The Razor

Oh for crap’s sake can’t our leaders do anything right?

Russia Captures US Embassy Worker in Act of CIA Recruitment

This reminds me of an appropriate book for times like these:

So David Bowie is upsetting Christians with his latest rock video. How boring.

If he wants to “ruffle feathers” dress up as Mohammed and dance around the stage with nearly naked women wearing veils while imams leer at the buttocks of the club goers. That is sure to upset some birdies.

Ruffling feathers of Christians is easy. They don’t issue fatwas calling for your death (see Salman Rushdie) or put a knife in your chest (see Theo Van Gogh).

I’ll admit I’ve been a bit mystified why the Left supports the misogynistic and homophobic religion of Islam, attacking Libertarians and Conservatives who question the religion as being “extremists” and “Islamophobes”. Benjamin Wiker, writing for Human Events, explains that modern liberalism has its roots in and defines itself against Christianity. As a result…

Liberals therefore tended to approve of anything but Christianity. Deism was fine, or even pantheism. The eminent liberal Rousseau praised Islam and declared Christianity incompatible with good government. Hinduism and Buddhism were exotic and tantalizing among the edge-cutting intelligentsia of the 19th century. Christianity, by contrast, was the religion against which actual liberal progress had to be made.

So, other religions were whitewashed even while Christianity was continually tarred. The tarring was part of the liberal strategy aimed at unseating Christianity from its privileged cultural-legal-moral position in the West. The whitewashing of other religions was part of the strategy too, since elevating them helped deflate the privileged status of Christianity.

The problem is that Christians aren’t the threat to that Muslims are today, and so the Leftist view of the world has a huge blind spot that prevents it from seeing the threat Islam itself poses to the liberal ideals of women’s equality and the rights of homosexuals. As a former liberal myself it took the al Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to force me to question my beliefs, and the 9-11 attacks and the celebrations that erupted throughout the Muslim world to forever change them, but neither these attacks nor the many that have followed seem to have drawn many away from the self-defeating ideology at the heart of modern liberalism. So liberals will continue being blind to treatment of women and homosexuals, and the intolerance that lies at the heart of Islam.

This: Police say liberal student activist threatened herself with rape in Facebook hoax, framed conservatives

Reminds me of this:

Mel Brooks is a genius. Meg Lanker-Simons is not.

Because it seems to me the only thing the bombings at the Boston Marathon have provoked is anger.
Maybe we need a new word for such acts, furyism, because I’m not seeing any terror or fear, just pure white-hot anger.

In 2008-9 our country experienced an unprecedented meltdown of its financial system brought on by the cosy relationships between government regulators, politicians and bureaucrats. In response the Federal Reserve embarked on a program whereby the it stole money from the bank accounts of 98% of the country and shifted it to the wealthiest of American society through depressing interest rates paid to savers on their accounts below the rate of inflation, meaning that for every $1,000 in your bank account you lose $30 every year to inflation. This subsidized those with money by providing them with low borrowing costs, allowing them to leverage their wealth for even greater gains in the stock market. It’s not good enough that a billionaire invests $100 million in the market; no, he must use that $100m as leverage to control a billion dollars worth of stock. The stock market has become a casino where small investors are left to chase nickels in front of steam rollers while the government funds the wealthiest segment of society. Worse, the Cyprus Model has put paid to the idea that bank savings are property and protected by the law. Instead savers have become “speculators” and their savings “investments” to be wiped out whenever banks need a bailout. It must not be forgotten that the initial bank bailout, the first put forward by the European Union, looked to steal 6.7% of guaranteed savings below 100,000 Euro. The European Union isn’t exactly communist China or Soviet Russia yet it completely ignored its own law of guaranteed deposits (the EU FDIC) and took the money. Is such an event possible in the United States? Yes. Unlikely perhaps at this point, but still possible.

To support this stock market bubble the federal reserve has flooded the markets with currency yet denied such actions, euphemistically called “quantitative easing”, are inflationary. Government bureaucracies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) manipulate employment statistics to make it appear as if good times are here to stay by excluding the long-term unemployed and those who have given up on finding a job, meaning that if your wife is working and you’re looking for a job, our economy will improve by you staying at home and watching daytime TV since your household will go from 50% unemployment to 0% unemployment. Similarly the BLS manipulates inflation rates by discounting the volatility of food and fuel, the largest categories all but the very wealthiest people spend their money on besides taxes and housing, and making “qualitative adjustments” that hide inflation. In addition companies are passing on higher production costs to consumer through stealth inflation, providing less product for the same money. The profusion of dollar stores are proof of the success of this strategy since shoppers at these stores believing they are getting a bargain while in reality they are paying more per unit of good than at other stores. 4 loads of Tide for a $1 might seem a deal until one goes to a supermarket and finds a 40 load box of the detergent for $7.

