The "soldier" behind the Wikileaks - redux

I read the news today - oh boy! The latest Wiki-leaks are in the news and so is the original leaker about whom I blogged last July.

He's a half Brit homo:

He was born in Oklahoma but grew up in Britain where had a hard time in school. I've been wondering what his story was. It sounds like he's a real Sad Sack. Of course the fact that he was schooled in England could simply mean that he's a "confused kid" like most modern "adult" British males who've been infantilized by having Big Brother as the daddy who will always be there to change their soiled diapers from cradle to grave. They've never had to face reality.

I went to look for my old post. I've learned not to bother with using Blogger's search function. It's more reliable to Google "Born Again Redneck blogspot Bradley Manning." This showed up in second place in the search results: The Bradley Manning Support Network.

Here's the screen capture:

Christian faces death for insulting a noted pedophile

I'm sure everyone already has read about this but I was struck by the bits that I've high-lighted.

I'm so surprised - not!

“She was picking berries with other women, when she was sent to get water,” her husband said. “One of the women refused to drink the water after my wife dipped her cup into the bucket. This woman said it was contaminated because it was touched by a Christian.” According to Masih, all the women then started taunting his wife, and shouting insults against her mother and their children. Bibi just repeated the same insults back at them. “The name of the holy prophet never came up.”

At the time, Masih said he thought that was the end of it. It wasn’t.

“Five days later, the local cleric came to our house, followed by an angry mob, and dragged my wife away,” he said, recalling the incident that took place in June 2009. They beat her, ripped off her clothes and accused her of insulting the prophet. Then they locked her up in a house until the police came to take her away.”

In an interview with NBC News, Qari Muhammed Salem, the local cleric in Ittan Walli, accused Masih of lying. “I talked to everyone who witnessed this incident and she is guilty,” he said. “She confessed to the crime in front of the entire village and then she begged for forgiveness,” he insisted.

“She even told me she said these things in rage during a heated argument and would never think of blasphemy,” he said. Salem said he called the police to lock her up, only to protect her, because the angry mob would have killed her.

Najma Yousaf, a sister of Bibi, still lives in the family home in Ittan Walli, a rural village of approximately 10,000 inhabitants, almost all Muslim. “I’m not afraid to live in our house,” she said. “The villagers are all very nice with me, my husband and our children. They are angry with my sister.”

The story can be boiled down to:

An angry humorless Mahomedan harridan insulted the Christian lady who spat back insults in a typical bitch fight. Mad imam even says Christian lady was simply angry and didn't intend blasphemy. There are more Mahomedan hens than Christian hens?

Basically a tale of which noble savage - aka superstitious illiterate peasant - has the bigger gang of thugs hens and which hens have the biggest cock. And the biggest cock in Islam is usually the mad imam.

And they've got the cheek to call rednecks uncivilized!

A few more strange maps

I've posted many maps from Frank Jacobs' Strange Maps. Here's his latest:

What if the world were rearranged so that the inhabitants of the country with the largest population would move to the country with the largest area? And the second-largest population would migrate to the second-largest country, and so on?

The result would be this disconcerting, disorienting map.
...
The averages per country would more closely resemble the global average of 34 per mi² (13 per km²).
...
Strangely enough, the US itself would not have to swap its population with another country. With 310 million inhabitants, it is the third most populous nation in the world. And with an area of just over 3.7 million mi² (slightly more than 9.6 million km²), it is also the world's third largest country (2). Brazil, at number five in both lists, is in the same situation. Other non-movers are Yemen and Ireland. Every other country moves house.

It's huge. Click to biggify.














While I was over there, I found this one too. US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs:

Although the economies of countries like China and India are growing at an incredible rate, the US remains the nation with the highest GDP in the world – and by far: US GDP is projected to be $13,22 trillion (or $13.220 billion) in 2007, according to this source. That’s almost as much as the economies of the next four (Japan, Germany, China, UK) combined.

The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.

Pakistan, for example, has a GDP that’s slightly higher than Israel’s – but Pakistan has a population of about 170 million, while Israel is only 7 million people strong. The US states those economies are compared with (Arkansas and Oregon, respectively) are much closer to each other in population: 2,7 million and 3,4 million.

Leftists like TV "shows about damaged people" - part two

I don't know if you remember this post that I did earlier this month.

