Hypersensitivity

Some people will get upset over anything!

Happy New Year!
Enjoy 2013 — it's got to be better than 2012 was!

Why Is It ...?

. . . that all the stories about the end of the Mayan calendar — the ones that show a "Mayan Calendar" — always actually show the Aztec calendar stone? (Like this.)

Just askin'.

Remember Why There Is A Christmas

Christmas today may look like this

Why Christmas exists looks more like this

Remember the reason for the season.
Wishing you a blessed Christmas

Merry Christmas to All!

Wishing everyone a very
Merry Christmas

. . . with a thought back to the very first Christmas
. . . with the manger and the animals and the shepherds . . .

. . . and with a smile and some laughter of the season!

End of the World

No comment is needed.

Update: The world didn't end, after all. Guess I'd better do some Christmas shopping!

Servicemen's Votes, Uncounted

There's one recent set of news reports that is simply disgusting. Politicians continue to deny our servicemen — soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines — men and women — their constitutional right to have their voices heard as citizens. They do this in violation of the law, as well as all possible justice and morality. Disgusting!

Something more must be done to protect the rights of these citizens.

Veterans Day, 2012

In 2007, Kyle-Anne Shiver wrote an open letter of thanks to America's veterans that is a must read — especially today. Here's an excerpt:

And it is also true, that unless one has been in battle, one does not truly understand the depth of your passion for liberty. To families that have borne no soldiers, you are an enigma. To cowards, you are a shaming presence, a constant reminder of their weakness. To your parents, you represent both the mountaintop of pride, and the deepest valley of concern that mothers and fathers can ever know. And to most of us ordinary citizens, you are the unseen, under-appreciated protectors of all that we hold dear.

Military men and women really are different. Like their brothers and sisters in fields such as firefighting and law enforcement, they are the ones who run toward the fire and toward the firefight, not away. They are the sheepdogs, the ones who protect the sheep from the wolves — but whose presence makes the sheep uncomfortable. They're not all the same; they come in all types. But they share that difference. Sometimes you can see it in their eyes. Sometimes you can see the difference without being able to see who they are.

Even when you're not be able see the difference, the difference is still there. But whether you see the difference or not, whether you are aware of them or not, they are the ones who are there to be a deterrent — and, if necessary, a force for protection and rescue. They are the men and women who have secured and preserved our freedom. To them, along with Kyle-Anne Shiver, I say

You serve and fight for the greatest Nation in the history of civilization. There has never been a grievous wrong that good Americans have not sought to rectify. There has never been a just cause on which America has turned her back for long. You, our soldiers, have been and continue to be, the greatest force for freedom and human rights ever gathered. You have raised our flag around the world, not for domination, but to bring greater liberty and a better way of life. You are the reason America remains a beacon of hope to the entire world.

To all our veterans, and to all who serve, THANK YOU!

The Choice — and the Results

The choice the country's voters had last Tuesday was

• Change We Can Believe In

or

• Forward! (to the past four years)

 

Part of that is because the change we thought we could believe in four years ago turned out not to be quite the change we'd hoped for.

As the incoming president, Barack Obama is inheriting some really nasty situations. This is just a sampling:

But I'm sure President Obama has a plan for dealing with them.

For the rest of us, however, last Tuesday has given us a different feeling.

Remember

A New Truth

As more information has come out about the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, it looks worse and worse for President Obama. A women's group has put out an ad as a result. This is from that ad.

Clearly, the president does not hold his people in the same high regard they have held him.

Two Truths

President Obama and his campaign have produced a new flag. A cartoonist has identified what that flag represents.

The new Obama flag strikes me very much like another drawing, based on an image out of Benghazi.

On a separate topic, it seems to me President Obama must be pitied. If he loses — especially if he loses big — he needs to be pitied as getting his just desserts for being the worst president in U.S. history, displacing Jimmy Carter from that spot. And if by some chance he wins, . . .

