Cowboy Confessional

Some accidents occur at high velocities, where victims are instantly eliminated from future history (this seems especially true of Olympic luge racers and rock stars).  Other accidents are the slow motion variety, where the impact is plainly visible to onlookers but not to the victims themselves.

Of course I speak of Obama.

Several combined news items show a certain cluelessness about the regime du jour, the type of obliviousness that in other circumstance proceeds being belted by a biker or ditched by a girlfriend.  Within the gears of political machinery, slow-mo self destruction comes from declining to see that The People dislike incompetence or autocracy, though they will tolerate a competent scoundrel (for all his sins, and there were many, at least Bill Clinton lifted his head from an intern once in a while to take the pulse of the voting public).  Obama combines incompetence and autocracy in such a unique package that he’ll have the same number of terms as Nero, though ten fewer years to fiddle.

Such is Obama’s perpetual misreading of the public and voter demographics on the issue of health insurance.  Polls routinely show voters against legislation as drafted at Obama’s behest (Gallup say 60% against and Rasmussen says 56%).  By and large, The People are disenchanted, showing detest and come November they will be inclined to divest.  The secondary stimulus for their disaffection is the feeling that Obama and Company are not listening much less obeying.  Ever want to whack your child for being dangerously obstreperous and disobedient?  I know my parents did.

Voters appear poised to backhand Obama.

The primary political point is a general discontent with Washington, personified by the Tea Party movement.  Unlike the media, we must keep in mind that Tea Party rabble was roused in the waning days of the Bush administration as a backlash against incomprehensibly unconstitutional bail-outs of buddies (the unsavory collusion of Hank Paulson on behalf of his perpetual employer Goldman Sachs being instructive).  The peasants (a.k.a. my friends, family, neighbors, employees, preacher … everyone aside from politicians) were revolting against unrestrained power and apparent corruption before Obama waltzed into the White House.

He merely poured jet fuel on smoldering embers.

The Tea Party movement is a reflection of something deeper in the American political psyche.  Republicans imploded because they failed to stick to constitutional principles.  Democrats, not equally handicapped by constitutional fidelity, hijacked the crisis of economy and attempted an ideological end-run around the express written will of The People, folks with a nasty tendency to vote.  Disenchantment with the two parties and their indifference to The People’s policy is the paramount propulsion behind party defection, and the growing number of voters who self-identify as independents.

Independents hate ObamaCare more than Republicans or Democrats, with a full 62% willing to vote out anyone who votes up Obama’s legislation.

The collision ahead can only be ignored through blindness, willful ignorance, outstanding arrogance or plain stupidity, with “all of the above” being a distinct possibility when describing Obama’s latest misstep.  During this week’s refreshingly teleprompter free, but unfortunately day-long health insurance summit, Obama made it clear that his Henchman Harry would use a budgetary procedural gimmick (which Reid opposed when his party was out of power) to enact legislation despised by 62% of the largest voting block in the country.  Summarized, Obama is antagonizing the group most likely to beat him to an electoral pulp.

Uncle Bob used to call that “pissin’ in your own porridge.”

Tea parties have a recurring theme.  The original party was called because the government at that time ignored the express written will of The People.  The modern Tea Party movement and growth of the independent voter block is rising from resentment to the two halves of a similarly arrogant government.  When the 1773 government failed to listen to the people and abide by their will, blood was shed.  Let’s hope King Barry learns from King George before history reluctantly repeats itself.

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I love the gun control industry.  They’re more predictable that a politician lying.

(Speaking of which, I’m enjoying the sweet sound of silence now that John Edwards has mysteriously shut-up)

Whenever laws are loosened, the gun control industry predicts bloodshed in the streets.  I witnessed such first hand in Florida and later Virginia when those states respectively enacted concealed carry laws, letting honest folk tote weapons in public.  The Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center, the Joyce Foundation (if I may be redundant) in a single voice said Hell itself would erupt and swallow those states whole.

Didn’t happen.  Not in Florida.  Not in Virginia.

