Slim Pickin’s*

Here it is not even halfway through 2011 and names are being thrown about, tossed in the hat (and thrown back out; Newt, I’m talking to you, you jackass) and bruited about for potential presidential runs. Republican/Repugnican’t names only, of course, as The Zero has said, according to Billary, that he intends to win in 2012 “And then we’re done.” (Would that make the Biden presidency begin the day after the election? *heh*) But choices of decent candidates from the supposed “Right” are slim pickin’s*.

On one key issue, illegal immigration (or, as I prefer, “alien invasion”), Michele Bachman is the only potential candidate whose name has been floated so far who passes muster on this one of my three critical issues. (If Bobby Jindal’s name were to be raised–haven’t seen it so far–he’d make number two.)

Any candidate fielded for any national office who can articulate sensible policies concerning 1. Eliminating–or very nearly so (not controlling or limiting) illegals, or “alien invaders” 2. Revenue and expenditures (big points for balanced budget and FairTax stances) 3. U.S. energy independence will get not just my vote but my enthusiastic support.

Solutions to these issues aren’t exactly rocket science: most are pretty simple and straightforward, requiring only the ability to spit in the eye of the entrenched political elites and their co-conspirators, fellow travelers and useful idiots. The only really tough weed in my three critical issues is expenditures by the feds. So-called “entitlements” (grants of special privilege to gain political power from voting blocks) are the big bugaboo. But even Social Security and Medicare “grants of special privilege” issues can be dealt with. After all, families cared for their aged loved ones for millennia before those programs came around to suck the life from young workers’ paychecks. Positing less “feddle gummint” meddling overall, families could do so again today, especially if American citizens grew up and took responsibility for their own care and feeding back from the “feddle gummint”… or were required to because someone jerked the “safety net” out from under their lazy-assed, greedy, “grasshopper” feet.

Oh, but what to do about the “grants of special privilege” to the locust class (generational welfare “families”)? Screw ’em. While I can grant that States have authority to engage in some sort of charitable efforts to alleviate situational poverty, supposing of course that the particular States’ constitutions provide for such, despite the lies libtards have sold for a generation or more, the federal Constitution does NOT give the “feddle gummint” authority to practice charitable acts with public funds. Let local communities, State agencies, private groups and associations handle the matter. And if “welfare queens” and their courts object, ship ’em to Mexico.


*Orthographic note: No, I did not misuse that apostrophe. And no, I did not mean to make “pickin” possessive, and nor did I mean “pickin is”. As you no doubt rightly inferred, the apostrophe is there because I extracted the “g” from “pickings” simply to effect a colloquial pronunciation in readers’ ears.

🙂


I thought to myself, “Meself, mayhap ‘t’would be a Good Thing to expand on, “not exactly rocket science.” So, herewith the third world county central fixes for the thee Big Issues:

1. Eliminating–or very nearly so (not controlling or limiting but eliminating) illegals, or “alien invaders”

a. Build the damned fence already.
b. Place machine gun nests with interlocking fields of fire and ROE that demands “shoot to kill” on the border
c. Go after those who employ illegals. Seize ALL the assets–including “sheltered” family assets–of ANYONE who employs illegals and cannot PROVE they made BEST faith efforts (not just “good faith”–exhaustive efforts) to eliminate alien invaders from their employ.
d. Pay a bounty to citizens ONLY for ratting out illegals and employers of illegals.
e. Refuse ALL government services, save emergency services for immediately life-threatening health care to any and all illegals and place bureaucraps who circumvent this on chain gangs making little rocks out of big ones.

THEN

Streamline LEGAL immigration for those seeking to enter the country who can demonstrate that they will both not be a burden on society and are likely to benefit our nation.