Not one person from the banking crisis has been indicted or prosecuted by the Obama administration or Congress, a fact that spawned a PBS Frontline show “The Untouchables.” Could this be because the federal government would be prosecuting it’s own? Former SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro resigned and has taken a position at Promontory Financial Group, a bank consulting group, but promises not to lobby the government she once worked for. That has led to Forbes wondering what other of her qualifications Promontory is willing to bill $1,000 – $10,000 an hour for. She’s among numerous ex-federal employees at her new digs. Check out the nifty graphic at ZeroHedge listing Promontory employees and their former positions in the government. Yet we are supposed to believe this revolving door between regulators and those they regulate is free from moral hazard. In the comments at ZeroHedge someone calls the place a “high end whorehouse.” It it were taxpayers wouldn’t be the ones being screwed.

Banks like JP Morgan-Chase and investment firms like Goldman Sachs are considered too big to fail, taking their “skin” out of the game and replacing it with the American taxpayer’s. If JPMC or Goldman’s risky investments turn out well, it’s “capitalism” and their corporate managers and shareholders are rewarded; if they bomb it’s no big deal. The shareholders or managers are still rewarded as they were in January 2010 when banker bonuses were “bigger than ever” according to the New York Times even after the economic collapse of 2008-9. The American worker will simply work a few hours to provide the taxes the firms need to be bailed out, that is if she has a job. It’s a great system if you are Lloyd Blankfein GS’s CEO who earns upwards of $100 million a year at Goldman Sachs. It benefits Democratic politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama too since Blankfein is a large donor to the Democratic party.

Then there’s the debt. To call it a “mountain of debt” is to betray a shallow awareness of the world’s topography. Here are some neat visualizations of our debt in $100 bills, and an impressive sounding statistic that’s hard to visual: a line of $1 bills would stretch from the Earth to Uranus. We’ve reached a point where analogies lose their meaning, although the current debt being greater than the country’s entire output in 2011 must be at least a bit sobering to even the drunkest Keynesian economist. The best way to consider the debt is by making it personal. Since 2008 the debt has expanded by $26,000 per person. Multiply that number by those in your household and ask yourself if you feel that amount richer over the past 4 years. That would mean an extra $78k for my household, enough to drop the Wife’s med school debt by 40% or replace our aging cars, each with over 150k miles on them, as well as buy a new car for the Kid. If you don’t see that money, where did it go? Ask yourself: are you better off today than you were 4 years ago? Then ask Lloyd whether he is.

The system is corrupt yet we do nothing about it. We are told happy days are here again, that the stockmarket is at record highs, yet those of us who dabbled in the market prior to 2009 have still not recovered from the losses suffered then, leaving us on the sidelines of this rally. Small investors piled into the market and out of the market late back then, proving they were the “greater fools” and some are doing so today as the market skyrockets and smart money looks for the exits. Sure our 401K’s are expanding, but the numbers are meaningless for anyone other than those planning to retire in the coming months before this bubble bursts. Self employed people and contractors like myself don’t have 401K’s, we just have our wits and an ever sharpening skill set that we use to stay employed, but both are slowly being eroded by time as we age and the younger cohorts below us grow hungrier and more competitive. Time will unravel us, and when it does we will be poor and destitute, remembering the hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxes paid that could have gone, should have gone, into our retirement funds but didn’t. At that point we’ll be on the side of the 47% who don’t pay taxes, but by then the government will be completely broke. We shouldn’t expect any sympathy from the generations coming up in our shadows, since both Left and Right are in agreement that theirs will be the first generations to have lower living standards than preceding generations. It doesn’t help that we’ve sent them to substandard schools whose sole purpose seems to be to employ Masters of Education degree holders instead of actually teaching our children the skills they need to succeed in life.