Tonight we watched a movie that my son recommended: Dead Man's Shoes which is basically about a British soldier who takes revenge on the thugs who tortured his mentally retarded brother years before. This is what I wrote to my son after watching it:

I'm just a simple redneck and I couldn't wait for at least one killing of a subhuman thug. It was almost comic relief when it finally happened. One of the reasons why I'm not a big fan of modern Brit movies is that the writers have forgotten Shakespeare's advice about changing moods (comic relief in the midst of tragedy etc) and they can be relentlessly tedious. The other reason is the bad technology: Brits just don't seem to have heard of post-production over-dubbing and the sound quality usually stinks. The "marbles in the mouth"accents don't help either.

I read a survey the other day about what TV shows are popular with the two American political groups. Leftists like awful bleak shows about people with mental illnesses. Us redneck Republicans like escapist shows. I figured that's because we face reality head-on all day being filthy capitalist pigs and want to relax and watch something cheerful and uplifting when we come home whereas unionized Lefties goof off all day long at "work" and then have pangs of liberal guilt and want to be tortured for ripping off the tax-payers.

I just wish that the thugs could be euthanized like mad dogs before they destroy others' lives. I'd gladly do it myself if it were legal.

Only in America

A "flash mob" decided to sing the "Hallelujah Chorus" at a food-court in a suburban shopping mall. Can you imagine this happening in Iran or Saudi Arabia? Me neither. In fact I can't imagine it happening anywhere in Europe either - or anywhere in the world except these great United States.

Thanksgiving and the Puritans

David D. Hall:

To return to the first of these harvest feasts is to return to the puzzling figure of the Puritan, the name borne by most of the English people who came to New England in the early 17th century. What did they hope to gain by coming to the New World, and what values did they seek to practice?

The easy answers simplify and distort. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who came along a couple of centuries later, bears some of the blame for the most repeated of the answers: that Puritans were self-righteous and authoritarian, bent on making everyone conform to a rigid set of rules and ostracizing everyone who disagreed with them. The colonists Hawthorne depicted in “The Scarlet Letter” lacked the human sympathies or “heart” he valued so highly. Over the years, Americans have added to Hawthorne’s unfriendly portrait with references to witch-hunting and harsh treatment of Native Americans.

But in Hawthorne’s day, some people realized that he had things wrong. Notably, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer who visited the United States in 1831. Tocqueville may not have realized that the colonists had installed participatory governance in the towns they were founding by the dozens. Yet he did credit them for the political system he admired in 19th-century America.

After all, it was the Puritans who had introduced similar practices in colony governments — mandating annual elections, insisting that legislatures could meet even if a governor refused to summon a new session and declaring that no law was valid unless the people or their representatives had consented to it. Well aware of how English kings abused their powers of office, the colonists wanted to keep their new leaders on a short leash.

Tocqueville did not cite the churches that the colonists had organized, but he should have. Like most of their fellow Puritans in England, the colonists turned away from all forms of hierarchy. Out went bishops, out went any centralized governance; in came Congregationalism, which gave lay church members the power to elect and dismiss ministers and decide other major matters of policy. As many observed at the time, the Congregational system did much to transfer authority from the clergy to the people.

Contrary to Hawthorne’s assertions of self-righteousness, the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament.
...
The most far-reaching of these Puritan reforms concerned the civil law and the workings of justice. In 1648, Massachusetts became the first place in the Anglo-American world to publish a code of laws — and make it accessible to everyone. Believing that the rule of law protected against arbitrary or unjust authority, the civil courts practiced speedy justice, empowered local juries and encouraged reconciliation and restitution. Overnight, most of the cruelties of the English justice system vanished. Marriage became secularized, divorce a possibility, meetinghouses (churches) town property.

And although it’s tempting to envision the ministers as manipulating a “theocracy,” the opposite is true: they played no role in the distribution of land and were not allowed to hold political office. Nor could local congregations impose civil penalties on anyone who violated secular law. In these rules and values lay one root of the separation of church and state that eventually emerged in our society.

I rather like the Puritans' idea that ministers "were not allowed to hold political office." When preachers become politicians, the combination seems to bring out the worst of each profession.

Palin Paranoia Decoded

Tunku Varadarajan:

Palin has “star power,” the real thing, rather like Ronald Reagan or Princess Diana did (and Bill Clinton, on a good day, still does). It is what Paul Newman had when the camera lingered on him: It didn’t matter whether he was acting particularly well. It is a quality that causes people to sit up and take notice—and even to feel a bond.

