Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
Well, Obama has brought me around to realize the error of my ways.
A couple of years ago I wrote a scathing article about how Obama has fundamentally gutted the American space program in his “fundamental transformation” of America into a third-world banana republic. And I was particularly pissed off (please pardon my language, but I’m trying to accurately describe my state of mind at that time) over the political correctness of the gutting of the space program that America had taken so much pride in before Messiah Obama.
I now realize how wrong I was.
But look, for the official record, I wasn’t the only one to be angry and appalled. The former astronauts who made the American space program the greatest in the world – household-name astronauts such as Neil Armstrong – were just as livid as I was:
The first man to walk on the moon has told senators that new plans by Barack Obama will cede America’s long-time space programme leadership to other nations.
Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan, the last astronaut on the moon, told a Senate Commerce Committee hearing that the US president’s plan to revamp the human space programme was short on ambition, including the decision to alter the Bush administration’s goal of establishing a permanent presence on the moon.
Mr Cernan said that he, Mr Armstrong and Apollo 13 commander James Lovell agreed that the administration’s budget for human space exploration “presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to ‘nowhere'”.
Mr Lovell, while not present at the hearing, issued a statement opposing Mr Obama’s Nasa budget.
So I’m in great company in my error. Well, to the extent that Neil Armstrong isn’t disgraced for playing the role of Winston Smith vs. Big Brother in 1984. I mean, look what happened to Winston.
But now we know why Obama’s magnificence is so magnificent. And why the merely mortal such as myself and Neil Armstrong can only grovel at his feet.
Obama – as Messiah – knows what no merely mortal mind can know. He knew that humans in space mean the pollution of space and the transportation of man-caused global warming to other worlds.
Are hurricanes caused by man-caused global warming? Of course they are. Just ask any liberal. Ask Al Gore:
The images of Sandy’s flooding brought back memories of a similar—albeit smaller scale— event in Nashville just two years ago. There, unprecedented rainfall caused widespread flooding, wreaking havoc and submerging sections of my hometown. For me, the Nashville flood was a milestone. For many, Hurricane Sandy may prove to be a similar event: a time when the climate crisis—which is often sequestered to the far reaches of our everyday awareness became a reality.
While the storm that drenched Nashville was not a tropical cyclone like Hurricane Sandy, both storms were strengthened by the climate crisis. Scientists tell us that by continually dumping 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every single day, we are altering the environment in which all storms develop. As the oceans and atmosphere continue to warm, storms are becoming more energetic and powerful. Hurricane Sandy, and the Nashville flood, were reminders of just that. Other climate-related catastrophes around the world have carried the same message to hundreds of millions.
Okay. So we have established fact here, don’t we? Hurricanes are caused by man-caused global warming. And bigger hurricanes are caused by more man-caused global warming.
So what do we make of a hurricane on Saturn that is TEN TIMES LARGER than any hurricane in the history of planet earth?
On Apr. 29, 2013, NASAannounced that its Cassini probe had discovered an enormous hurricane in the atmosphere of Saturn. The hurricane is located at the north pole of Saturn, and has wind speeds of 530 kilometers per hour. Its eye wall is about 2,000 kilometers wide, nearly ten times larger than the eye walls of hurricanes on Earth. The large size of the hurricane is made possible in part by the fact that Saturn is just over nine times larger than Earth in diameter. A similar polar hurricane on Saturn’s south pole was spotted by Cassini in 2006.
“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”
Scientists hope that studying the hurricane will give insight into hurricanes on Earth. There are important differences between storms on Earth and storms on Saturn; for example, the Saturnian hurricane is locked into position over the planet’s north pole, while hurricanes on Earth tend to drift toward the poles, but never manage to get there. “The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that’s likely why it’s stuck at the pole,” said Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Va. This suggests the possibility that at times in Earth’s past when the climate was warmer and more capable of producing strong hurricanes that long-lived polar storms could have developed on Earth.
Obama, in his sublime deity, knew this before the astrophysicists. Those damn humans have already polluted Saturn – and we haven’t even BEEN there, yet. Just imagine how big that damn hurricane would be if astronauts drove around in their giant NASA SUVs.
Science should now be defined as that which agrees with and justifies Obama. For Obama is the standard of all reality.
Well, either that, or these idiotic pompous fools are dragging America and anybody else dumbass enough to listen to them into dodo-bird extinction.
Because these liberal climate screamers are lunatic morons. And the more degrees they write after their names, the more “lunatic-moron” they are for believing this idiocy.
I mean, again, you global warming buffoons who follow King Buffoon AlGore: what does that piece on Saturn’s hurricane say?
“This suggests the possibility that at times in Earth’s past when the climate was warmer and more capable of producing strong hurricanes that long-lived polar storms could have developed on Earth.”
You know, remember back when there were no damn humans and earth was WARMER THAN IT IS NOW??? Remember that, you abject liberal dumbasses?
Which kind of points out that either actual science is bogus or every single liberal who ever lived ought to be sterilized lest they give birth and produce more of their pathologically stupid kind.