Not in the 28 other states that followed FLA, rescinding restrictions on packing a heater.  In fact, Professor John Lott notes that not a single peer-reviewed criminological study on concealed carry has found a rise in violent crime compared to national averages.  A hand full of studies show minor declines in violence, and a few show major drops in select categories of bloody bad behavior.

Yet in 2008, when the Supreme Court told the District of Columbia that their handgun ban was history, the gun control industry resurrected the same claims concerning carnage.  They predicted (again) that gutters would run red with blood, which for D.C. meant nothing much would change.  The gun control industry said with certainty that death was inevitable for every living being in that city.

Guess what.

Crime statistics are in for 2009, the first full year in which D.C. citizens have been allowed to keep handguns at home, the overall violent crime rate fell.  Though much higher than most everywhere else in America, the rate of violence in The District plummeted.  Based on Census Bureau population estimates and D.C.’s own online crime statistics reporting system, violent crimes fells 6% in the first full year of liberated handgun ownership and homicides dropped 23% (if you want to check the math, here is a spreadsheet with the raw numbers).

It is unimportant to wonder why the crime rate dropped – there will be plenty of time for criminologists to analyze the dozens of potential variables.  However, private gun ownership did not cause violence to increase and may be the magic variable to explain why it tumbled.

Helmke, Sugarman, Brady, Feinstein … time to pipe down.  Your chorus is off key, again.

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Nero should have been as thorough.

History has witnessed numerous despots fiddle while empires burnt.  Barack Obama, aided by a legislature filled with Caligula’s elected descendants, is moving America steadily in the direction of the Zimbabwean empire.  The parallels between Obama and Zimbabwe’s loco dictator Robert Mugabe stop only at their body mass index (the latter being a pro-ranked porker, and the former a chain smoking string bean).  Both men – and I use the word “men” very loosely – are self-important, functionally clueless, imbued with messianic visions and able to drive entire nations into insolvency solo.

Anyone have a stack of Zimbabwean currency?  I need to hit the head.

Nobody with brains blames Obama for the pre-existing national debt.  America has run in the red for most of its modern existence.  However, aside from times of war (like the last nine years) there has been some semblance of sanity and approximate alignment between federal spending and revenue.  Obama is following in Mugabe’s footsteps by printing money at a rate that requires buying more printing presses.  Compounding the elaborate theft that was the 2008 bailout of failed businesses (AIG, et al) is Obama’s even more elaborate theft, done with enough audacity to double down and double the deficit.  His nearly trillion dollar stimulus spending spree only stimulated Chris Matthews’ leg, but did send the Bureau of Engraving and Printing into overdrive.

Now Barack is ready to spend even more.  (Note to the graduating class of 2010:  RUN! Barak’s bill has your name on it.)

This week Obama pimps a $3.8T budget that increases government spending beyond where he has already elevated it.

• · Another 6% for education and civilian research.
• · A cool $25B for states that misspent as effectively as the Feds (this money is, no doubt, reserved for blue states like perpetually insolvent California).
• · A “freeze” that locks-in last years hyper spending, yet excludes the most expensive and fastest growing parts of the federal monster – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, national security, and the VA.

Investing in Zimbabwean dollars suddenly sounds sane compared to buying U.S. bonds.  Before Mugabe gave in, a Zimbabwean $100 billion banknote could buy three eggs, clearly demonstrating the effects of the hyperinflation soon to rock America, which still produces a quarter of the globe’s GDP.  In other words, America will indirectly export its economic mess. You thought $4 a gallon gas was tough … just wait a couple of years and try buying three eggs.

The Congressional Budget Office, an operation with relative sanctity inside the beltway, estimates that even without Obama’s further fiscal indiscretions:

• · The federal deficit next year will be $1.3T – on top of this year’s $1.4T.
• · The total national debt will be 95% of GDP, and 100% within a decade (imagine owing your credit card company as much as you made last year … assuming you had a job last year).
• · Over the next 10-years the interest costs alone will tally $4.8T, a service load more than triple the debt itself.

That is the good news.