“Substance,” here, is beside the point, and this enrages a certain spectrum of the intelligentsia. As for Barbara Bush, her husband had not one iota of star power; her son had a little, but his qualities—non-eloquence, an Everyman outlook, a red-state appeal—are Sarah Palin’s, too… a closeness that may embarrass Barbara Bush more than a little, and really sting.
...
But the truth is that Palin disconcerts us because she seems to have no mask at all, no change of gear. She’s utterly forthcoming, even regarding her family, which is normally a sacred preserve of privacy. Perhaps it’s frightening to meet such people for those of us who value propriety and discretion first of all. So we don’t like her because we are afraid of that level of openness. It just terrifies us. Could we endure a president who is mask-less?
...
Since Palin’s political attraction isn’t immediately comprehensible to the ruling class, she terrifies that class, for whom there is no torture worse than not being able to comprehend. I’m convinced that her run for the presidency is her way of baiting these people—her enemies.

In effect, she’s a strong, beautiful, ungovernable woman who is scaring the pants off a whole lot of people—scaring the pants, to be sure, off Frank Rich, and off dear old Barbara Bush.

I couldn't have said it better. It's the same reason that the "ruling class" is freaked by the Tea Party.

Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU's Stern Business School. He is a former assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal.

The 100th anniversary of Tolstoy's death

Remembering Tolstoy - Hollowed by time:

LEO TOLSTOY died one hundred years ago today, [19th Nov.] aged 82. His last days and hours succumbing to pneumonia in a railway master’s house were followed by the entire world. A special telegraphic wire was installed in Astapovo to transmit news about the state of his health, and newspapers carried reports from the Russian and foreign press.
...
Tolstoy’s death—like his life—was a monumental event, particularly in Russia. Writers, artists, followers and peasants flocked to his funeral. Trains from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana, where he was brought after his death, were packed.
...
Devastatingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy’s death is hardly marked in Russia. Tolstoy was a man who opposed state violence, who considered the Church’s union with the state as blasphemous, who denounced pseudo-patriotism, and who wrote to Alexander III asking him to pardon those who assassinated his father. These principles are firmly out of fashion in today’s Russia. By turning Tolstoy into an icon, the Soviets ultimately hollowed him out.
...
A recent political manifesto published by Nikita Mikhalkov, one of Russia’s most odious, wealthy and Kremlin-favoured film directors, is a good example of the country’s dreary move away from Tolstoy’s ideals. Called “Right and Truth”, the 10,000-word call for “enlightened conservatism” draws on the ideas of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, one of Russia’s most reactionary thinkers, who viewed Tolstoy as one of his most dangerous enemies. (He once denounced democracy as "the insupportable dictatorship of vulgar crowd", and saw Tolstoy’s non-violent resistance as a real threat.) As a senior figure in the Church, Pobedonostsev helped to initiate Tolstoy’s excommunication. In 1899 the Holy Synod banned all prayers in Tolstoy’s memory after his death.

A hundred years after Tolstoy’s death, this ban feels very much in place in Russia today.

I highly recommend the movie, The Last Station, about Tolstoy's last days with Christopher Plummer playing Tolstoy and Helen Mirren (who is the child of White Russians who escaped to England) playing his wife. I enjoyed the movie so much that it inspired me to write about Tolstoy here.

UN approves executions of gays

Countries vote to accept execution of gays:

The United Nations has removed a plea for lesbians, gays and bisexuals not to be executed in a narrow vote.
...
The amendment was supported by Benin in Africa on behalf of the African Group in the UN General Assembly. It passed on a narrow vote of 79 for, 70 against , 17 abstentions and 26 absent.

Some of those voting to remove sexual orientation were countries where gays are known to be or thought to be executed or summarily killed including Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iraq.

The socalled "African Group" all have large or majority Muslim populations as is the case in Nigeria and Sudan. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iraq - 99% Muslim.

Maybe there's some truth to the old adage that the most vehement anti-homos are closet cases. Oops, sorry, Muslims aren't gay. They're only boy-rapers.

And Muslims are definitely not gay in the old traditional meaning of the word. If they were, we probably wouldn't have a Muslim terrorist problem.

Happy Thanksgiving - snow at Robin's Wood

[This has been composed in Firefox and is best viewed with that browser.]

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because I celebrate three anniversaries: I came to the USA just before Thanksgiving 32 years ago; I met Chas around Thanksgiving 29 years ago and then we met Andy just after Thanksgiving 18 years.

And snow was just the icing on the cake. I love snow. I had never seen snow until I was 21 and went to live in England. The first snow I ever saw was on Christmas Eve as we were walking to midnight mass in London.

