CHINA IS A SERIOUS COUNTRY — AMERICA IS NOT
Shanghai. The loudest people on the planet are Chinese. The most obnoxious sound you've ever heard is that of a Chinese man spitting - which they do often and everywhere. The most evil mass murderer in human history is worshipped as a demi-god by countless Chinese. His picture is on every denomination of Chinese currency. The list of Chinese negatives is very long. And they are all irrelevant. They are all overridden by one single fact: that China is a serious country and the Chinese are a serious people - while America and Americans are not. There is almost no way to describe the massiveness and ubiquity of the construction going on in hundreds of cities. Gigantic apartment complexes are springing up everywhere. Bullet trains going 200mph with amazingly smooth rides over railroads that go everywhere. Superhighways are the same. There must be at least two or three dozen airlines that fly to hundreds of cities. Three of them just placed an order for 68 A320s worth $6.75 billion - European Airbuses instead of Boeings as a slap in Zero's face. This same massive, purposeful, determined energy is being channeled into China's military. The Chinese will have a full-on blue water navy within a few years. They are focused on aircraft carrier-sinking cruise missiles, communication satellite-destroying ballistic missiles, undersea cable-slicing deep water robots, and of course, incapacitating our entire computer-based economy and military via hacking. The Chinese are different from us in many ways. They operate under a different set of moral rules and proscriptions. But one thing the Chinese are not is stupid. Another thing they are not is apologetic and unconfident. China today is a competitor of America's unlike any we have ever faced. It is deadly - literally deadly - serious, and deadly smart. Really smart. China is becoming more serious, more confident, and more educated-smart by the day - while we are becoming the opposite of all three, by the day.
MODEL MELTDOWN: GOVERNMENT FUNDS THE FORECAST IT IS LOOKING FOR
This week, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is slated to release its fourth report since 1990. Leaked copies indicate an admission that there has been no global warming for the past 16 years, but the report will also increase its probability from 90 percent to 95 percent that global warming ? if it does occur ? is caused by man. Not one of the major climate models on which the panel bases its predictions forecast the lack of warming over the past 16 years, even though the models do vary widely as to how much warming they predicted. Not to be outdone, President Obama again is warning us that if the Republicans do not vote for more government spending in the budget battles that are now upon us, we will go back into a recession. You may have not noticed we had left the recession, since employment levels are still below where they were five years ago. The president, of course, does not make such statements off the top of his head, but on the basis of his economic-forecast models. You might ask: "How accurate have these models been in forecasting?" Please note the accompanying table for the answer...
HIS BRAVURA PERFORMANCE HELPS TED CRUZ A LOT; THE CAUSE NOT SO MUCH
THE REAL CULPRITS IN MASS SLAYINGS
When President Barack Obama said blame for the murders of 12 people at the Navy Yard Sep. 16 on "those who fight to make it as easy as possible for dangerous people to get their hands on a gun," he was partly right. But the culprits aren't those he was trying to smear.
OBAMAS BLUFF
President Obama has adopted the unsustainable position that he will not negotiate with Congress over spending and the debt ceiling. He is betting he can get Republicans to fold without having to give up anything he wants. That's why we're hearing ridiculous claims from him like the one he made speaking to the Business Roundtable this week: "You have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt being used to extort a president or a governing party and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and nothing to do with the debt." This is nonsense, of course. Moreover, the implication that Obamacare has "nothing to do with the budget and nothing to do with the debt" is simply dishonest. The law accounts for a large part of the budget and we now know that it will cost twice as much in the next ten years as President Obama promised before it was passed. The truth is the President may soon be forced to negotiate. Here's why.
THE IRANIANS ARE COMING!