The collapse of our education system is proof of our sick society, one that raids the education budgets for the young to pay for the guaranteed pensions of the old, one in which the only people who treasure marriage these days are gay and everyone else hooks up like a shed-full of feral cats in heat, with an increasing percetage of the products of these unions are on ADHD medication. I’d need to be medicated too if I was forced to sit still with a body full of hormones and brimming with youthful energy, taught by teachers who, like the children of Lake Wobegon, are all above average, all 98% of them. Conversely, Walter Russell Mead points out ”only 78.2 percent of American students graduated high school in 2010. Sixty-seven percent of all fourth graders could not read at grade level in 2009. And only 32 percent of eighth graders and 38 percent of twelfth graders were reading at or above grade level that same year.” Of course if we measured education aptitude by the number of body piercings and tattoos we’d lead the world.

David Stockman, former Reagan budget director, is getting beaten up in the press for his book The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. Journalists, products of the Masters of Education employment entities described above, look at the highs of the Dow and discount Stockman’s thesis that the system we have today is more akin to the monopolies and crony capitalists that spawned the progressive movement over a century ago rather than some Randist free market anarchic paradise that they instinctively fear. The treatment of Stockman is similar to that shoveled out to Bob Woodward for daring to criticize President Obama game of chicken with the sequester, as J-school graduates leaped in defense of their icon in the White House attacking Woodward with various ad hominems that any of the profs would have failed them for had they used them in class (or rather, a class where failure was an option – evidently a rarity these days where students can pass without actually studying.) Watching Woodward, a man whose politics I disagree with yet whom I respect for helping pull off the greatest journalistic story of the century, being attacked by the likes of Andrew “I’m here, I’m queer, blah blah blah” Sullivan was like watching a fine thoroughbred horse attacked by a swarm of flies fresh from their home in a dung pile. But such is the fate for anyone who dares call “shenanigans” in the current climate where anyone who can’t continue deceiving themselves is lampooned, debased, or in the case of Woodward, threatened.

Our problems aren’t just economic either. The Obama administration has fled the Middle East and attempts to appease Iran by refusing to support the rebellion against the Assad regime in Syria.

“I think that the United States has not taken a more active role in Syria from the beginning because they didn’t want to disturb the possibility, to give them space, to negotiate with Iran,” Javier Solana, the former European Union foreign policy chief, said Monday at a Brookings Institution discussion about this week’s talks. Solana, who was a top negotiator with Tehran in the nuclear program until 2009, added, “They probably knew that getting very engaged against Assad, engaged even militarily, could contribute to a break in the potential negotiations with Tehran.”

As Walter Russell Mead notes this could be a catastrophic mistake.

If Solana is right that this policy has been driving the White House all along, this is Obama’s initial Iran failure—remaining silent during the 2009 Green Revolution—on steroids. Weakness doesn’t win you the friendship of bullies. And if this dispatch is right, we should expect some ugly repercussions from the Sunni Arabs, the Israelis and the Turks. All these powers want to see Iran’s claws clipped and they want Assad to go; all of these powers chiefly view the value of their US ties at the moment in the light of the confrontation with Iran. If they come to feel that the United States is willing to throw the Syrian lamb to the Iranian tiger, their trust and confidence in the United States, and consequentially America’s power to get things done in the region, would go into a deep eclipse.

Things don’t look any better on the other side of Asia with North Korea promising to attack the United States. So far the US response has been mild, yet that hasn’t stopped the press from asking White House spokesman Jay Carney if that hasn’t provoked a communist dictatorship whose people are being starved to death on a steady diet of leftist propaganda and grass. But their carbon footprints are tiny, for now. How much carbon will be released by a nuclear strike on Osaka or Guam? Quite a bit I suppose. In any event we soon might find out if North Korea acts on its threats.

A whole industry is set up to use imagery and fantasy to modify our behavior so that we buy something, yet somehow a related industry employing the same techniques but for entertainment purposes ie exempt from responsibility when an admittedly sick individual dresses up as villain of the violent movie being shown to the audience he then commences to massacre. The Roman Catholic Pope is labeled as an extremist for calling abortion murder while a doctor who performs late term abortions and keeps the tiny feet of his victims in a jar as memento mori is lauded as a hero. The billionaire mayor of New York City makes it his personal mission to rid the city of large soft drinks while the city’s crime rate rises and the city becomes less friendly to all but society’s richest and poorest.

But when all is said and done, who is to blame for this mess that we find ourselves in? We are.