It snowed on Monday night while I was asleep and this is what I saw when I woke up yesterday morning. It kept on snowing on and off all day. I've posted these pictures especially for my son and my sister who have never see Robin's Wood in the snow.

Don't you just love "global warming?"



























































































Then we had to drive into the nearest town to do some last minute grocery shopping. This what the driveway looked like before we messed it up with tire tracks.
















On the way to town we have to pass the dunes. There was snow on the dunes. In fact we heard later that there was snow on the beaches all the way down to the surf.

















The bay.

































The parking lot of the Bi-Mart shopping center.

















The main intersection in town and the main road.

































On the way home we tried to get a shot of the snow on the distant Umpqua mountains but they were obscured by clouds.

















The bridge across the bay. The photos don't show how beautiful the bridge looked dusted with snow.

































On the highway headed home.

















The little cottage down the road from our bunkhouse where we put up our out of town guests when they visit.

















By the time we turned into our driveway, more snow had fallen over our previous tracks.

































Just last week were sitting at this picnic table drinking beer in the sunshine.

















Smudgie the cat loves snow.

















So do the ducks.
















But most of the chickens hated it. That's because most of them were only born this year and haven't seen snow. Most of them remained huddled in the coop all day long. One brave brown Leghorn hen ventured out.

















Andy and his snowman - our third attempt to build one. Chas first built a small one. Then Andy built a huge one which fell over and broke up.

































Digby the dog was very intrigued by the snowman.

Post-apartheid South Africa

Graeme Wood at the WSJ reviews a book by R.W. Johnson about post-apartheid South Africa:

Trevor Manuel, the South African finance minister from 1996 to 2009, got his job when the aging Nelson Mandela asked, at a cabinet meeting, who was a good economist. Mr. Manuel raised his hand thinking Mr. Mandela had asked who was "a good communist." Mr. Manuel served his country ably. But the appointment of the sole competent minister in the first government of African National Congress was a matter of blind luck.
...
A self-described liberal who "cheered on" the wave of African nationalism of the postwar era, Mr. Johnson now sees the black supremacist ANC as the third in a trilogy of nationalisms (the first two were British and Afrikaner) that have ravaged South Africa. He is nostalgic for the economic growth of the apartheid era; the country was run by hardscrabble racists who built nuclear weapons, but they increased everyone's standard of living.

Most of the blame for South Africa's failings falls to the leadership of the ANC, in Mr. Johnson's view. Though he makes some allowances for Nelson Mandela, he is here a sad figure: publicly fêted by his ANC colleagues but privately scorned as senescent and incapable.
...
While Mr. Mandela comes across as hapless, the villain of this narrative is Thabo Mbeki, who emerges as one of the most cowardly and morally obtuse men ever to lead a free nation. Among Mr. Johnson's most sensational accusations is that Mr. Mbeki knew in advance about the 1993 assassination of Chris Hani, a potential rival. Mr. Johnson builds a strong circumstantial case that Joe Modise, later defense minister, conspired in the killing and that Mr. Mbeki was long beholden to Mr. Modise for the favor.

Less controversially, Mr. Johnson details Mr. Mbeki's support of Robert Mugabe (he claimed to be trying to ease the Zimbabwean dictator out peacefully while actually abetting an African auto-genocide) and his denial of the country's HIV problem. Mr. Mbeki enshrined in policy the ravings of AIDS denialists and encouraged the fighting of the disease with garlic and potatoes. Mr. Johnson traces such missteps to Mr. Mbeki's black revolutionary nationalism and a lingering Leninist tendency to view all dissent as fifth-column activity by puppets of patronizing whites.

Neither Mr. Johnson nor anyone else expected much of the government of Jacob Zuma, Mr. Mbeki's successor, a man known for "simple and unquestioning devotion to the ANC" and for stating that to preserve his health he had been sure to shower after having unprotected sex with the HIV-positive woman who accused him of rape. But recent reports say Mr. Zuma is planning to take innovative steps. Among them: firing incompetent ANC officials, a move that would certainly distinguish him from his predecessors. If Mr. Johnson's descriptions of the farcical political scene in South Africa are even partly accurate, one is left to wonder who besides a few accidental economists will be left standing.

The Afrikaners (those "hardscrabble racists") also happened to be Christians who provided nearly free housing, medical care and education for the Africans paid for by taxing only white South Africans.

Thank God for Christians

When I first started this blog I did not foresee that the phrase "born again" would attract Christians. It was a joke. But over the past six years I've gotten to know dozens if not hundreds of conservative Christians through this blog.

