think that if you can break the rock into very fine particles the sand you create will just burn up in our atmosphere. That’s correct except the energy required to do that is immense, orders of magnitude greater than the energy necessary to cleave the rock into just several pieces.
What is required is to change the trajectory, not break up the rock. That means, perhaps, bouncing a missile off of the asteroid to change the asteroid momentum vector (direction). The problem is the closer the asteroid is to the Earth before it is discovered, or before we respond, the more energy is necessary to change its direction sufficiently for us to be safe. Today’s asteroid was 2.7 million miles away when it was discovered by an observatory in Spain. An asteroid this size comes close to Earth about every 40 years and an impact is likely every 1,200 years. The energy of impact would be equivalent to 2.5 megatons of TNT.
You could create a discovery distance versus energy chart, although I suspect the result would be depressing. I don’t know what our technology is capable of, hopefully NASA will comment on this, but the USA is now relying on foreign governments to launch payloads into space. So I have a bit of a concern that our ability to fight back a future asteroid Armageddon is shrinking.
If you’ve been on an Antarctic expedition the last few days you may not know that Christopher Dorner is an ex Los Angeles police officer who was dismissed by the department. Dorner went on a killing rampage, after writing a long leftist manifesto, presumably because he concluded he was mistreated by the LAPD. He died in a final confrontation with police last night.
As shocking as his killing spree was, what has shocked at least some of us even more is the fan club that has grown up around him. He has been compared to the title character in the recent movie Django. His fans showed up at the final shootout carrying signs in support of Dorner with messages such as “Don’t shoot Dorner.” As a result, many average Americans have concluded that America is sick and getting sicker, as the famous radio host Bob Grant is fond of saying.
It’s very difficult to accept that any murderer is sane. It’s even more difficult to accept that his fan club is sane. But, if you think about it, we’ve seen this all before. What is going on?
Few doubted that OJ Simpson murdered two people. But he was freed by a jury that voted along racial lines to get even, somehow, with society. Occupy Wall Street disrupted the lives of many innocent people with their antics in multiple cities, presumably because they had a beef with people who’s lives they didn’t even affect with their protest. Members of the New Black Panther Party stand on the street cursing at passers-by they don’t even know, based on skin color. Whole industries are tarred with a broad brush in Presidential speeches, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals, oil companies, hospitals, banks and more. Meanwhile, favored groups can do no wrong and never suffer condemnation, unions, illegal immigrants, and most, so called, minorities.
It doesn’t take much analysis to see a pattern, a pattern that contradicts hundreds of years of Western concepts of justice. Where traditional justice tells us not to judge the son by the sins of the father, the modern ethic is to do just that. In fact, we are supposed to judge whole races by the alleged sins of predecessors. Where traditional justice commands us to judge people as individuals and only punish the guilty, the modern ethic tells us that the sin of one or two policemen is an acceptable justification for a riot that injures or kills many innocents. Where traditional justice demands we carefully consider the evidence before condemning someone, the modern ethic is to assume the guilt of the Duke Lacrosse team before any evidence has been presented. Where traditional justice tells us to put those that obey the rules ahead of those that don’t, the modern ethic is to favor illegal aliens over those applying for residence legally.
Christopher Dorner embodied this modern ethic perfectly. He felt wronged. Rather than present his case and submit evidence, he became the executioner. Rather than confine punishment to the guilty, he lashed out and killed people who had nothing to do with his grievances. And most importantly, those that share his modern ethic became fans. Millions of them celebrated the killing of innocents, applauded his lawlessness and shared his racist motivations.
Christopher Dorner is a poster child for the morality of the Left, the morality of grievance, of race, of tribe and of identity politics. According to the Left, all history is to be interpreted as a class struggle between different identity groups. The “good” guys, in this view, include all the black and brown peoples of the world (whatever the hell that means), the workers (if they are in a union), those that don’t work, certain criminals (especially cop killers), foreign dictators such as Hugo Chavez and all third world people. The “bad” guys include the financially successful, all corporations, all conservatives, Republicans, the police, white people, old white men particularly (ageist, sexist racist much?) and the United States as a whole.
In short, the morality of the Left, the morality of Christoper Dorner, is tribalism. According to the Leftist justice system, the scales of justice must not be level. They must be biased against the oppressor class and toward the victim class. So all Palestinians are good and all Israelis are bad, independent of the merits of a specific act, because the Left has decided that Palestinians are an underclass. According to the morality of the Left, it is acceptable for an aggrieved member of the oppressed class to harm any member of the privileged class, no matter what the facts are. College admissions are based on race, independent of the back stories of individual applicants. Justice is based on tribe, not individual. Who can forget the confirmation hearing of Judge Sonia Sotomayor where she declared her decisions are based on her being a wise Latina woman. Oh? What struck me as a magnificently disqualifying statement, an admission of deep bias, was welcomed by our modern overlords and Sotomayor was confirmed. I wouldn’t trust her to judge a spelling bee.
To those of you not schooled in this evil, abominable morality because you missed a college Marxist indoctrination, the fact that Dorner has a fan club is crazy. But if you’ve been unfortunate enough to have suffered through consciousness raising or corporate diversity training, you recognize the tribal nature of the doctrine and understand the Dorner fan club. All cops are pigs. All blacks are mistreated. All blue eyed people have an easy life and oppress all brown eyed people. And inserting a Latina ethnicity into a judicial decision is applauded. (Note that your Chinese or Slavic or Greek or Scottish heritage doesn’t buy you squat)
Forget traditional concepts of justice. If you are a man or white or old or rich you can’t help yourself but be an oppressor. Read your Marxist dialectic stupid. OJ Simpson wasn’t a murderer. When he killed two white people he was a freedom fighter, striking back at the system that oppressed him and his fellows.
In some way I feel sorry for Chris Dorner. He was taught to hate by immersion in a Leftist culture that revels in hate and racist ideology. The Left owns Christopher Dorner. They should be made to account for his sins.
Thanks to Leftist/collectivist/tribalist ideology in the academy, the media and the entertainment industry, we now have a new and improved justice system. However, it is neither new nor improved but rather a throwback to barbarism. More about that another time.