Once in a while the Obama “scientists” actually say something that reveals the truth. Where does “climate change” come from – whether here, or on the damn planet SATURN, or any where else in our solar system where no human has ever been? It comes from changes in the sun, rather than whatever the demon-possessed left says.
Jesus, the REAL Messiah, talked more about catastrophic climate change than ANYBODY. He said it would happen just before the ultimate big government liberal – the beast – emerged to put the entire human race into the slavery of government tyranny. But liberals, like their boss Satan, have made it their plan to hijack the Word of God and pervert it to their demonic ends.
I might be wrong, but I’ve read several stories about the Mars Rover mission now – and every single one of them only provides ONE reason for why NASA launched this $2.5 billion mission: to search for proof of evolution in the form of proof of panspermia.
Panspermia is the view that life was – as religious people have told them for thousands of years – far too complex to have originated on earth. So since we know that there could not possibly have been an Intelligent Creator God, the only remaining possibility is that life evolved somewhere else and then came here.
Directed panspermia is an attempt to evade some of the difficulties associated with the concept of abiogenesis. Panspermia theories argue that life began elsewhere in the universe and was subsequently seeded on earth. Some proponents of panspermia hold that life rode on meteorites travelling through space which eventually landed on earth and allowed the Darwinian mechanism to take over. A major problem with this suggestion is the sheer improbability that any life form could survive the radiation and extreme temperatures found in space.
Other proponents of panspermia, such as the co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, Francis Crick, suggest that intelligent aliens visited earth and seeded it with the first life form. The willingness of many scientists to resort to the hypothesis of aliens does not say much for their prospects of finding a feasible naturalistic model for the origin of life. The main problem with panspermia theories is that they only explain how life initially got to earth — they say nothing about the actual origin of life. All such theories merely attempt to shift the problem of the emergence of life to another location.
But here we are, spending $2.5 billion to see if life originated on Mars.
In a way, it’s almost reassuring: the very craziest theory of evolution is now essentially the most mainstream of all the craziest possibilities.
What’s the purpose of the Mars Rover mission? It is this:
to find whether Mars has the crucial ingredients that could once have supported life.
Well, here’s the thing: what happens if the Mars Rover finds no life on Mars? What if they don’t find evidence that Mars supported life? Was the mission a failure? Was the money wasted? How could it NOTbe given the purpose of the mission???
NASA needs to either find something they can call “evidence” that Mars could have once supported life or they need to explain why they pissed away $2.5 billion in a day when America is going broke.
I’m just telling you right now that they’re going to conjure up the former so they won’t have to do the latter. I read articles whose headlines screech that some incredible new find has “proven” evolution. Invariably I end up reading some incredibly minor and trivial thing that amounts to “Mt. Molehill.” If you read enough of these, you will begin to conclude that the more meaningless a “discovery” is, the louder they are in hyping it.
And just to continue: if they can’t find life on Mars and aren’t able to fabricate some “evidence” that they did, would they finally acknowledge that boy were we ever wrong in our idiotic Darwinism and let’s all join hands and worship our Lord God Almighty? NO! Theirs is a radical religious faith commitment that literally everything came from nothing. They believe that life came from lifelessness. They believe that intelligence is the result of mindlessness. They believe that all the purpose and meaning and value came from purposeless, meaningless, valueless nothingness.
When the purpose of a $2.5 billion mission is to find evidence of life, there is a lot of pressure to FIND “evidence” of life. But let’s say they don’t “find” it. Is that it? Do they acknowledge, well, shoot, I guess we were wrong”? Hardly. They’ll say, well, there were a lot of other sites we could have landed on. We’ll need to come back to a different site next time. Or to a different planet (Uranus sounds good). Or to one of an infinite number of planets. Believing that life is “out there” means never having to admit you were wrong.
In any words, evolution is no more “scientifically falsifiable” than even the most ardent young earth creationist claim. Their standard is impossible to prove. I mean, you show me that God “could not possibly have” created the earth.
The whole way they sold evolution was a lie.
And I then stated:
There is NEVER an admission of guilt or an acknowledgment of error by these people. They simply suppress or destroy the evidence, or “morph” their argument, or anything but acknowledge that just maybe they should be open-minded and question their presuppositions.
The reason “scientists” tell us that we can’t drag our religion into science is because you can’t disprove that God didn’t create. That might be true; but you can’t disprove evolution any more than you can disprove God. Because both evolution and Creation are equally religious views.
Then there’s NASA. How much should we trust an agency that literally got started by Nazi rocket scientists?
You can understand the mindset: when you’ve got the coldest winter since 1886, blame it on global warming and then make sure you quit calling it “global warming” and start calling it “climate change.” When you call it “climate change” you don’t even NEED a damn theory any more; all you’ve got to do is demagogue every hot day or every cold day or every tornado or every hurricane or every whatever.
Problems with this ice age no we meant global warming no we meant climate change no we were right when we said global warming (at least until winter comes again) theory abound:
“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” – Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
“Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.”
– Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society
“Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.”
– John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
“Humans on the Earthbehave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.”
– Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia
“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.”
– Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.”
– United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment
“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
– Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor [and major DEMOCRAT PARTY DONOR]
So pardon me if I’m not impressed with the “James Hansen Agency” or its “missions.”
And pardon me for looking at what “scientists” and even NASA “scientists” have done with global warming and understand why I’m more than a tad skeptical about this “mission” that really already seems to have a predetermined “discovery.”
It is hard for me to believe that our most brilliant of brains over at NASA couldn’t have figured out a way to come up with a purpose for sending that rover to Mars that didn’t involve “proving” that there is no God and I’m just the result of a race that began as a protein that evolved into a microbe that evolved into a fish that evolved into a lizard that evolved into a monkey that evolved into a man. And I’m saying if that was their only reason for their $2.5 billion mission, I wish they’d saved the money.
If you’re going to have a mission to explore space and increase the knowledge of science, I’m all for it. If you’re going to have a mission to prove atheistic panspermia, then leave me out of it. And leave my tax dollars out of it. If you think I’m wrong for having that attitude, then I hope you’ll be demanding that NASA’s next mission goes to Mars to “search for the crucial ingredients to support young earth creationism.”
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together. (Applause.)
So all these issues go back to that first campaign that I talked about, because everything has to do with how do we help middle-class families, working people, strivers, doers — how do we help them succeed? How do we make sure that their hard work pays off? That’s what I’ve been thinking about the entire time I’ve been President.
Now, over the next four months, the other side is going to spend more money than we’ve even seen in history. And they don’t really have a good argument for how they would do better, but they’re thinking they can win the election if they just remind people that a lot of people are still out of work, and the economy is not growing as fast as it needs to, and it’s all Obama’s fault. That’s basically their pitch.
The spirit of Obama’s words boils down to EXACTLY what I said about this demon-possessed man in a piece I wrote nearly two years ago titled “Obama’s Government As God Believes It Owns Everything The People Earn.” To wit: we owe the government EVERYTHING. We are NOTHING without the government; we are ENTIRELY produced and shaped by government and we could do absolutely nothing to better ourselves apart from politicians and bureaucrats. The only difference between rich, successful people and poor, unsuccessful people is that the former are better at taking advantage of the benefits of government. And therefore the Government frankly ought to basically own us and it own absolutely everything we produce – such that whatever the Government DOESN’T take in taxes from us is literally considered a COST to Government. But Government in its deity is gracious and mercifully allows us otherwise pathologically helpless descendents of monkeys to keep some of what we earned entirely because of all the many Government blessings.
Obama’s remark produces this question: is America a people who have a government or is America a government that has a people? Obama very firmly believes the latter.
Let me first explain why Obama’s words are just incoherent pabulum. Obama starts yapping about roads and bridges that were built by government. But there’s an obvious question: where did the government get the funds to build those roads and bridges? And is it seriously Obama’s assertion that “the Government” climbed aboard the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria and was the very first entity to stride onto the beach of the New World???
What came first, the chicken or the egg? I don’t know what YOUR answer is, but Obama’s answer is “The Government came first, and that’s all that really matters.”
Obama’s rant depends entirely upon the assumption that government didn’t even exist at all until Karl Marx invented it. It depends upon the straw man demagoguery that Republicans are nihilistic anarchists who have actually been trying to dissolve all government. It depends on the narrative that only Democrats and only Obama want to have ANY government at all. And that is why quite literally every single success of government in history actually becomes the result of Obama’s policies that Republicans want to stop.
It’s an incredibly weak and idiotic point, and so it isn’t that surprising that Obama would reach to some profoundly contradictory examples to try to substantiate it.
Government gave us the internet. So of course therefore rich people should be taxed at whatever the hell rate Obama says they should.
“The President signed and supported cuts in the defense budget of close to a trillion dollars that his own Secretary of Defense has said—we’re talking about Leon Panetta, here—are devastating to the military and equivalent to shooting ourselves in the head. This was done with no strategic analysis of the needs of national security and no plan for how to implement the cuts. Even now we don’t know the details of how the cuts are going to be implemented. We do know that they’re planning to cut 200,000 troops. Given the state of the economy, it’s equivalent to laying them off and the military is sending them to the unemployment lines.”
Fact: the military didn’t build the damn internet “so that all the companies could make money off the Internet,” you damn disgrace to the presidency; the military built the internet to network computers so that the United States could further protect itself against attack and regain a technological edge that had been lost to the Russians.
You need to understand, Obama’s never-before-seen expansion of government into Government isn’t going to create the next internet and it won’t put the first man on Mars. Rather, it will put a man on his couch on permanent welfare for life as long as he votes Democrat and as long as we don’t run out of somebody else’s money. Obama’s Government is only intended to massively, MASSIVELY, MASSIVELY expand government dependency of a class of redistribution-loving welfare-sucking pigmy people. Obama’s policy is not the means to the next great thing; it is the END of greatness.
Let me just round file that “storytelling” into a “How the hell can you be that stupid?” alert.
