AN ERA OF NARCISSISM AND MADNESS
Perhaps when the history of our times is written, ours will be called The Era of Narcissistic Catechisms. To understand why this is the case it is enough to consider the fortunes of two green movements. 2,800 miles away from the one in Copenhagen, another green movement took to the streets this week. In Iran tens of thousands of anti-regime protesters from the green (the color for Islam) movement for democracy again risked their lives to demand freedom. Unlike global warming, there is no doubt that the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran constitutes a grave threat to international peace and security. There is also no doubt that the most effective way to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is to replace the current genocidal jihadist regime with a peaceful, liberal and democratic government. As unlikely as it may seem, at the very moment that freedom in Iran has become most urgent requirement for the world as a whole, the Iranian people have taken to the streets to demand it and are willing to pay with their lives to achieve it. In the face of this miraculous turn of events, the international community has nothing to say. Whereas the West's celebrity icons line up to get their pictures taken next to posters of polar bears, no one stands with the Iranian people.
THE DOUBLE-D STRATEGY FOR RESCUING AMERICA
A friend of mine lives in Kona on the Big Island in Hawaii. He has a fishing boat which he proudly named the 44-DD after a spectacular feature of his wife's anatomy. This is not about that sort of Double-D. While it may be difficult to keep your mind off what that spectacular feature might look like - just as it's hard to comply with the demand that you not think of a pink elephant - let's try and focus on a Double-D that can rescue our country from the clutches of the Fascist Democrat Party and the destruction being wrought upon it by President Zero. So - what does this Double-D stand for? It's a strategy for any Republican wanting to get elected or re-elected to Congress in 2010, and for any Tea Partyer wanting to take individual action now against a government that ignores the Constitution. Double-D stands for...
HALF-FULL REPORT 12/11/09
Certainly the best news of the week is that Copenhagen is imploding. The "Climate Change Conference" is where the world's Fascist Left intended to cement its control of a global bureaucracy. But then China and India balked, demanding they be paid oodles of Western money to reduce their "carbon footprints." Whereupon every hick country from Tuvalu to Sudan demanded they be bribed as well, calling the bribes "climate reparations" from America and the West. Knowing there is utterly no way to extract hundreds of billions in such bribes from Congress, the chief US negotiator at Copenhagen, Todd Stern, publicly told all those demanding bribes to forget it. The US rejects "any notion of debt," he said. "Any sense of guilt or culpability or reparations" are "categorically rejected." Stern is no conservative. Take a look at his bio. Yet this guy - under orders from his boss, Hillary Clinton, which is intensely interesting - has done the quintessential thing most necessary to protect America: reject envy, tell the envious their guilt-mongering has no power. There's still a week to go (the conference ends next Friday 12/18), but this is high drama unfolding. The US has finally told the world to take its envy and shove it. This is Hillary at work, folks, doing a number on Zero who would never do such a thing. Lots of drama on several levels. Enjoy the show.
WILL CHROME REALLY SHINE?
There is a new kid in town and his name is "Chrome OS" as for Google Chrome. It's the new operating system to be interactive with Google Cloud. Google is out to change the world more than they already have, and having applications stored on the Internet in a specified zone, known as a "cloud", is the new way to store information. I have written about the "Cloud" in earlier articles and there is a huge push for this new avenue of computing. If you have all your information stored in the nebulous cloud on the Internet, your going to need a vehicle to connect with it. That vehicle, friends is Chrome, Google's new browser that will do just that. Just what will Chrome do for Google's cloud users? So how is this different from the way we currently compute? A lot.
UNDERGROUND AMERICA
The underground or "black" economy is rapidly rising, and the fault is mainly due to government policies. Here is the evidence. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) released a report last week concluding that 7.7 percent of U.S. households, containing at least 17 million adults, are unbanked (i.e., those who do not have bank accounts), and an "estimated 17.9 percent of U.S. households, roughly 21 million, are underbanked" (i.e., those who rely heavily on nonbank institutions, such as check cashing and money transmitting services). As an economy becomes richer and incomes rise, the normal expectation is that the proportion of the unbanked population falls and does not rise as is now happening in the United States. Tax revenues are falling far more rapidly at the federal, state and local level than would be expected by the small drop in real gross domestic product (GDP) and changes in tax law that have occurred since the recession began.
WORLD ESCAPE HATCHES
[This is my talk at the Financial Plan B Workshop in St. Louis yesterday, December 9th.] With our country under assault from the Fascist Left and a president who hates America, many of you are considering locating an "escape hatch" somewhere in the world until we regain our freedom. What guidelines are there in determining what places are right for you? One place to start researching places to live overseas is the Index of Economic Freedom (IEF) compiled by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation. The web address is: heritage.org/index. One place to be careful of is the "Quality of Life" index put out by International Living. Any such index that lists France at the top, Number 1 on its list of 194 countries, is not to be trusted. It even claims France's climate is better than Tahiti's! That said, let's take a quick world tour of a number of promising candidates for a second home, a retirement haven, a bolthole until Hurricane Obama passes by and America becomes safe to live in again under a President Palin.