If you haven’t grabbed your bottle of Jack Daniels yet, best do so now, even if you are still eating breakfast.  You’re going to need a belt.  All these budget numbers do not take into account off-the-book liabilities the feds willfully adopted.  According to a federal inspector general, the government is the insurer of record for 90% of all home mortgages.  Perverse legislation granted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the ability to over-leverage their assets (a staggering 70:1 ratio), higher than any commercial bank, while congressional clowns (Barney Frank by name) encouraged Mae and Mac to buy subprime loans, which in the end accounted for 20% of their portfolios.  Uncle Sugar assumed all that risk and added it to mortgages protected by the Federal Home Loan Association.  If for any reason we enter economic decline – you know, like Zimbabwe – then all that mortgage debt will be paid for by you.

The tally thus far (yes … there is more) is that we are running huge deficits, getting ready to spend even more, pumping up our interest expense, and have a moat full of mortgage paper to insure.  Despite this, Barack boosts spending.  In his Keynesian  hallucination Obama begs for change Americans do not want, much like his health insurance hijack.

So, taxing in your IRA and 401K should not surprise you.  No, even your congress critter isn’t insane enough to renege on the promise of tax reduced/free retirement income … yet … though whispers of taxing retirement account capital gains are circulating within I-495.  What Obama and his cohorts in Congress are cooking is to tax all banks (including yours) to recapture TARP money (even if your bank didn’t want or take TARP cash).  This will result in raised bank fees, including the management fees on your IRA and 401K.  As noted in paragraphs above, the epicenter of the current economic emergency was the inane objectives of the Federal government.  But since Obama believes government is “cool” (his words, not mine) there is no way he can blame the mess on his own kind.  Thus Obama inappropriately harangues all banks in order to compensate for the federal mistake of bailing out a few banks … which was caused by the federal mistake of rigging the mortgage market.

These bank taxes will be passed along to you.  Of course, if you lost your job and have no money in the bank, then you may not feel the pinch.

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History is its own recycling bin.

Soon we may see an unraveling of Democrat control over the country.  In a resurrection of similar mistakes made a decade ago, the Democrat party is engineering their own defeat, and in a hurry.  Democrats tend to go for broke and in the process break themselves, unlike Republicans who patiently shoot off one toe at a time.

This toe targeting analogy brings to fore the latest failing of dunderheaded donkeys.  For all their ideological alignment, Democrats time and again demonstrate indifference to The People.  This is important since all power derives from the consent of the masses, which explains why the Democrats support taking guns away from the rabble – Democrats prefer to operate without consent.

This desire to rule instead of being ruled is what caused alleged people like Pelosi and Halfwit Harry to plow ahead with their ideological designs whilst The People yelled “no” directly into elected faces.  No WABAC Machine is required to dredge up newscast-images of working wonk moms, armed with a 1,000 inkjet pages of proposed legislation and confronting their representatives at town hall meetings.  Despite polls staggeringly opposed to the rigging of health insurance and near violent confrontations with angry, informed mothers, Democrats continued pushing the unpopular while engineering snaky deals in order to reach their end goal of total government health care control.

The last time they operated this way was the year 2000, and the subject then was gun control (a topic of which I know a little).

Gun control has been an increasingly loosing political issue in America for three decades.  Recurring public opinion polls show fewer people supporting more of the stuff.  Little wonder.  In that same period America has gone from a mere ten states allowing concealed carry of weapons to forty.  Yet despite polling, regardless of states loosening local gun control laws, and notwithstanding a growing satisfaction among increasingly armed people, Democrats committed a full frontal assault to enact more gun control.  No less of a man than Bill Clinton (and there are no lesser men) led the charge, with his imbecilic acolyte Al Gore aping the agenda while campaigning for the presidency (you know, Al Gore, the fellow whose Earth in the Balance Armageddon book proved to be as accurate as William Miller).

Gore lost that election, Bush took the White House, and the GOP removed their shoes and started firing.

Americans have three nasty tendencies.  The read, they talk, and they vote. Even in ages before the Internet, voters wrestled with issues and debated the merits of all enactments (People with limited perspective use the phrase “Founding Fathers” to glorify a handful of Americans who authored the U.S. constitution, while ignoring that nearly every colonist read, debated and only then, ratified the same.  In the aftermath of ratification, one visitor to The States said – and I heavily paraphrase – “Every American is a bloody lawyer!”)  Today, armed with the Internet, every American has vastly expanded abilities to research and debate, if digital partisan flame throwing can be called debate.