Obama wants to take credit for public schools, does he? The public education system has utterly and comprehensively failed American children who are left “waiting for Superman” because government and unions have seized childrens’ futures. The only reason that public schools continue to exist is because liberals turned the public school system into a monopoly that benefits liberals. An organization I serve provides monthly support to a Christian private school. That school is located in a state (California) that is in the bottom ten percentile of schools in the nation for SAT scores. That school is located in a county (Riverside) that is in the bottom ten percentile of schools in California for SAT scores. And that Christian school is in the ninetieth percentile in the entire nation for SAT scores. And politicians and bureaucrats like Barack Obama WILL NOT allow parents to use their tax money to attend such a school; rather they will force most American children to rot in these government schools that are frankly more like prisons today than centers of learning.
Let me simply assure you that Barack Obama is dead frigging WRONG about “without Government there would be no schools!” and present the fact that kids who have escaped Obama’s wildly failed government schools are running circles around the mindless drones that are increasingly being pumped out by union-owned indoctrination factories a.k.a. public schools.
Let’s go over the punchline of the sick, twisted, perverted joke Obama is playing on the American people again:
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
I’ve known quite a few people who started their own businesses. And what I’ve encountered proves that Barack Obama is a liar without shame. Because the small business owners I have known were people who risked virtually everything they had built in their lives to borrow enough money to start their businesses. Because the small business owners I have known were people who worked upwards of a hundred hours a week – basically seven days a week – to get their businesses off the ground. Because the small business owners I have known were self-made men and women who scratched and then carved out a niche for themselves with the government being FAR more of a burden and hindrance than it ever was a blessing to them.
“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” Mr. Obama continued. “Somebody else made that happen.” This claim would come as a surprise to the small-business owners who have invested their lives and life savings in making a go of it. It would be a shock to inventors and innovators who have been the drivers of America’s technological edge. It does make sense, however, coming from someone who has never had a job that didn’t depend on patronage and has spent his entire career getting ahead on identity and charisma instead of creativity and achievement.
“We succeed because we do things together,” the president chimed. He neglected to mention that lately, too much togetherness has been a source of failure. The type of relationships that help lead to success in life, the personal and professional bonds of trust and fellowship, aren’t what Mr. Obama is selling. He’s trying to pitch the idea that everyone in business should be required to take on government as a partner, with himself as a member of the board. He’s discarding the capitalist notion of free association and replacing it with the socialist idea of forced oversight by the state. The anemic economy, high unemployment and skyrocketing debt that are the products of his policies don’t deter Mr. Obama. He envisions a golden age in the future by repeating the failed policies of the past.
The government Mr. Obama worships isn’t a source of economic growth. It retards innovation, prevents jobs from being created and halts business expansion. Government under current management has become the greatest threat to initiative, creativity and wealth generation in American history. Mr. Obama thinks there is no finer force for good than his administration, but it’s a wrecking ball to prosperity. His Cabinet has the least collective private-sector experience of any Cabinet ever. This is the group that thinks unemployment checks and food stamps create jobs, that the public sector creates prosperity and that raising taxes on the productive to transfer it to the unproductive will create growth. The wonder is not that the economy is doing so poorly, but that it hasn’t collapsed altogether.
Mr. Obama has no business talking about business. He has never created anything substantive and doesn’t understand those who have made it their life’s work. This president only invented the stories and people he made up for his purported autobiography, assuming somebody else didn’t make that happen.
Update, 7/18/12: I’ve already had liberals say that “Obama didn’t say what he very clearly actually said.” So let’s show an even clearer version of Obama’s gobblygook to see that what Obama is saying has already been spread through every single liberal roach in the nest:
“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren said. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”
That is the SAME argument that Obama was making – and it couldn’t be clearer. The assertion is that “nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” Those are the exact words. And why would Democrats say that? Because Government built the roads, that’s why. And therefore the Government is responsible for ALL the wealth that was created. And therefore those who ONLY succeeded because of Government owe the Government EVERYTHING. EVERYBODY owes the Government EVERYTHING. Which is a statement of pure Marxism and which if taken to its logical conclusion justifes the Government in taking over EVERYTHING.
Let me give you a couple of quick examples of where evil ideas like this lead:
1) Liberals say that health care is a universal right that everyone should have and nobody (but rich people) should have to pay for. Okay. What about housing? How is it that health care is a universal right but housing isn’t? Don’t I have the right to live in a house that somebody else should have to pay for? What about food? Why the hell am I forced to pay for my own food when Obama should be giving it to me? Wht about clothing? What about transportation? What about fuel for my transportation? If health care is a universal right, then ALL of the others and many more things become universal rights. Becaue there is no way in hell that you can say that everyone has the universal right to health care but nobody ought to have the universal right to housing, to food, to clothing, to transportation, etc. etc. etc. And the logically necessary conclusion to the first “universal right” is a totalitarian Marxist state in which the State owns you and owns everything around you.