2. Revenue and expenditures (big points for balanced budget and FairTax stances).

a. Pass a balanced budget amendment, even if it takes working to defeat every spendthrift asswipe politician from now until the Trump of Doom sounds. Never give up. Make one provision of the amendment that politicians *gag-spit* who want to institute programs that exceed revenues must pay for those programs out of their own pockets.
b. Pass the Fairtax already. Any and every argument I’ve seen against it (save one) has been disingenuous to the point of outright lies. The only honest argument I’ve seen against it is that it would remove so much power from the “political elite” that they’d never pass it. So? Work to put their asses on the unemployment line and get some people in who are willing to have less power at their fingertips. Take the brakes off the American economy, aready!
c. Yeh, start being honest with folks about “entitlements”–we can’t afford ’em, and we for sure can’t afford to keep expanding them. For folks already addicted to ’em, let ’em sunset, slowly, but with the two provisions above in place, that’d be possible, because everyone who worked would have more in their pocket to handle such things, either as family or via real charities as opposed to government “charity” which is simply stolen resources bestowed on those who don’t earn them.

3. U.S. energy independence.

a. Put all the whining greenies that bitch and moan about how awful nuclear power is and place roadblocks to oil, gas and coal development and play NIMBY with new refineries out in the wilderness with a fishhook and a pocket knife and leave ’em to starve. (Feel free to go ahead and pity the wildlife.)
b. Go ahead and drill baby drill, build a few (hundred) pebble bed reactors (or any of the other exciting new nuclear reactor designs), put a thermal depolymerization plant in every tiny lil community that wants to actually MAKE MONEY via turning their sewage into oil, open up exploration and development of ALL hydrocarbon energy supplies, oh, and go ahead and remove roadblocks (as if there were any) along with artificial supports to development of “alternative energy sources”.

Oh, and as to the “drill baby drill” meme, check this:

There. Third world county central’s prescription for three big issues (we’ll leave The Biggest** for the Second Coming or perhaps the Twelfth of Never (sigh*) that face us.


**The Biggest: *@^^^3* politicians who either stupidly and ignorantly OR wittingly and venally violate the Constitution… just because they can, all the while either lying about what they want to do being constitutional or just not caring at all whether it is or isn’t (Yeh, Newt, I’m looking at you, too).

Happy Mothers Day in the Land of the (Once) Free

Victor David Hanson’s “Thoughts on a Surreal Depression” contains these sobering words:

… the law-biding stifled by red tape, the non-law-biding considered exempt from accountability on the basis of simple cost-to-benefit logic. A speeder on the freeway will pay a $300 ticket for going 75mph and justifies the legions of highway patrol officers now on the road; going after an unlicensed peddler or rural dumper is a money-losing proposition for government.

(BTW, VDH, Samuel T. Francis described the circumstances you bemoan 18 years ago as anarcho-tyrrany: punishing the law-abiding and rewarding outlaws.)

So, mothers, at the least, pray for the country your children will inherit from your hands. (And fathers, pay some *&^%@#$ attention, too.)


BTW, I’m very glad I had a mother. Don’t know where I’d be without one. *heh* Also glad she’s still around, and I can pick up the phone and say “Hi” any old time I want to. I’ll do that this afternoon…

Defund NPR!

No Shiite! (Seriously: the Muslim Brotherhood which is the pretext for this investigative report, is Sunni, so “No Shiite!” is correct… in more senses than one*… )


*Recently, in “polite” conversation, I have taken to substituting “”Shiite!” for a word that means much the same thing but which has only one “i” and no “e”.

It’s No Longer Simply Ironic

With the open display of antipathy toward democracy in recent days–so-called “Democrats” using various tactics to avoid the outcomes of democratically-decided elections, beginning with the “Democratic” State senators of Wisconsin fleeing the state to avoid providing a quorum–isn’t it time the party was formally renamed the Anti-Democratic Party?

Pay Attention: Our Society Has Already Failed The Test Once….

Jerry Pournelle:

“What is so Special about the 30 Year Mortgage” by Peter Williams in today’s [Feb 1, 2011] Wall Street Journal dispels some myths and raises interesting questions. The United States has for a long time encouraged people to buy their homes. This is a good idea: rule by the middle class, ‘those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation’ (Aristotle) requires that there be a middle class, and that they have property. Alas, the implementation did not leave them much of a property stake. People who owe more than the property is worth not only do not own property, but have a strong motive to shed themselves of the very idea that they ever owned it. The long time mortgages with low down payments do not build property ownerships.

Now, our home is paid for. Was a fifteen year mortgage to begin with, and we had EVERY intention of making it wholly ours from the beginning. Paid it off early. And when we bought, we bought a home that was less than we could have gotten, deliberately. Indeed, we’ve mostly, for quite some time now, made it a practice, in general, to live under our means, providing a greater cushion for emergencies and potential income losses or other changes of circumstances.

