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.
AMERICA AND THE WEST LEAD THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM
The good news is that there are more countries managing their economies in a fiscally responsible way than there were two years ago. Fiscally responsible means keeping average annual deficits less than average annual economic-growth rates, keeping net debt from exceeding one-third of gross domestic product, and maintaining a relatively small government. The bad news is that most of the world's biggest economies, including that of the United States, are getting deeper and deeper in debt as a result of excessive spending, and will ultimately have to pay the price. The chart below gives the details. They are not pretty for us nor for most of the West.
OUR FUTURE OF BEING LESS CROWDED AND HAVING MORE NATURE TO ENJOY
Most everyone has seen the nature documentaries of Sir David Attenborough and is familiar with his name. Publicizing his imminent new series about the evolution of animals, Sir David said in an interview last week that he thought a reduction in human population during this century is impossible and "we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse." People will look back in another 100 years "at a world that was less crowded, full of natural wonders, and healthier." His is a common view. He longs for people to enjoy the open spaces and abundant herds of game that he has been fortunate enough to see. To that end he thinks it vital that there should be fewer of us. I would now passionately disagree with the two premises of his argument. It's actually quite likely, rather than impossible, that population will be falling by the end of this century and it is also quite likely that the people alive then will have lots more wilderness to explore and wildlife to admire than today. The facts that show this and disprove Sir David are fascinating.
COLORADO DISASTER — A HARBINGER OF THE DEMOCRATS’ FUTURE
The good news for former State Senate President John Morse of Colorado Springs and former State Sen. Angela Giron of Pueblo - both Democrats - is their place in history is now secure. They're the first legislators in Colorado ever to be recalled. Despite outspending their opponents at least 6 to 1, Mr. Morse and Ms. Giron lost in districts Democrats should win handily. Obama won them last year by 21 and 19 points respectively last year. Mr. Morse lost because Democrats in his district didn't turn out, and Republicans did. More Democrats than Republicans voted in Ms. Giron's district. Her problem was so many of them voted to throw her out. It was chiefly the votes of blue collar Hispanics that did her in. More recall petitions were signed by Democrats and Independents combined than by Republicans. Here's why this is such really bad news for Democrats nationally.
HALF-FULL REPORT 09/13/13
The United States has suffered a huge diplomatic defeat, with ominous consequences that will reverberate for decades. Yet I feel relieved, because the alternatives were worse. * * * * The silver lining in this cloud is that if America can survive the next 40 months, the odds are the America 3.0 Jack Wheeler described here will be ushered in on January 20, 2017. * * * * Despite spending about 8 times as much as their opponents, two Democratic state senators lost recall elections in Colorado. This has ominous implications for gun grabbers and Democrats nationwide. * * * * Despite liberal smears, conservatives won landslide victories in Australia Saturday and Norway Monday. **** At its convention in Los Angeles Thursday, the AFL-CIO passed a strongly worded resolution against Obamacare. * * * * Syria may mean curtains for John McCain's sidekick.
PUTIN THE PRO WIPES THE FLOOR WITH OUR AMATEUR PRESIDENT
Members of Congress -- spooked because their constituents oppose intervening in Syria's civil war, and alarmed by the president's inept handling of the crisis -- were about to vote down the resolution he tardily asked for to authorize military strikes. It would have been a humiliating defeat for Barack Hussein Obama. Then Russian President Vladimir Putin tossed him a lifeline, which Mr. Obama went for like a trout to a fisherman's lure. "Putin openly despises your president," Russian political analyst Andrei A. Piontovsky told the New York Times. Why would he help Mr. Obama out of a jam? Because Putin knows Mr. Obama is so vain, he'd be more likely to act to protect his own reputation than to protect America's. This of course is exactly what has happened -- and Zero is so clueless he hasn't figured out yet the extent to which he has been humiliated.
THE NSA IS THE EYE OF SAURON
[Note: Paul Rosenberg, has spent many years trying to protect Internet users from unjustified surveillance by groups like the NSA. Many TTPers subscribe to his Virtual Private Network (VPN) called - for reasons known only to him - Cryptohippie, to avoid tracking by the snoops. I never go online without it. Here Paul discusses the latest revelation of unconstitutional NSA Orwellian fascism. -JW] On September 5th, Glenn Greenwald, Ed Snowden and others revealed that the NSA was able to break the vast majority of encryption used on the Internet. You can find the story here or here, and commentary by cryptographer Bruce Schneier here. In the NSA documents, ordinary Internet customers are referred to as "adversaries." We're all perps now. If all Internet users are "adversaries," do you really think anyone is safe? Forget about the US Constitution; it's a non-factor now. This is just the latest example of people who are drunk on power and don't care about the principles on which this country was founded. The NSA and the entire US/UK "security" apparatus is a gigantic drunken beast. The operators are arrogant and untouchable. The reality is, the system is beyond broken, no matter what kind of happy talk you hear on TV. Here's what this means to you.