2) A particular example comes from Rahm Emanuel who is taking Obama’s abrogation of illegal immigration to the next logical level. Obama’s former chief of staff and now Chicago Mayor Emanuel is saying that Obama didn’t go far enough in refusing to enforce federal laws that were passed by Congress and signed into law by a president of the United States. Emanuel has an out-of-control murder rate that proves that liberalism equals lawlessness. So he’s in a tight spot and has to get Hispanic voters on his side. And so now he’s saying he’s more liberal than Obama; Emanuel is a better liberal who can out-liberal the liberal-in-chief. So Emanuel will go even further in abrogating the law to win his base than Obama went to win his. And there is simply no end to that. Until you get to a pure Marxist State for which the Constitution and the constitutional framework of separation of powers is utterly meaningless.
To further attack Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama’s idiotic Marxist rhetoric, both the rich and the poor get to take equal advantage of all the government services. If you call the cops, does the 911 operator ask you if you are rich and hang up on you if you’re not? If you pull out of the driveway, does a cop demand your IRS information so that you can show that you are wealthy enough to use the damn road? It is a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD. And in point of fact the rich paid a much, MUCH bigger share for those roads and those police than the poor ever did. You are simply a liar if you suggest otherwise.
But some people playing on that level playing field took independent initiative which Marxists around the world hate. They wanted to better themselves. And Democrats like Obama and Warren can’t have any of that. If you take risks, buy a business, work like hell to grow that business, spend all of your energy and time investing yourself and your creativity into that business, well, to quote Obama: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.” The welfare-sucking Democrat parasite deserves as much of the wealth produced by your business as you do. Why? Because the government built the roads and hired the police and so that business owner built nothing and therefore deserves nothing.
And you will necessarily get Marxism unless and until people start saying, “That is a lie from the devil. We can’t go there. We WON’T go there. We will vote out Obama and Warren and absolutely everybody who believes the hell that they believe.”
You need to understand something: liberalism is half-ass Marxism that will be taken to full-fledge Marxism the moment the left truly is able to take power.
There’s a problem with Marxism that few liberals bother to think about in their Utopian visions of a world in which everyone has a universal right to everything that Government can provide. Allow me to quote the question and the Marxist answer that was developed out of necessity because their original premises were so wildly wrong and evil:
Why work?
In a challenging paper, Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984) argued that – despite imperfect monitoring – work incentives are preserved in Western economies because those caught shirking face the threat of unemployment and loss of income. The ‘No Shirking Condition’ they derive for wages constitutes the effective labour supply curve for the economy – with labour demand given by its marginal productivity. We apply the same broad logic to the Soviet system in CEPR DP 6621 – but with two significant alterations. First, in deriving the No Shirking Condition for labour supply, custodial sentences replace spells of unemployment-on-benefit as the ‘worker-discipline device’, so the supply price of labour falls not with the numbers of unemployed but with the population of the Gulag. Second, wages are set below the marginal productivity of labour as the dictator exercises monopsony power in the labour market to maximise investible funds.
… The state commands a goodly share of national resources, but wages are pushed down to ‘efficiency’ levels – just high enough to prevent shirking. No-one is unemployed, but many are in labour camps.
Ironically, the outcome for labour is as if it faced a greedy capitalist who wanted to maximise profits and had the market power to do so. More than that, the state employer can also manipulate the living and working conditions for those not in civilian employment to further its own ends. To increase investment, for example, prison conditions can be made harsher – so as to lower the supply price of civilian labour and reduce consumption. Where this may lead is what Solzhenitsyn (1963) describes – from first-hand experience – in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
You need to understand that everything Obama stands for is a system in which the rich are discouraged from working harder because they are not allowed – and do not deserve – to keep the fruits of what they risked more and worked harder to earn.
So why work harder at all? Why even work? After all, if business owners didn’t build their businesses, who can truly be said to build anything? Why bother to work to build anything at all?
The penultimate result of that kind of thinking is the Marxist solution. You will work harder not because we will reward you for working harder – that contradicts our liberal philosophy that some deserve more than others. No, you will work harder because the State requires that you work harder and you will work harder because otherwise we will put you in a gulag and MAKE you work harder.
That is the logical outcome of where Obama is heading. History has already proven that time and again.
Let’s see what small business owner Jack Gilchrist says about Obama’s telling him he and his family didn’t build their business:
Obama talked about America facing a “Sputnik moment” last night. For the record, “Sputnik” was a Soviet successful satellite that stunned America out of its complacency. America entered the space race with a vengeance, and won it by a knockout. Obama exploited that moment, pointed out that America is watching the world go past us, and says we need to be competitive by pursuing massive government spending oops I mean “investment.”
But he did evoke a huge defense issue from a half-century ago—the signal wake-up security call that marked the years of transition from Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy, the single word that has symbolized ever since the fear of slipping behind in a dangerous world: Sputnik.
“This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” Obama said. As a result, we need to fund “a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the space race.”
Well, at the heart of Obama’s State of the Union speech were many contradictions. And I’ll get to them. But his “Sputnik moment” thing was the worst one of all.
Allow me to cite a couple of my own articles to document just how stunningly pathetic Obama’s analogy truly is:
The first article above documents how Obama has been GUTTING the space program, and in fact RETURNING AMERICA to the pre-Sputnik vulnerability. To the disgust and open contempt of former NASA heroes. And the second documents how Obama has turned the now disgraced NASA into yet another tool for political correctness.