Major purchases, other than this house–cars, appliances, electronics, whatever: saved for and paid for in cash or cash equivalent (check or debit card).

“[T]he goods of fortune in moderation” is key to a solid middle class, and a solid middle class is even key to long-term wealth for the putative upper class, for without such a middle class, the means to assure long-term wealth become shaky in a republic. Of course, our republic is trending toward an oligarchy (rule by an elite) with a veneer of democracy (rule by mob), and the oligarchs seem to have little interest in even their own grandchildren’s future, “planning” ahead only so far as their next short-term “killing”.

Well, as usual I’ve wandered off the reservation a bit. *heh* Pournelle’s original comment, and his recommended reading material (I fixed his link to point to a non-registration reproduction of the article) are worth reading.

What’s the Matter With Kids Today?

*heh*

Okay, so my topic’s not the same as the Bye Bye Birdie tune’s. Here’s a switcheroo. A recent (well, 2007) book on school reform and what can go dreadfully wrong with reform efforts had one comment that made me hoot til I almost cried. “Oh, what was it?” you ask. Praising the intent of the “New Math” era and how it breathed life into Math curriculum.

Yeh, right. If anything were deliberately designed to wreck budding students’ interest in or understanding of math, it was New Math. Either it was a conspiracy of evil persons to completely screw kids up or it was a conspiracy of dunces who were too stupid for words… completely screwing kids up. That is, if their “intent” was good, the people who designed and implemented “new math” were monumentally stupid people.

4th Grade: “new math” screwed me up so badly, it wasn’t until I had a high school geometry teacher who was teaching just for the joy of it (her family was in Big Bucks City) that my head started to come unscrewed from “new math” so the threads could be reworked and I could have the thing screwed on right (as to math). From there, calculus, stat, whatever, was fun.

What’s the matter with kids today? A lot of it is remote educrats having screwed up public education for decades (with the complicity of lazy, dumbed down by their own school years, parents and stupid, compliant pubschool administrators).

[great story excised to protect the innocent]

Asshats.

Politics vs. Science

Nope. Not what you think. In fact, in order to remove current political “science” from consideration this time, I’ll simply ask:

Tomato: fruit or vegetable?

True fruits are developed from the ovary at the base of the plant’s flower and contain the seeds of the plant. Botanically a tomato is a fruit.

However, in 1893, in what I view as a purely political decision contrary to fact, simply decreed the tomato to be a vegetable in order to satisfy the bureaucrappic “needs” (read that as “desires”) of tariff collectors, since fruits were exempt from a tariff on imported foods and vegetables were not.

Now, can anyone else name anything in current events that might fall into this unscientific denial of reality that is being pushed as public policy? Hmmm?


Note: I originally, and very uncreatively, typo-ed “1983” for the date of 1893 above. You would have thought I’d at least make some sort of interesting mistake, eh?Oh, well. 🙂

Looking Toward 2012…

I have a suggestion for transparency in campaigning for The Zero, adapted from a graphic I ran across on FB:

Of course, complete transparency would attach this to a certified copy of an actual birth certificate, adoption records, Indonesian citizenship records and a statement that “Barry Hussein Obama-Soetoro is running for the position of unconstitutional holder of the office of the presidency of the United States of America as the illegal alien communist candidate from Kenya-Indonesia”.

(Yes, I do think that, given the millions he’s spent to deny the public access to his past, Barry Hussein Obama-Soetoro is “a fraud of monstrous size” perpetrated on the citizens of the United States of America by a coalition of the corrupt, stupid, naive, and deliberately disinformed.)

Updating the Emperor

“The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.” —Marcus Aurelius

Nowadays, our electorate can more properly be described by,

“The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if they are all willfully ignorant.”

There are adequate means now for ANY person in these (dys)United States to be adequately well-informed about the important issues of the day, but, sadly, few bother to take the time or make the effort to do anything but soak up–directly or indirectly–the viewpoints of the Ruling Elite mostly via the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind.

Keep in mind: your ignorant, self-enstupiated neighbor’s vote counts just as much as yours does.

Educate the stupid.