Thus the fate of our nation has never been in the hands of elites, and it is even less so today.

These observation are related to this week’s election in Massachusetts; the elevation of a Republican to a Senate seat involuntarily vacated by the very vanguard of the Democrat party, and in a state where jackasses outnumber pacaderms by three-to-one.  Accepting the fact that Scott Brown’s opponent was a rhetorical weakling with the charisma of a cave bat, it is still stunning that he won.  Numerically the odds were against him and the Massachusetts Democrat machinery was menacing.  Obama carried 62% of Massachusetts voters in his rise to the White House. He and his policies should have carried weight in this election.

Neither did.

Foremost, Brown campaigned openly against Obama’s Soviet-style HMO plan.  Brown’s strategy was one of hopeful audacity.  This is no small aside.  Realigning health insurance is the signature item of the wounded Obama agenda.  To openly campaign against the president’s foremost initiative was not the gamble some pundits assume.  According to surveys, 85% of American have health insurance, 80% of them are happy with their coverage, and with each passing month more voters became unhappy with how the Democrats planned on changing that.  Indeed, 56% of Massachusetts voters said health care was their primary concern, and 78% of voters that backed Brown did so specifically to abort Obamacare.  Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, borderline criminal deals cut with soon-to-be former members of the Senate, offering their constituents amelioration not afforded to everyone else, turned voter resistance into open anger.

This included Massachusetts voters.  It takes some mightily shady dealings to make Boston Democrats vote GOP.

As with gun control in 2000, the Democrats are attempting to do to the people what the people do not want done to them (in a sexual context, this would be called rape, which would carry on a proud Kennedy tradition).  As in 2000 the people responded with their first two boxes – the soap box and the ballot box.  This leaves Democrats a mere nine months to make voters think that the majority party should remain such, that they are not a band of heavy handed hooligans who are openly indifferent to the source of true power.

They will fail.

The source of their defeat is in the White House.  Instead of administering to pressing issues of war and economy, Obama instead sought to remove the prerogative of the people concerning their health.  In the smolder of defeat, he claims he will continue his inept battle while also refocusing his obsessions on banks who, despite mythology, were not responsible for our current economic woes.  In a misguided attempt to channel voter discontent over the economy (which Obama amplified through his mismanagement thereof), Barack wants to turn screws on banks.  In his best faux Chicago street-tough façade, Obama said of the banks “If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have.” Of course, five days before Brown’s election Obama said “If Republicans want to campaign against what we’ve done … that is a fight I want to have.”

Gotta give the man credit for tenacity.  Brain-dead, bulldog, bite everybody until the dog pound takes you away tenacity.

But the real fight now comes from fellow Democrats.  No less of a mind than Robert Scheer (and there are no lesser minds than his) railed against Obama.  First Obama’s policies and tactics caused a revolt among The People.  Now his policies are causing revolt within the ranks.  All wars and battles are lost when one or another army enters a state of disarray.  Obama opposed the will of the people, which lost his party an iconic Massachusetts battle, and now his troops have started shooting one another.

Republicans, start unlacing your shoes – your turn at target practice is soon coming.

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Google is evil.

Sorry Sergey, Lawrence. You know as well as I that your manta of “don’t be evil” is transparent, and that like any powerful entity – be it corporate or government – it succumbs to sins of opportunity and convenience.

How has Google gone evil? Let me compute the ways.

First and foremost are multiple modes of censorship. A recent spate of reports showed Google playing religious games by censoring insults to Islam (note to Brin and Page – that is actually an insult to your customers). When one typed into Google’s search engine a phrase such as “Christianity is” or “Judaism is”, Google most helpfully filled in the top suggestions from its vast database, most of which were derogatory. Yet when the search phrase began “Islam is”, Google was oddly silent.