And to make sure you realize how pathetically laughable Obama’s analogy is, let’s make sure we understand that Sputnik was a Russian threat, and then let’s make sure we understand how Obama has helped undermine American interests to advance the Russians with yet another title:
That one documents how Obama has undermined America’s missile defense program. And the actual Sputnik moment was all about dealing with Russian missiles.
This guy’s talking about our Sputnik moment? Seriously?
Conservatives had already debunked many of Obama’s lies last night before he even told them. I’ve debunked those lies right here.
But sadly we must take Obama seriously. Because Obama’s real political genius comes down to one simple thing: he realized that the people who support him are stupid and ignorant, don’t know a damn thing that the incredibly biased media machine doesn’t tell them, and that he can therefore spit out anything and not get caught by much of America in his deceit.
Obama is our Sputnik moment. By which I mean, this turd-in-chief and his policies are the reason that we are failing and falling behind while other nations around us rise up and overtake us.
One of the other major contradictions of Obama’s speech are that he is essentially acting as if the previous two years didn’t happen. “Nothing to see over there, folks, now if you don’t mind looking this way.” Obama is saying that we need a major new “investment” (which is a tidy euphemism for yet more government pork), when in fact he has already “invested” well over a trillion dollars with absolutely nothing to show for it but more debt and more deficits than this nation has ever seen before.
Which is why DeMint said:
When asked about President Obama’s statements about government investments, DeMint said, “Now the president is promising more spending, which he calls investments, when the time is to cut spending in Washington.. The president needs to tell the American people the truth.. That its time for the federal government to do less.”
Let’s look at Obama’s trillions in “investment” and see what effect it has had on our “competitiveness”:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States spends more public and private money on education than other major countries, but its performance doesn’t measure up in areas ranging from high-school graduation rates to test scores in math, reading and science, a new report shows.
That dates back to 2003. Look before that, look after that, and the results are the same. We spend and spend and spend while our kids get dumber and dumber and dumber. To the extent that right now only a third of our kids are considered proficient in major subjects.
Here’s the problem: liberals call for more and more and more spending, but liberals make sure that all the largess goes to them, and goes to their politically connected interests. Like the liberal teachers unions that are the REAL reason our country is falling behind in education. And to the extent we spend more, we only feed the beast that is the REAL source of our dilemma and help build it into an even BIGGER problem as it uses its vast resources to protect the status quo.
Obama wants to spend billions on “green energy.” What that means is that he wants to subsidize incredibly expensive and NON-Competitive energy sources while our rivals continue to run circles around us with cheap and efficient oil and coal. And the more and the faster we spend, the more and the faster we fall behind.
The real sputnik moment, epitomized in the person of Obama himself, is this: America is spending itself into extinction. It is not wise spending, because we are sucking money out of the efficient private sector, giving to an incredibly inefficient and wasteful federal government, and then doling it out on the basis of political patronage rather than common sense.
I’ll end with this: Obama is using a “mangled multiplier” as his basis for the need for more government spending. On Obama’s and the Democrat Party’s distorted view, for every dollar the federal government spends, we get a $1.55 “bang for our buck.” But it isn’t true. Unless you really think building tunnels for turtles, bridges to nowhere and studying cow flatulence is going to make America great. On the International Monetary Fund model, which just makes more sense in addition to being less ideologically biased, we only get back 70 cents for every dollar spent. See this article for the documentation on that, and check out this graph:
In his SOTU speech, Obama provided an airplane metaphor that went:
“Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you’ll feel the impact.”
On Obama’s metaphor, government is the engine that flies our economy. And if you reduce government spending, you eliminate the engine and the plane crashes. But that simply isn’t true; it is PRIVATE spending that flies our economy. And sucking money out of the private sector to create more government bureaucracy and more pork-barrel spending is foolhardy. It is actually OBAMA who is actually removing the engine from our economy.
If we really want to experience a “Sputnik moment” and surge back to greatness, what we need to do is wake up and vote out Obama and the Democrat Party.
Houston, we have a problem. Our president is a chucklehead.
I can imagine Barry Hussein sending a helmeted American astronaut to Mecca, live on video feed, and hearing him say as he steps inside, “That’s one small step for man, one giant step for Sharia.”
Any student of history worth at least a penny should be readily able to see how our Failure-in-Chief Obama represents everything that is declining, failing, and unsustainable.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.
One could present a powerful argument that it was as a result of that speech that the United States dominated space and dominated space-age technology for the following forty-plus years.
But NASA just got new marching orders. From the moon to Mars? Nope. From the moon to anywhere? Nope. From the moon to mediocrity? You’re starting to get warm.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world.
Though international diplomacy would seem well outside NASA’s orbit, Bolden said in an interview with Al Jazeera that strengthening those ties was among the top tasks President Obama assigned him. He said better interaction with the Muslim world would ultimately advance space travel.
“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering,” Bolden said in the interview.