We didn’t demand for the bankers to be tarred and feathered (well, we did but failed to hold our elected leaders accountable for allowing the bankers off scot-free.). We continually vote in the politicians who offer us platitudes instead of common sense and plunder the public purse for the benefit of the monied elite regardless of their party affiliation. We engage in bitter fights over issues that don’t impact us directly (I’m not gay, on medicaid and I can’t get pregnant, so honestly just how worked up can I get about gay marriage, social programs and abortion?), yet ignore the issues that unite us and affect our daily lives. We vilify other Americans for their differences yet are willfully blind to the commonalities. Intellectual laziness encourages us to accept stereotypes and straw men built by those who feed on hatred the way a maggot feeds on the flesh of an open wound instead of putting ourselves in the other’s position, or to use an old cliche, “walking a mile in the other man’s moccasins.” We have Obama himself saying, “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” accepting a stereotype and succumbing to a form of elitism and intellectual laziness by belittling his opponents instead of attempting to understand them and winning them over. We’ve accepted the low standards of education because we’ve been trained that “fighting city hall” or in this case the school board is futile. So our kids read less than we do, they can text faster and know the special combo to beat the god Zeus in the “God of War” video game. They’ll be alright. Right? We keep our heads down, do what we are told and hope that our dreams come true, the way they do on TV between the ads for drugs to help men get it up and women feel not so down.

We should be ashamed for what we’ve done, or more importantly, not done, expending the effort to fight for accountability from our elected officials and receiving their heads in baskets after they ignored us 4 years ago. Today the problems are even worse, the threats greater, yet we continue on the way we did before the 2008 financial meltdown and on September 10, 2001, fighting among ourselves without giving the other the benefit of the doubt or the dignity our opponent deserves. To paraphrase my late mother-in-law, we chose this path, and we did so because we are idiots.

And Michael Burleigh writing for The Daily Mail calls them out for it,

The truth is that Chavez was a brutal despot who strutted the world stage basking in the international celebrity status he gained as a result of his anti-American rhetoric and relentless attacks on Britain.
He was a master of propaganda who deftly wooed the ‘useful idiots’ of the Left — to use the phrase Stalin applied to Britain’s Labour politicians and trade unionists — while clamping down on free speech in his own country, rigging the political system in his favour and presiding over a nation drowning in bloodshed and mired in poverty.

But the Left shouldn’t fret. There will always be someone else coming along to show their loyalty to.

I have never been a fan of Grover Norquist, nor will I ever be. Joshuapundit explains why:

CPAC is apparently now under the control of Norquist, and anyone not willing to bow down to (or at least ignore) The Muslim Brotherhood and it’s agenda is no longer welcome, including Robert Spencer, AFDI, gay homosexual groups or anyone else who doesn’t fit into the agenda.

Saudi money has always been a problem in American politics, and the shenanigans at CPAC shows that it’s not just a left/liberal/Democratic Party problem. Here’s more on Norquist’s ties to Hamas and Hezbollah – the latter group responsible for the deaths of 242 US servicemen in Lebanon in 1983. Norquist standing in the conservative establishment is proof that William F. Buckley jr.’s purge of anti-Semitic paleo-conservatives in the 1950’s missed a few.

From Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French call “the caviar left,” la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance – not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle…

A former client of mine, a rich fellow with what appeared to be a social mission, tried to pressure me to write a check to a candidate in an election on a platform of higher taxes. I resisted, on ethical grounds. But I thought the fellow was heroic, for, should the candidate win, his own taxes would increase by a considerable amount. A year later I discovered that the client was being investigated for his involvement in a very large scheme to be shielded from taxes. He wanted to be sure that others paid more taxes.

In the “I’m so glad I live in the South” file today… The state of Colorado passed a law banning CCW on college campuses. Instead women are being advised to pee or vomit on their attackers.

Evidently state rep Joe Salazar believes that women can vomit at will but can’t shoot straight. “And you don’t know if you feel like you’re gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around or if you feel like you’re in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop—pop around at somebody.”

Of course this isn’t the first time a state politician got in trouble on the topic of rape. Missouri congressman Todd Aiken famously quipped that “legitimate rape” rarely caused pregnancy. Colorado rep Joe Salazar just proves that Rape is a bipartisan issue.

CO Rep. Joe Salazar (D) and MO Rep. Todd Aiken

Sorry guys, but if I had a daughter she’d be carrying a Glock 17. I’ve seen the aftermath of college rape and it’s not funny or a lighthearted affair. The mere flash of a gun would deter all but the most suicidal rapists. Thanks to Salazar and his fellow Democrats women in Colorado won’t have that choice.