Hasan Rouhani, Iran's new president, arrived in New York yesterday (9/23), and the dips and pundits are very excited. They think there's a chance for a breakthrough, maybe even two or three breakthroughs: Even a "chance encounter" between Rouhani and Obama will be treated as a major event, and you can expect to read language like "for the first time in decades, American and Iranian leaders met face to face." That language is false. There have been myriad face-to-face encounters, and other claims about Rouhani are also false. Typical is this fawning puff piece in the New York Times, portraying Rouhani as the Middle East's new Golden Boy:
HALF-FULL REPORT 09/20/13
President Barack Hussein Obama did not let the fact that a mass murder was taking place a few blocks away distract him from making a cheesy, dishonest attack on Republicans over raising the debt ceiling. * * * * Putin, who is often photographed bare chested, likes to think of himself as a he man macho stud, a reputation that was burnished by the admission of our friend Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Cal, that he'd once lost at arm wrestling to the ex-KGB thug. But there is more to the story. * * * * Perhaps the strongest evidence that Democrats in Congress are off the reservation and headed for the lifeboats (how's that for mixing metaphors!) is that the prez couldn't get liberals in the Senate to back his choice for Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. * * * * How did a whack job like Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis get - and keep - a security clearance? You won't be comforted by the explanation. * * * * The IRS targeted the Tea Party and other conservative groups chiefly because of their anti-Obama rhetoric, USA Today reported Wednesday. The IRS apparatchiks were inspired to do so by the anti-Tea Party stories in the Washington Post. * * * * In 11 days, Obamacare officially begins. Panic is spreading throughout the land.
EVERYBODY HAS SOMETHING
One of the most consistent pieces of truth that I've come to understand in the course of over three decades of working with people as a therapist and Life Coach is this: Everybody has something that they struggle with, have struggled with, or will struggle with. We are very complex beings, all of us. The image of some kind of perfect, untroubled, constantly joyful and serene and bold and perfect life is an image from Hollywood; we are much more complex and magnificent than that. My point is that if you are struggling with something; if you sometimes get depressed, or anxious, or obsessive, or scared, or confused, or distracted, or lazy, or feel overwhelmed... there is nothing unusual about you. These are all well within the normal range of human functioning, and they represent challenges to master, not failures to feel ashamed of. The issues are not the issue. How you deal with them is. Here's how to start doing so.
IF LIBERALS REALLY WANTED TO HELP PREVENT MASS SHOOTINGS
On Monday (9/16), Aaron Alexis, 34, who worked there for a private contractor, shot and killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard. There seems to be an epidemic of mass shootings -- in Tucson, Arizona in 2011, last year in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Appearances are deceiving. In the 30 years ending in March, there were 78 mass shootings, said the Congressional Research Service. CRS defines a mass shooting as an incident "in which four or more people were killed at random by a gunman killing indiscriminately." In these mass shootings, 547 people were killed. The FBI estimates that in the 30 years ending in 2012, 559,347 people were murdered. The 547 slain in mass shootings account for less than one tenth of one percent of these murders. Many more die in collisions with deer. Even one mass shooting is too many if it could have been prevented. If liberals wanted to, here's what they could do.
THE GOVERNMENT WANTS YOU TO LIVE IN FEAR
There was a shooting two days ago (9/16) in DC. The details are still sketchy as I write this, but it appears that a deranged man decided to kill other people for some reason. In response, the usual talking heads will be debating whether this is actual Terror or merely something like it. But the T-word will be spoken in the same grave way we speak of cancer - a thing to be dreaded above all else. Certainly this shooting was a horrible, tragic thing - especially for the families involved. But that said, any talk about an "age of terror" is utter drivel. Terror is NOT worse now than it was before 9/11 - it's just that we've been bombarded with fear for more than a decade, creating a culture-wide residue that poisons every mind it touches. In actual fact, you are eight times more likely to be killed by a SWAT Team cop than a terrorist. Does that mean that we should all have a collective panic attack and beg for anti-SWAT SWAT Teams? Now here's the truth they don't want you to know: You are taught to fear because fear makes you easy to manipulate. If someone is making you afraid, they're also making you into an easy mark - a sucker. Our government wants us to live in fear. Think of how many things people have accepted from governments just because they were afraid. Things like complete online surveillance, crotch searches at airports, random searches on the highways, and so on. Do you think those would have been accepted in 1920? Of course they wouldn't, because people hadn't been sufficiently frightened at that time.