So Obama’s new mission for NASA is first, not to go into space, second not to go into space, and third not to go into space.
Instead he’s got the most technologically powerful agency on earth doing his useless politically-correct hopey-changey crap.
And only Barry Hussein is naive enough to actually believe that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and the Taliban are going to quit hating us because we tore NASA apart and pissed it away.
What a legacy of failure from the worst failure to ever occupy the White House. One can just look at the past few weeks to see what a useless turd Obama is. I think of Vice President Joe Biden explaining how “Yes We Can” really meant “No We Can’t” on jobs:
I think of Kennedy boldly saying “We choose to go to the moon!” Do you realize how incredible that statement is? Now we’ve got failures who don’t even have the balls to predict that we’re going to be able to restore jobs right here on earth – even with their “saved or created” bullcrap.
OBAMA: The US economy for a long period of time was the engine of world economic growth. We were sucking in imports from all across the world financed by huge amounts of consumer debt. Because of the financial crisis, but also because that debt was fundamentally unsustainable, the United States is not going to be able to serve in that same capacity to that same extent.
“But I think the world understands now that world growth in the future can’t depend on the United States as much as it did in the past. So, for the world to grow together, we have to see more growth in the other major economies. Not just in the emerging markets, which are very strong now, in the United States.”
Because We Are All Socialists Now and our days of greatness in the world are now behind us in the age of Obama.
Levin said this is a sign that the president wants to “rebalance the globe.”
“We selfish, piggish Americans, and all the rest of the people out there who we abuse in other countries, we’ve got to rebalance this ladies and gentlemen and he is going to rebalance this for us,” Levin said. “Do you know what that means in the mind of a Marxist? We become poorer so the others can become richer, and then we get equality.”
He later added, “You know what our enemies must be thinking? This is cool. We don’t even have to defeat them. We’ve got Obama. Obama’s on our side. He’ll defeat his own people for us. “
I think of Ronald Regan boldly predicting the downfall of an evil empire that covered a sixth of the globe and stretched over 11 time zones. I think of Reagan boldly going to the Brandenburg Gate and saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And succeeding in bringing down that vast, evil empire without firing a shot. Now we’ve got failures who don’t even have the balls to believe that we can even possibly secure our damn border from an illegal invasion:
“Even as we are committed to doing what’s necessary to secure our borders, even without passage of the new law, there are those who argue that we should not move forward with any other elements of reform until we have fully sealed our borders,” said Obama. “But our borders are just too vast for us to be able to solve the problem only with fences and border patrols. It won’t work.
“It’s just too hard.” “It won’t work.” “No We Can’t.” “Wah.”
Now, I’m sure that at this point some moral idiot will eventually challenge me that Reagan urged Russia to tear down it’s wall while people like me are demanding that we build a new wall of our own. I say “moral idiot” because such a person doesn’t have the moral reasoning capability to differentiate between the wall the Soviets built to prevent people from escaping and the wall we would build to prevent people from illegally invading our country.
Well, under Obama, America believes that it is an arrogant, mediocre nation that has nothing to offer but our bared throats and our apologies for terrible things we did such as defeat Nazism and world communism.
But there are a people who now believe that they have what the world needs: global domination under Islam and totalitarian sharia law.
Obama has bowed down to these people in every way imaginable – including literally:
So by all means, let’s strip American greatness to the bone. Let’s transform one of our greatest agencies into a politically-correct tool of ideological asininity. Let’s give up on our economy and job creation. Let’s abandon our global standing in the world.
You can’t deny, however, that such a reality WOULD in fact be “fundamentally transforming America.” There. See, Obama DID keep at least one campaign promise!
Obama, being sensitive to criticism, scheduled his trip to Florida today to not only shore up support for his NASA cuts but to shine the spotlight away from thousands of Tea Party protests all over the country on this tax day. NASA is one of the many non-entitlement programs that Obama is cutting to finance his socialistic dream.
I interviewed Dick Gordon, command module pilot of Apollo 12 today after the President’s speech. When asked what he thought of the speech he answered, “Not much. The President was long on rhetoric but short on specifics. Wait until the Russians are the only game in town. Their $50 million fee to the space station will escalate.”
Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon was interviewed today by Neil Cavuto after the speech. Cernan stated, “I have concerns about the future of this country. I’m not on board with Obama’s transformation of America. The President’s vision is a vision to nowhere. Nothing has changed today after I heard the President. You can take parts of his glib presentation today and add them up and there is no defiinition, no detail, there’s no real destination, no focus.”
Let’s see: “The President was long on rhetoric but short on specifics.” Why do the utterly vacuous Obama campaign slogan, “Hope and Change” come to mind?
And: “You can take parts of his glib presentation today and add them up and there is no definition, no detail, there’s no real destination, no focus.” Well, okay. No definition. No detail. No real destination. No focus. But smile, pump your fist, and holler, “Yes, we can!” when you say that.
In Barry Hussein, America decided that it wanted a self-deluded tool whose arrogance was outmatched only by his inexperience. Yes, we did, and now no, we can’t.