Congratulations Joe, the rapists of Colorado thank you.

Update: I’m starting to wonder if the Democrats in Colorado are smoking something funny because they’re acting stupid. Sen. Evie Hudak (D) told a rape survivor that a gun wouldn’t have done her any good. Guess she should have tried puking or peeing on herself.

So you’re a cop who has been done wrong. Let’s see… How many movies have I seen with this plot device. Oh, nearly every cop movie I’ve ever seen I’d have to guess. But instead of finding evidence to clear your name, or at least exposing the baddies who did you wrong, you gun down a 28 year old assistant women’s college basketball coach – the daughter of one of the 50+ people you blame for your plight. And at the same time you pop her fiance, who happens to be another cop and someone who never did anything wrong to you. And just for kicks, you call her father and torment him with how you killed her. Classy.

Of course this doesn’t stop people from sympathizing with you. Evidently you are, or were, a big fan of gun control, Obama and other liberal conceits. Hell, Hitler has sympathizers as does half-wits like Charles Manson and run-of-the-mill psychopaths like Jeffrey Daumer. Of course many of these are white people who would cross the street if you approached them on a sidewalk in the dark, and who have more in common with your victims than they do you. But there is no shortage of idiots in this world who will lose their good sense when the actions of a nutjob like you titillate their relativist morals and political leanings.

But while the liberal blogs are effusive in their praise of you, I doubt that your so-called “brothers” would take your side. There’s a good reason why you’re hiding out in the mountains with white people rather than the inner cities with your black brethren. They’d turn your ass in because they have a deeper sense of right and wrong than your liberal cracker supporters do. What ever your beef with the LAPD, there was a right way, a wrong way and an evil way to deal with it. By murdering an innocent woman, her fiance, and shooting two more cops, one fatally, after writing a rambling manifesto you have become the next Unabomber, although unlike him I suspect your fame will be fleeting and you will meet your end in a hail of bullets. Your idiot supporters will eventually realize the nature of their stupidity and be embarrassed for their actions, and your ideas and rant will be forgotten by everyone except the families of the innocents you destroyed in cold blood. The meaninglessness of your rampage will become apparent as your bones molder in a grave mourned by no one.

I can only hope that my tax dollars have wound their way through the federal bureaucracy to end up helping to buy the bullet that flies through that diseased mind of yours at 2,500 fps.

UPDATE: Welcome to the Legend of Christopher Dorner, brought to you courtesy of the LAPD aka “The LA Gang Squad.” By shooting old ladies and censoring the media before apparently burning Dorner alive (“f***ing burn this motherf****r”) they have only proven what Dorner alleged: that he was the victim of a vast conspiracy. Now we have a burned cabin and a body burned beyond recognition that the LAPD is taking its sweet time identifying, and it won’t be long before Dorner is spotted at some dusty gas station in the Mojave like Elvis, and Denzel Washington and Jamie Foxx arm wrestle over who’s going to play him in the next Weinstein brothers’ blockbuster.

Of course, such a movie wouldn’t be conceivable if Dorner had been a Tea Partier. But thankfully his views were the same as Hollywood’s: He was a big Obama supporter “You disrespect the office of the POTUS/Presidency and Commander in Chief. You call him Kenyan, mongroid, halfrican, muslim, and FBHO when in essence you are to address him as simply, President,” gun control advocate, “Who in there right mind needs a fucking silencer who needs a freaking SBR AR15? No one. No more Virginia Tech, Columbine HS, Wisconsin temple, Aurora theatre, Portland malls, Tucson rally, Newtown Sandy Hook,” NRA hater, “Wayne LaPierre, President of the NRA, you’re a vile and inhumane piece of sh*t,” and loved Hillary, “You’ll make one hell of a president in 2016.”

Sunday former Joint Chief of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell speaking on Meet the Press said there is a “dark vein of intolerance in the Republican Party,” and that many Republicans “look down on minorities.”

Bullsh*t.

Whenever the mainstream media wants to attack the GOP they trot out Colin Powell, a man whose failures as Joint Chief of Staff and Secretary of State are conveniently forgotten whenever he says anything critical of “his party.”  The usual response by the GOP is to deny such charges by trotting out former RNC Chairman Michael Steel, former Congressman Allen West, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice – but that’ s just playing defense since all of these men have been attacked as being “Uncle Toms” or “House N****rs by the Left. So I’m responding the way Republicans should respond.