A PORTENT OF PRESIDENTIAL DISASTER
The flap over Desiree Rogers, insignificant in itself, illustrates why Barack Hussein Obama's presidency is headed for an epic fail. Social climbing publicity hounds Michaele and Tareq Salahi crashed President Obama's state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Nov. 22. The Secret Service was unaware of the security breach until the Salahis posted photos of themselves with the president and with Vice President Joe Biden on their Facebook page. Desiree Rogers is the White House social secretary. A Chicago socialite, she's a pal of White House counselor Valerie Jarrett, and of Michelle Obama. Ms. Rogers and her ex-husband, John, raised a ton of money for Mr. Obama's presidential campaign. It's no secret how she got her job. In previous administrations, someone from the social secretary's office was at the gate when the guests arrived, checking their names off the guest list as the Secret Service checked their identification. But Ms. Rogers felt she could do without this sensible (and obvious) precaution. She treated herself more as a guest than as someone whose job is to see to the comfort of the guests. Her total arrogance and that of her boss in invoking executive privilege for a lowly social secretary is a portent of the disaster that always comes from such unbridled hubris.
COMRADE LYSENKO IN COPENHAGEN
As the illustrious conclave of global warming true believers, led by President Barack Hussein Obama, gathers in Copenhagen for yet another exercise in environmental doom and gloom, observing the proceedings with the sly smirk of somebody who's "been there, done that" is likely to be the ghost of one Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976). No ordinary ghost that one either, for Comrade Lysenko was Stalin's favorite scientist for decades and the driving force behind the greatest scientific fraud in history prior to "anthropogenic global warming." Indeed, to fully understand the nature, magnitude and implications of the AGW scam, it's worthwhile to revisit Academician Lysenko's exploits, which just happen to bear an uncanny resemblance to the charlatanism currently on display in Climategate. Anthropogenic global warming has become for its supporters what Lysenko's theory of heredity was for the Stalinists. For its small international cabal of top AGW functionaries, it was about more than money, power and prestige, though, with the connivance of sycophantic Western governments and U.N. bureaucrats, there was plenty of that too. It was about ideology.
SARAH AT THE GRIDIRON
[The Gridiron Club, founded in 1865, is the oldest and most prestigious journalist organization in Washington DC. The annual Gridiron Dinner is attended by the media elite, at which the president is traditionally the speaker. This year, President Zero was the first president to refuse to address The Gridiron Dinner since Grover Cleveland. [Last night, Saturday December 5th, the black tie dinner at the ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel had double the attendance of recent years - for instead of Zero, the speaker was Sarah Palin. The tradition of the dinner is that the speaker pokes fun at himself and the attendees. Sarah was such a hit there were dozens of the most liberal elite journalists in America laughing their heads off, many wiping tears of laughter from their eyes. Here's her speech. It is as clever as it is funny.] Good evening. It's great to be in Washington. I am loving the weather [it was snowing]. I braved the elements and went out for a jog! Or, as Newsweek calls it, a cover-shoot. I feel so at home here in DC. I can see the Russian Embassy from my hotel room! It's a privilege to be here tonight at the Washington DC Barnes & Noble. Tonight, I'll be reading excerpts from my new book. Perhaps you've heard of it? "Going Rogue." Yukon wasn't sure if I'd go with that title and somebody suggested I follow the East Coast self-help trend and go with, "How To Look Like A Million Bucks...For Only 150 Grand." Todd liked, "The Audacity of North Slope." [She nods to him as he's at the head table] Hey, I considered not having a title at all. I've said it before, but you Beltway types just don't seem to get it. You don't need a title to make an impact. But anyway, let's get started.
HALF-FULL REPORT 12/04/09
Here's the question of the week: What if King Canute had been a liberal? You know the ancient tale. Canute (985-1035), son of Sven Forkbeard, Viking ruler of both Scandinavia and England, tired of the endless flattery of courtiers trying to curry his favor, ordered his throne brought to the seashore at Bosham in West Sussex on England's southern coast. Ensconced on his throne wearing his royal robes and commanding his courtiers to stand around him, he delivered a Royal Order to the sea to stop the incoming tide so that his royal feet should not get wet. The sea did not obey, the tide washed over his feet, whereupon he railed at his flatterers: "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws." But what if Canute had been a liberal? What if he really believed he could command the tide - and continued to believe it as the tide washed over him and threatened to sweep him out to sea? Wouldn't that remind you of Democrats facing the tide of 2010? Of glowarmers commanding the tide of truth to stop? Of the OPM (Obama Propaganda Media) denying the very existence of tides?