Some PR flack at Google suggested it is was programming bug, which this former hacker knows is not. Data queries operate on four simple models, and no others can exist. A search dumps nothing, dumps everything (obviously not the case here), allows a defined subset of information out (the general Google operation based on keywords) or dumps everything but disallows certain data to escape.

That last mode is the system that filtered insults to Islam but not to any other religion. This is not caused by a bug, it is caused by a configuration decision. Ipso facto, someone in Google took specific and premeditated action to avoid displaying what people think about Islam, yet leaving uncensored what people think of other faiths. I have my suspicions that Google was prostrating itself before yet another brutal government.

Evil.

It should not surprise us then that Sergey and Lawrence unevenly endorse censorship and other forms of evil. Google’s relationship with one of the most evil entities in the known world – the tank rolling, protestor squashing, summary executing, labor camping and (yes) censoring government of mainland China. With better than a billion head and a growing middle class, China is an obvious place for advertising companies (like Google) to make a dime. Thus, Google bent over forwards for their PRC puppeteers, willfully excluding information for consumption by the average Chinese netitizen. Searching for “tiananmen square massacre” in google.cn produces a highly redacted set of responses than for google.com.

Evil.

Yet Brin and Page threw a harmonized hissy fit when the same source of evil (the Chinese government, not Google, though it is increasing difficult to decide which is more ruthless) hacked into Google’s systems to troll for dissident data – emails to and from human rights activists. Google stomped its corporate feet and threatened to exit the Chinese market, where unlike the rest of the world, Google is not the market leader.

To summarize, it is OK for Google to unilaterally (Islam) and collaboratively (China) perform evil acts on the world at large, but it is not OK for evil to be committed against Google.

But Google won’t leave China. Instead, Google is ‘discussing’ with tyrants what can be done to accommodate freedom, which is nothing. As evidence, China issued a most interesting quote about the incident, saying “Properly guiding Internet opinion is a major measure for protecting Internet information security.” In the end Google will accept their 35% share of 1.3 billion people because that’s real money, something more important to Silicon Valley than right and wrong.

Evil.

Google’s grotesqueness is greater than just its major non-movements. They have taken lessons from other organization and engineered recurring forms of minor mass thievery. After all, most of Google’s wealth comes from advertisers, and numerically most of their advertisers are small operations. The past year brought light to a tiny Google scam where by Sergey and Lawrence recruited new advertisers with a teaser of 100 free pay-per-click dollars. Readily available coupons allow new account owners to start running Google ads everywhere. Just give Google your credit card number (in case you go over your $100) and everything is set in motion.

The problem is that the usage and click rates are initially not shown in the new user’s account, leaving them to think that their ads ineffective. Newbies continue to tweak their ads, and many stop tracking performance daily. They are delighted somewhat later when click-through begin to appear. Nuevo advertisers are equally undelighted when they get a hefty bill from Google. The oddly silent initial ineffectualness of Google’s ads cause new users to believe that subsequent clicks are billed against the free $100. In fact, that gift has been spent on the unreported clicks, and the surge of activity seen by Google’s new users is billed to their credit cards. Since the initial $100 basically costs Google nothing, it is an elaborate scam to suck money from otherwise attentive people who previously had no interest in advertising via Google.

Evil.

I myself encountered an odd issue with Google advertising. Having decided to pimp my book AFTERLIFE in multiple ways, I ran some Google display ads. The campaign’s end occurred at the start of the Christmas holiday travel season, and I disabled all campaigns before boarding the whisperjet. Naturally I was somewhat surprised to receive a bill from Google for advertising that ran during the holidays, and to discover that one of my campaigns had been reactivated without my permission.

Evil.

I can suffer this minor economic rear-ender. What cannot be suffered is a witch in corporate clothing. Google’s transgressions – petty theft, mass censorships of the masses – are sins against the common man. Powerful as Brin and Page may be, they cannot abuse governments because governments have the off switch for data routers. But the caustic indifference to Google shown by governments is the same indifference Google shows to people, the ones that directly and indirectly made Sergey and Lawrence wealthy and powerful. Until they quit being evil, it is up to the people to quit aiding said evil. Maybe we need to ping Bing.

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