Bullsh*t.

Challenge Powell to answer any of the following questions:

1. Racism is a serious charge and one that is difficult to defend against. What proof do you have to support your statements?


2. The Democratic Party, lest we forget, was on the losing side of the Civil War and fought the Civil Rights movement a century later. Has the party been completely purged of these racists in the 40 years since  or is it possible there could be a “dark vein of intolerance” and many Democrats who “look down on minorities” ? When you said this were you thinking of anti-Semite and homophobe Chuck Hagel?


3. If Republicans are racist, describe how another party could oppose the Democrats without being racist in your view? Similarly, is it possible to oppose the policies of an African-American president and not be racist? If so, how?


4. Are the Democrats who fought the re-election of Congressman Allen West racist, or is it only racist if you oppose an African-American Democratic candidate?


5. Is it possible that what you are seeing is not an artifact of a particular party but the overall condition of humans in general? Racism isn’t just skin color thing as evidence by tribalism in Africa, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and the “Troubles” in Ireland. It also doesn’t explain attacks by African-Americans on African immigrants in Philadelphia, New York and Detroit.


6. Am I a racist for disagreeing with you? If so, what if I was black? If my skin color changed, would that make it okay? Should whites only criticize whites and blacks only blacks, you know, separate but equal disagreements? Isn’t that in itself racist, and doesn’t that make you, former Joint Chief of Staff and Secretary of State, a racist?

It seems 2013 is starting out to be The Year of the Sucker as CurrentTV staffers learn that their old boss, Al Gore wasn’t that different after all from their new boss the emir of Qatar.

“Of course Al didn’t show up,” said one high placed Current staffer. “He has no credibility.

“He’s supposed to be the face of clean energy and just sold [the channel] to very big oil, the emir of Qatar! Current never even took big oil advertising—and Al Gore, that bulls***ter sells to the emir?”...

“Al was always lecturing us about green. He kept his word about green all right—as in cold, hard cash!”

The new channel promises to “Inform! Inspire! Entertain!” and an old buddy of mine in the State Department forwarded me a copy of proposed programming that will start airing in the US in April.

The Big Bang Theory – a sitcom about a Ali, a wanna-be suicide bomber and his overbearing wife Fatima, played by Rosanne Barr. For some reason known only to Allah, Ali’s bombs never go off, a fact that his wife never stops criticizing him about, “You can’t blow up a balloon let alone a zionist bus stop.”

The Cave – a reality show starring 15 male jihadis competing for a chance to win 72 virgins in paradise. Each week contestants are kicked out of the cave for homosexual or bestial acts with a herd of unusually attractive goats kept nearby to tempt the contestants. The last surviving member gets a pair of explosive sneakers and a one way plane ticket to New York.

The Jews - A prime time drama about the Goldberg’s, an uber-rich family that along with other Jewish families runs the world. Pilot focuses on the patriarch Bernie whose wife nags him for spending too much time at the office helping to run the banking system. Bernie’s son Johah, who works in the weather control divison, schemes with his brother Jacob, who helps control the media, to take over the father’s empire by creating Hurricane Sandy. The scheme fails when Jacob’s employees fail to make much of the disaster for fear of hurting President Obama, who like all the world’s politicians is owned by the Old Man.

Arabia’s Top Model – Which one of these burka clad beauties will take home the prize – a day pass to drive the streets of Riyadh without a male relative? Watch the titillating show that everyone in the mosque is sure to be talking about to find out.

All in the Umma – A rapid-fire comedy about the struggles of a small-time cleric, Abdallah, in New York City whose wife can’t cook and his daughter can’t shut up. Pilot episode has the daughter marrying his brother’s son Fadi who then moves in to torment with crazy western ideas like women’s equality and religious tolerance.

If you thought the 98% was safe from tax hikes, that the leviathan we call the Federal Government would be sated with the blood and treasure of the top 2%, think again.

Senate-Passed Deal Means Higher Tax on 77% of Households

More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes. Among the households facing higher taxes, the average increase would be $1,635, the policy center said. A 2 percent payroll tax cut, enacted during the economic slowdown, is being allowed to expire as of yesterday.