I'm not a biblical literalist and I regard myself as merely a cultural Christian but I am very glad to count biblical literalist conservative Christians among my allies. Unlike secular leftists, they're a bit more realistic. At least they have studied some history.

Another turning point?

Generation Y getting hard finance lessons early:

One 28-year-old man who declined to be named because he is a hedge fund vice president said five years ago he kept about 10 percent of his finances in cash. Now, he keeps 70 percent.

Generation Y's views on money echo that of another generation — their grandparents. Many of those people learned the value of saving and frugality because they grew up in the wake of the 1929 market crash and the Great Depression.

By contrast, their parents — the Baby Boomers — were buoyed by several major bull markets, soaring home values and the proliferation of easy consumer credit.

From the comments:

"HAHA! Learn to balance a CHECK BOOK! Awww, the generation Y crowd has to learn financial hardship, boohoo.

Mommy and daddy got me a cellphone, and then couldn't afford their mortgage payments, I think i'll Text all my friends of what losers mommy and daddy are. Mommy and daddy bought me a car, I think i'll drive around till 2 am on friday night while mom and dad try to figure out how their going to pay for groceries. Mommy and daddy decided to sue the school board, when the teacher called me a moron for not learning anything, like who cares, I was to busy tweeting under the desk. It's not like i need to learn anything, when I can just google it at home with the computer mommy and daddy bought me.

Generation Y can go @!$%# itself."
...
"I'm one of the lucky few 4 in 10 people in Gen Y that has a full time job but am underemployed and living at home. At the rate I am going I will be lucky to be able to afford my own house at 40. I'm thankfully and gratefully debt free and have no intentions of trying to make the next step in life (wife, kids, etc) until I know I can absolutely afford to take care of such financially."
...
"Maybe the 30 year olds had grandparents that survived the depression, but most of the Gen Y'ers had great-grandparents that survived the depression. I doubt that's what taught them any lessons. If anything, it's watching not only their parents suffer now, but in general, they are living what their great-grandparents lived - witnessing the financial ruin of America's middle class. This is exactly why their great-grandparents were frugal - they too witnessed the financial ruin of the middle class. But more accurately, it's today's children, let's say ages 10 - 20, that are probably learning lessons that will hopefully stay with them throughout their lives. As for the rest of us, until we get the older baby boomers retired, nothing is going to change in this country. They brought about sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll, and then they went on to financially devastate this country. It's time for them to go. Since I was born in 1963, and am considered part of the baby boomer generation, albeit among the youngest, I can speak with authority."

It's about time. My generation, the Boomers, and Gen X coasted because of their great grandparents' and grandparents' frugality. They were lulled into thinking that the nanny government - aka taxes on the rich - would take care of them. Survival on this planet has never been easy and never will be. Hopefully this new generation will be more realistic.

PS The trouble with coasting downhill on this roller-coaster ride that we call human life is that going downhill requires a hard slog uphill.

PPS Those same frugal ancestors were also stupid enough to be fooled by the socialist Democrats like Wilson, FDR, LBJ and JFK - who BTW died 47 years ago tomorrow.

A turning point?

The New York Times reports, "Last Tuesday's elections will send 33 small-business owners and entrepreneurs to Washington, according to The Agenda's exhaustive (and exhausting) search. All are Republicans."

It's about time. Sure we need lawyers but we don't need every congress-critter to be one. Our Founders envisaged part-time citizen legislators not a full-time ruling class of ambulance chasers as has been the case for far too long.

P. J. O'Rourke thinks we lost the election

How about politics without politicians?

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.

A snob's view of W's official portrait

"It's Sear's art":

That can't be serious, I thought to myself when I turned a corner at the Gallery and saw the portrait. The mundane kitsch of the thing was shocking. There are standards. By God there are standards. Aren't there? A vase of flowers sits on the table of a dining room set behind him. The set is more middlebrow than anything you could find even at a mainstream outfit like IKEA. It is a set you'd find, I suppose, at Jennifer Convertibles. The whole scene is resolutely suburban. Aggressively suburban. The portrait is, essentially, a Sears portrait. Hanging at The National Portrait Gallery, not too far from where Elaine de Kooning's Modernist rendering of JFK can be found, is a Sears portrait of the 43rd President of the United States of America.