Gas Prices

This is the political season. That's what made this gas station owner give us a reminder about gas prices at his station the day Barack Obama took office as our president.

Here's today's reality in California, both in the mid-coast area

and in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

And here's a gas station owner who has captured the cause as well as the effect.

Guess I don't need to add any comments. You all know the conditions out there.

UPDATE: Here is a one-image definition of the Obama presidency, now known to some as Gasmageddon.

Netanyahu Made His Point

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the United Nations, and made clear there was a line Iran's nuclear program must not be allowed to cross.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called this "very hideous behavior".

Netanyahu was actually quite restrained. If he were a bit less diplomatic, he might have made his point a bit more more strongly this way.

Iran Needs More Women Like These

Two interesting stories from Iran. Both suggest Iran's women are getting fed up with their oppression and harrassment by the religious authorities.

• Story number one: In Iran's northern Semnan provice, an imam told a woman she was not properly covered. (Apparently some of her hair was showing.) She replied “you, cover your eyes.” The cleric repeated his "warning". She replied by knocking him down and assaulting him, putting him in the hospital for three days.
• Story number two: A Hojatieh imam encountered two girls, and told one to cover up. Like the woman in Semnan province, she "responded by telling me to cover my eyes, which was very insulting to me." He "asked her a second time to cover up and also to put a lid on what he felt was verbal abuse." She and her friend responded by assaulting him, knocking him to the ground and beatime him.

Iran clearly needs more women like these, willing to stand up for their rights against these self-righteous "authorities".

A Minimum Wage Increase — How Can This Work?

There is now a proposal on the ballot in Albuquerque to raise the minimum wage (already above the national minimum wage) by an additional dollar. The measure's proponents say the higher minimum wage will infuse a bunch of new money into the city's economy.

How?

The measure won't bring in any new money. Yes, it will give more money to those making minimum wage. It will take that money from one of two sources:

    1. From the business owners who will find their return on their investment reduced, or
    2. From other employees either fired or not hired as a result of the higher labor costs.

Either way, this proposal brings no new money into the economy, but simply shifts money from one person to another -- both of whom would spend it.

In other words, this proposal will damage business owners and/or workers without producing any economic improvement.

Islamist Honour

If that is their prophet, they have no honour.

Jobs Numbers Don't Add Up

The jobs report came out the day after President Barack Obama's speech at the end of the Democrats' national convention. It said the United States' economy had created 96,000 jobs in August. That's down a bunch from the revised 141,000 jobs in July. But it was enough to take the unemployment rate to 8.1% from 8.3%. The White House called this good news, saying “ today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

I don't buy it. I don't believe the White House thinks this report is good news. They're just shoveling a heaping load of ****. The only alternative would be that the White House and the Obama campaign believe this — and are alone in this assessment. After all, 96,000 is well below the estimates made by the economists, and those estimates were down from the prior month's performance. In other words, even if the jobs numbers had been no worse than the estimates, that still would show the economy on a clear and strong downward trend. That's far from good news. It indicates a slowing economy, with job creation below its poor 2010 level.

There are a few other problems — like the Administration is "cooking the books." To get a reduction in the unemployment rate from that puny 96,000 jobs number, a number far too small even to keep up with the normal population increase in the labor force, the Bureau of Labor Statistics had to assert that 368,000 Americans left the labor force, gave up looking for work, and probably decided to give up their addictions to food and shelter. This was they only way they could artificially reduce the unemployment number.

The 96,000 jobs number itself is also suspect, at best. It is certainly not a net jobs increase. That is an absolute certainty. If 96,000 is the number of jobs created in August, then there were 215,000 jobs destroyed in that month. That's because there were 119,000 fewer people employed at the end of August than at its beginning.

Obama keeps trumpeting his claim to have created 4½ million jobs since June of 2010. The August jobs numbers make me wonder just how many million jobs he has destroyed in that time.

Islamism Incompatible with Civilized Societies

Here's another take on the attacks on our embassies and consulates.