Ah, but that 2% cut is to keep Social Security solvent for your future, so it’s not that bad, right? Well, yes it is that bad. Remember all that talk a decade back about keeping Social Security in a lockbox? Well it was just that: talk. Social Security funds are not saved and spent only on retirees. Instead that money is added to the general fund and replaced by an IOU. So that $1,635 extra you pay this year could easily go to Hollywood movie studios or rum producers in Puerto Rico. It does not add to the solvency of the fund; it’s just extra cash for the federal government, which is not unlike an extra gram to a meth head.

Some Democrats are now noticing the damage to their paychecks.

“What happened that my Social Security withholding’s in my paycheck just went up?” a poster wrote on the liberal site DemocraticUnderground.com. “My paycheck just went down by an amount that I don’t feel comfortable with. I guarantee this decrease is gonna’ hurt me more than the increase in income taxes will hurt those making over 400 grand. What happened?”

It’s interesting to see the assumption made by the poster between comfort and taxes, especially when he’s taking the hit and not some faceless Two Percenter. ““Obama is the biggest f***ing liar in the world. Why the f*** did I vote for him”?” Because sir, you are a sucker.

So pass this news along to your smug liberal friends who screamed about the wealthy paying “their fair share” and voted for Hope and Change in 2008 and 2012, and ask them where their going to find the extra $136.25 to send the people who own the President and his party.

The gun control debate has taken a sinister turn with the publication by a Gannett owned newspaper of the names and addresses of people within the New York City area possessing a permit to own a handgun. The newspaper states the information was compiled using public records, but why? Why has the Gannett owned newspaper done this?

A journalist might answer that the public has a right to know, and I would ask him to point out that right in the Constitution. The right to bear arms is clearly laid out there, but I don’t recall seeing any right for the public to know anything. Yes the information is in the public domain, but just as the name of the editor of the Journal News, and her

The assumption is that lawfully owned weapons present a danger to public safety, and the purpose is to publicly shame the owners in the same way they publicize the sex offender registry. If the assumption were true, gun crime would concentrate highest in counties where gun ownership is most prevalent, yet urban areas such as Camden NJ, Washington DC, and Chicago have some of the strictest gun control laws on the books making legal gun ownership all but impossible yet have the highest rates of gun violence. Meanwhile counties in North Carolina, Texas and Tennessee have some of the highest per capita gun ownership rates in the country yet enjoy low incidences of gun crime.

Kneejack reactions always have unintended consequences, and the publishing of this list is no different. By listing owners of handguns one can safely assume that anyone not on this list is not armed. Criminals now know who to target and who to avoid. Criminality is like water or electricity: it always follows the path of least resistance, or what is perceived by the criminal to be the path of least resistance. It is the reason why burglars avoid homes with dogs, and why they prefer homes without burglar alarms. So by attempting to publicly shame legal gun owners the newspaper has instead helped criminals pick easier targets. Nice job guys.

When I saw this report I immediately recalled Rule 12 of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. The power behind this story chose to attack individual gun owners by name in the New York City area because they hurt, whereas the NRA as an institution does not. Some might scoff and think this is an example of “typical” gun owner paranoia, and that may have been true before we started jailing filmmakers. Answer this: Why else publish the names and addresses of private citizens, never convicted of any crimes, who legally own a handgun?

But gun owners aren’t idiots. They too can employ Alinsky’s tactics. The paper’s editor and vice president’s unusual name makes her an especially easy find on the internet. Add in some cheap information from one of the public records sites and it’s scary what one can learn about a private individual. I didn’t even try to find out personal details and still learned too much. I cannot post that info here because a) she obviously has no clue to what she has done by publishing the story and b) my conscience will not allow me to for the same reason that I will not publish information that could be used by jihadis. I have been on the receiving end of threats before, and it’s not fun but it taught me the wisdom of the old aphorism ”people in glass houses should not throw stones.” The editor/vp obviously hasn’t learned that lesson yet.

I also wonder how the newspaper and its editor would react if, say, Drudge Report  published a listing of the names and addresses of all doctors known to perform abortions in a particular area. Such information is pretty much public record, and abortion is legal in the USA just as handgun ownership is.

The Sandy Hook Massacre has allowed anti-choice forces to escalate the war against constitutional gun ownership in the United States.  For those of us who live to be free and view the Constitution as sacred as the Koran or Bible, we must learn the tactics used against us and employ them ourselves. As our President famously said in Philadelphia in 2008, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” And those are words to live by.

Update: Blogger Christopher Fountain does what I in good conscience couldn’t.