Vatel

One of the best movies I've seen in the past few years is Vatel:

In 1671, with war brewing with Holland, a penniless prince invites Louis XIV to three days of festivities at a chateau in Chantilly. The prince wants a commission as a general, so the extravagances are to impress the king. In charge of all is the steward, Vatel, a man of honor, talent, and low birth. The prince is craven in his longing for stature: no task is too menial or dishonorable for him to give Vatel. While Vatel tries to sustain dignity, he finds himself attracted to Anne de Montausier, the king's newest mistress. In Vatel, she finds someone who's authentic, living out his principles within the casual cruelties of court politics. Can the two of them escape unscathed?

François Vatel:

(1631, Paris – April 24, 1671) was a "Maître d'hôtel" (translates to "butler" from French), famous for creating Chantilly cream, a sweet, vanilla-flavoured whipped cream, for an extravagant banquet for 2,000 people hosted in honour of Louis XIV by Louis, the great Condé in April 1671 at the Château de Chantilly; hence the name crème Chantilly.

At this same banquet, Vatel, the consummate perfectionist, was supposedly so distraught about the lateness of the fish—the banquet was to be held on a Friday—and about other mishaps that he committed suicide by running himself through with a sword. According to some versions of the story, his body was discovered by an aide who came to tell him of the arrival of the fish. His death was treated as a national tragedy.

From The birth of the celebrity chef:

Since the Middle Ages meals were, first and foremost, about extravagant presentation, and the most celebrated figure was the maître d’hôtel, or steward — the front man who designed all the special effects of a banquet. It was he who chose the dishes, oversaw the decoration of the table, arranged the entertainment and choreographed the guests. The most famous of these impresarios was François Vatel, who in the mid-1600s stage-managed spectacular dinners for his master, the Count de Condé. Vatel claimed immortality in 1671 when — while hosting a feast for 2,000 people in honor of the Sun King, Louis XIV — he was informed that the fish for the meal would not arrive on time, so he committed suicide, becoming France’s first true martyr to gastronomy. (One version of the story goes that his body was found by a servant who was rushing to tell him that the fish had actually arrived. History repeated itself in 2003, when French chef Bernard Loiseau killed himself when told that his restaurant would lose one of its three Michelin stars).

Medicare

I'm getting to that age when I have to start thinking about Medicare so I've done some research.

Did you know that it is mandatory to join Medicare?

Did you know that, if you decide not to sign up for Medicare, you will forfeit 100% of your SS?

Did you know that Medicare takes a hefty chunk out of your SS every month without your permission?

Did you know that you have to have extra private health insurance or pay for the 20% that Medicare does not pay?

Did you know that many doctors and hospitals are now refusing to take Medicare patients?

Did you know that it is illegal for doctors to accept private payment from you if you are on Medicare?

Did you know that, by the time you have paid for private insurance to cover the costs of treatments and drugs that Medicare will not pay for and add in the amount that Medicare garnishes from your SS, that it's not much less than if you had simply bought private insurance and waived Medicare? (Except of course choosing private insurance instead of Medicare will also cost you ALL of your SS payments.)

We can "fix" SS by tweaking certain numbers but Medicare is in a death spiral. It cannot be "fixed." Period.

So, it's essential that the "law" (I should say extortionary measure) mandating Medicare is changed - and soon.

The consequences of that may mean that Medicare fails totally as people opt out. I can't wait.

The indigent elderly would then have to rely on Medicaid as the non-elderly indigent do now but you know that better-off Americans' naturally charitable kind-heartedness would fill in the gaps.

I'll take private charity over mandatory government "safety nets" anyday.

Thank God for guns - and the Second Amendment

Comic strip artist, Ted Rall, discusses killing conservatives with Dylan Radigan on MSNBC:

Criminals are the Reason to Buy Handguns To Protect Your Family. Totalitarian Liberals are the Reason You Buy Battle Rifles.

The Rethuglicans are Coming to Kill Us! Quick! Disarm!

Via Professor Jacobson, we get this gem of an analysis from Digby at Hullabaloo:

Right wing radio is hate radio. And Glenn Beck is f—ing lunatic. And they reach many millions of people every day. Will any of those people act? Well, they already have on an individual basis. But this daily ranting about the evil of liberalism and the inhumanity of liberals seems to finally be reaching some sort of critical mass in which those on the right who hear nothing but this sort of raving all day long have come to believe that liberals — not liberalism — must be eliminated. I realize that we won’t have teabaggers running across the countryside lopping off people’s hands with machetes. But the sentiment that drives people like Beck and Limbaugh isn’t all that different, even though the worst we’ve seen are spit spewing screamers at Townhalls and a few cases of head stomping and false arrest. So far. This cannot end well.