Today’s (now yesterday's) lead New York Times article, “Anti-American Protests Flare Beyond the Mideast” (meaning that they have spread throughout the entire Muslim world), makes it uncomfortably clear that we share this globe with a 1.7 billion strong religious community which is liable at the drop of a hat to erupt in global savagery. The events confirm what I have been saying since September 11, 2001: that Islam is incompatible with non-Muslim mankind, and that Muslims should therefore be separated and quarantined from non-Muslim mankind. But non-Muslim mankind, or rather the liberal West, will not pursue such a rational course. Instead it will follow Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society: The worse a non-Western group behaves, the more we blame ourselves for their behavior and the more we accommodate ourselves to them.

He goes a bit further that I did. What do you think he means in saying Islam is "incompatible with the non-Muslim world"? I think it's something like this:

I am not quite so pessimistic as he is, however. I think the West will do what it must — finally — after it has tried everything else. Islam, or at least the violent portion or cult some call Islamism, will be made extinct. And that will probably go down one of two ways:

1. The way the Assassin (Hashashiyyin) cult was exterminated. Basically, the governments of the region, including that of Saladin, attacked their strongholds and killed them all.
2. The way the Thugee cult was exterminated. The men (the direct criminals) were executed and their families were interred. With their expiration, the cult was exterminated.

Either way, this extremist group/cult is exterminated. Note that neither of these prior cults continues to exist except as words (assassins, thugs) in our dictionaries.

I suspect that accomplishing this will require that all civilized people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, work together to end the threat these Islamist "misunderstanders of Islam" pose to everyone.

Islamist Lies & Pretenses

Our local newspaper has a headline over a front-page news story that says More Violence Feared Over Anti-Islam Video. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has a story that says “The attacks on U.S. diplomatic missions this week — beginning in Egypt and Libya, and moving to Yemen and other Muslim countries — came under cover of riots against an obscure online video insulting Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.”

But it's not so. The "obscure online video" was a trailer — an advertisement — for a video that has apparently never been available, online or otherwise. That trailer has been online for months. So why the violence all over the Muslim world now? It seems quite clear the video is the excuse, not the reason, and the actual reason is self-generated within the Muslim community.

The Wall Street Journal recognizes this, too. In that same story it says “But the mob violence and assaults should be seen for what they really are: an effort by Islamists to garner support and mobilize their base by exacerbating anti-Western sentiments.”

Attacks on embassies and consulates have been recognized for centuries as acts of war. In this instance, we clearly don't want to go to war over these attacks. But what our response should be is clear, it seems to me: In every country where our embassy or consulate has been invaded and damaged or destroyed, we should (1) close our embassy and consulates, (2) remove all diplomatic personnel, and (3) cut off all aid. This should be done pending serious discussion of our relations with those countries.

Beyond that, there is just one long-term solution: All civilized people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, need to work together to end the threat the Islamist "misunderstanders of Islam" pose to everyone.

Not Voting For Obama

Barack Obama is a dirty Chicago machine politician. (Yes, I know that statement is repetitive and redundant.) Having spent time in Chicago, I have a real good sense of what that means, and why it should be disqualifying for any politician seeking office outside that city. That's the first reason this Democrat will not be voting for Obama this fall. The second reason is the way Obama has brought Chicago-style machine politics to the national political stage.

And if I were tempted to hold my nose and vote to re-elect him anyway, there's another roadblock to prevent me from doing so — President Obama's actual record.

These items are just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more things to object to. Like fewer people working now than when he took office. Like more people being pushed into poverty, and more people put on food stamps, under his Administration than ever before. Like his decisions on which laws he is willing to have enforced, and which laws he will have his agencies ignore. Like his unilateral rewriting of laws passed by Congress. Like his actions taken in violation of the law, and continued in violation of court orders.

And that's still just the (slightly larger) tip of the iceberg.

President Barack Obama has demonstrated he cannot or will not do the job he was hired for. We've got to let him go.