(curse word edited.) Now it is utterly correct to critique it as a violation of Godwin’s law with a slightly more modern spin. And it’s also correct to point out that she denounces the dehumanization of liberals, while dehumanizing conservatives. And of course it’s hilarious to notice her selective outrage over political violence, apparently believing that political violence is an indictment of the cause that motivates it… except when her side does it.

But here’s the other funny thing. This woman is also a supporter of… wait for it… gun control. I mean, if you were liberal, and you thought the republicans are really going to come and kill you, then don’t you want to have a gun? If you are fearing slaughter, doesn’t that make sense?
...
Of course I managed to find one exception. Ted Rall, last seen discussing with Dylan Radigan the need for a violent revolution in America, says this on his site:

All my friends are in favor of gun control; I’m totally opposed to it. How are we going to beat off the fascists when the crunch comes if we don’t have guns. They laugh at me, but that’s a real problem, a real tactical issue. There could never have been a French resistance if they didn’t have guns.

And thank God that most leftists hate guns.

Leftists like TV "shows about damaged people"

No surprise there since Leftists usually are often severely damaged people.

James Hibberd at The Hollywood Reporter:

According to months of data from leading media-research company Experian Simmons, viewers who vote Republican and identify themselves as conservative are more likely than Democrats to love the biggest hits on TV. Of the top 10 broadcast shows on TV in the spring, nine were ranked more favorably by viewers who identify themselves as Republican.
...
“The big shows with mass appeal tend to have above-average scores from Democrats and Republicans but with higher concentrations of Republicans,” says John Fetto, senior marketing manager at Experian Simmons. “Looking at the Democrats side, I don’t mean to make light of it, but they seem to like shows about damaged people. Those are the kind of shows Republicans just stay away from.”
...
So, what have we learned today?

We’ve learned Republicans like winners. The shows might be considered fluffy, but they’re generally programs that make people feel good. If you’re a broadcast network executive weighing whether to buy a show, you might ask your uncle who voted twice for George W. Bush if he likes the idea. We’ve learned Democrats are, depending on your perspective, discriminating viewers who prefer highly original, well-written series or are cynics who enjoy watching jerks.

I found that via John Nolte at Big Hollywood who opines:

Before the left dislocates something patting themselves on the back over how complicated and interesting their television choices are, both “Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami” and “90210″ place in their top five with the relentlessly sleazy (last I saw) “Law & Order: SVU” not far behind.

Really, Lefties? Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami?

If anything, we righties seem to just want to escape … as long as that escapism doesn’t involve someone who spells “Chloe” with a “k.”

We don't watch TV. We record the shows we like and the only one on this list that we enjoy is "V." We used to watch "Law and Order: SVU" but it turned commie about 7 years ago and is now unwatchable.

I watch Beck at the office at lunch time and he's good but I already know what he's talking about and I know it in greater depth than him. Like Limbaugh, he's good for popularizing ideas for those who have not read as much as I have.

A new fix for the needy?

Cash-transfer programs:

As she approaches her 50th birthday this month, Zanele Figlan has seen firsthand what does and does not work in the fight against global poverty. Living in a shack on the outskirts of Cape Town, her family serves as a reminder of South Africa’s 15-year failed effort to house its poor. Instead, Figlan says, the most effective help she receives is the $1 a day the government provides for each of her two youngest sons, which amounts to more than double her monthly income and allows her to make sure they’re well fed. It also means she can afford to send them to a reputable school in a wealthier part of the city, something that was previously unthinkable.

At first glance, simply handing out cash to the poor may seem naive. When cash-transfer programs, as they’re known in the parlance of international aid, first rolled out in Latin America in the 1990s, they were met with skepticism, especially from development agencies more intent on structural reform than redistributing wealth. More than a decade later, however, evidence shows that even modest payments grant the world’s poorest the power to make their own decisions; it also indicates that they make smart choices, especially on matters of health and education. Today, cash-transfer programs are thriving in some 45 developing countries and helping more than 110 million families. The World Bank has put at least $5.5 billion into nearly a hundred different projects.

One of the biggest impacts of these programs: education. Since its launch more than a decade ago, South Africa’s Child Support Grant has cut the number of children out of school in half. South Africans are free to use their payment any way they wish...

Precisely. Unfortunately socialists want attach strings to their hand-outs in an attempt at "social engineering."

Maps of the day

2010 Post-Election Party Control of State Legislatures:

This map shows control of state legislatures after the Nov. 2, 2010, election. There were 6,115 seats in 46 states up for election of a total 7,382 state legislative seats.

Oregon results are now completed and our legislature is evenly divided. We should be yellow on the map.


















When I lived in San Francisco, I drove across the US 6 times and, each time I did so, I was told to be careful of the bible-thumping rednecks as soon as I crossed the Oakland Bridge. Talk about insular.

The world according to San Francisco:

Why did Brown and Boxer win?

One word: unions - specifically government employee unions. That's why the legalize pot initiative in California failed too. It's the same in Oregon which voted for Kerry against Bush but voted against gay marriage. Union members are often socially "conservative" but have been brainwashed by union Marxist rhetoric into thinking that socialism is the answer because they are totally ignorant of real-life economics. Public sector unions could destroy America and should never have been allowed.

Daily chuckle

A leftist wonders "Am I the last person in America who still adores President Obama?"

But when I see Obama on television, I'm unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing humor, by the magnificence of his megawatt smile.

I like his mind-bendingly multicultural extended family. I like that in a campaign interview in Glamour magazine, he could fluently and unabashedly talk about Pap smears. I thought that the beer summit of 2009 was delightful. I was even excited when Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, not realizing until pundits explained otherwise that I was supposed to be aghast at its prematurity.

I found this at Ace (Maetenloch) who comments:

At this point the only way I think she could be happier is if Obama started sparkling in daylight and carried her away into the forest. And that’s not all:

At this point, I love Obama so much that I recently thought if it were 1961, I'd probably display a bust of him in my living room. Then I realized I'm already displaying the 2010 equivalent: On my living room wall, I have a framed version of that famous November 2008 New Yorker cover of the O moon over the Lincoln Memorial.

Maetenloch concludes:

Oh I shall so relish Sittenfeld’s tears on November 3rd. I think they will go well with some champagne and fava beans.

Personally I prefer caviar with my champagne but I may have to first take a dose of antacid to get rid of the after-taste of a slight upchuck after reading that.

How does Hollywood make money? Popcorn

Hollywood's business model is broken; prepare for the fall of the movie industry:

When a movie like Avatar makes $2.8 billion in under a year, it seems perverse to say that the movie industry is in trouble – but I’m going to go ahead and say just that. Not only are studios like MGM going bust, but even worse, the number of people going to the cinema refuses to rise – and, in the US, it’s dropping.

What happened? Could Hollywood’s century-long grip on the world’s entertainment spending finally be loosening, and why? The answer lies in three very different places: popcorn, the internet, and old-fashioned TV.

Now, if you’ve ever been to a cinema, you may have guessed that they make a killing from selling popcorn and drink; after all, it doesn’t really cost £3 to make a bag of popcorn. All the popcorn sounds like a great bonus to have on top of all the ticket sales they must make – but, in fact, popcorn is where much of their profit comes from, especially since they have to pay part of box-office sales back to the movie studios.

The massive profit margins provided by popcorn and drinks mean that cinemas want to pack in and move as many people as possible. The worst nightmare of a cinema owner is a screening with no punters and no popcorn sales, so if a film underperforms on its opening night, they’ll try and remove it as fast as they can.

All of this makes it vital for studios to create movies that get massive opening nights, otherwise they’re at risk of being shut out.

Who goes to cinemas on opening nights? Young people. And who buys popcorn and drinks? That’s right, young people. So that’s who blockbusters are made for.
...
Even movies that aren’t based on an existing franchise – like Avatar and Inception – aren’t quite as risky as they seem. The “foreign” box office (i.e. ticket sales outside of the US) is becoming increasingly important, and movies that work well, particularly in non-English speaking countries, tend to share two features – they have lots of explosions, and a minimum of talking. It’s no surprise, then, that Avatar and Inception made most of their money outside the US.

But it’s not working. Movie ticket sales are basically stagnant in both the US and the UK, despite their increasing population; people are just staying away from cinemas and doing something else, whether that’s watching TV, surfing the internet, or playing games. The only reason this downward trend hasn’t been spotted is because overall box-office takings have been artificially buoyed up by expensive tickets for 3D movies – but that’s hardly going to last forever.

I haven't been to a movie theater in years because, the last time I went, the sound was so loud it gave me a head-ache and the time before that I could hear the movie being played in the postage-stamp "theater" next door.

Notice all the black faces at the Stewart-Colbert rally - not!

Oops! I guess there aren't any - or at least much less visible than at the Tea Party rallies. I'm not surprised. This morning I noticed the lack of black faces on the TV news footage. So I did a Google image search. Yep, the attendees were mostly white spoilt brats as these pics show. For more see here.