A few details about Obama’s “Dumb now, disaster later” policy:
Armstrong and his colleagues complained that the cancellation would amount to wasting the roughly $10 billion that has been allocated to Constellation over the past five years. “Equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to re-create the equivalent of what we will have discarded,” they wrote.
Someone said of the result of Obama’s policy for NASA something that is very much like the result of Obama’s tenure in the White House: “the agency of pipe dreams and fairy tales.”
And just in case you think that Obama’s a terrible president, correct yourself: Obama’s a HISTORICALLY terrible president.
“Only once previously has a US president recommended to the Congress that this nation take a backward step in space. On that occasion, President Nixon cancelled the Apollo programme, a decision which will come to be regarded as one of the most strategically bankrupt decisions in human history. If such a thing is possible, this decision is even worse.”
Let me end by quoting Barack Obama’s handpicked science czar. Surely Obama’s SCIENCE czar can put Obama’s NASA policy into perspective for us.
We certainly can’t expect to be number one in anything for very long under this failure of a president.
From the generation that looked up at the sky and then did the impossible by putting a human being on the moon and bringing him safely home, to the generation that hung their heads down in shame as their president apologized for their country’s former greatness.
Josh Fulton has this excellent refutation of global warming on his blog. I suggest going to his site, because there is additional information contained in the comments to the article.
Hmm, well, that’s suspicious, but I suppose that doesn’t matter if he tells us it’s alright.
I have a couple of articles that are now several months old, but which report information contained in the incredible book, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years:
In April, President Obama declared that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.” It was just another smarmy attempt on his part to demagogue the Bush administration and hold himself up as superior. But rather than actually proving himself morally superior to George Bush, Barack Obama has actually demonstrated just the opposite.
Science is forced to sit at the back of the bus now as it has never been before. And it is Barack Obama who is making it sit there.
While we consider massive legislation that would cripple U.S. productivity for a generation in the name of curbing carbon dioxide gasses that supposedly cause global warming, shouldn’t we consider the fact that the science actually saysthat global temperatures actually DROPPED for the past 11 years, even as carbon dioxide gas increased? Shouldn’t it matter that global temperatures are roughly where they were at the middle of the 20th century, and that if anything temperatures are going down rather than up? Shouldn’t it matter that the models that created the alarmist hype of “global warming” have now been proven to have been entirely wrong? Shouldn’t we truly question the link between whatever global warming we are seeing and carbon dioxide?
Not if the Obama White House and his Envioronmental Protection Agency have anything to do with it.
The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency — and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.
Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. “It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else,” Carlin said. “That was obviously coming from higher levels.”
E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to “have any direct communication” with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.
“I was told for probably the first time in I don’t know how many years exactly what I was to work on,” said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. “And it was not to work on climate change.” One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.
The suppression of evidence against global warming is not just occurring at the EPA. It goes on all the time. In another example that is occurring right now, one of the world’s leading polar bear experts is being barred from a conference simply because he knows how to count and doesn’t want to be pressured into positions that are opposed to his own scientific conclusions.
One of the world’s leading polar bear experts has been told to stay away from an international conference on the animals because his views are “extremely unhelpful,” according to an e-mail by the chairman of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, Dr. Andy Derocher.
The London Telegraph reports Canadian biologist Mitchell Taylor has more than 30 years of experience with polar bears. But his belief that global warming is caused by nature, not man, led officials to bar him from this week’s polar bear specialist group meeting in Denmark.
Taylor says the polar bear population has actually increased over the last 30 years. He says the threat to them by melting Arctic ice — illustrated by a famous photo taken by photographer Amanda Byrd — has become the most iconic cause for global warming theorists. The photo is often used by former Vice President Al Gore and others as an example of the dangers faced by the bears. But it was debunked last year by the photographer, who says the picture had nothing to do with global warming, and that the bears were not in danger. The photographer said she just happened to catch the bears on a small windswept iceberg.
During the 1970s, NASA scientists were warning about ice-age-like global cooling due to “the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere” and saying that “fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees” (realizing that all the disaster-hype now is freaking out over certain predictions of just a ONE degree increase. That alarmist prediction was published in the Washington Post on July 9, 1971 in an article entitled, “U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming.” The NASA scientist who offered that clearly false prediction relied on data compiled by a computer model created by colleague James Hansen. And Hansen has flipped from being one of the very worst alarmists about a cataclysmic ice age to one of the very worst alarmists about a cataclysmic global warming.
We have seen a pattern of bogus science and alarmism for decades now. And all men like Alan Carlin ask is that bureaucrats take a step back and assess the science before they jump into overreaching policies that will destroy our economy.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which released the EPA-suppressed Alan Carlin report, made the following statement:
“We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries have paid too little attention to the science of global warming. EPA an d others have tended to accept the findings reached by outside groups, particularly the IPCC and the CCSP, as being correct without a careful and critical examination of their conclu sions and documentation. If they should be found to be incorrect at a later date, however, and EPA is found not to have made a really careful review of them before reaching its decisions on endangerment, it appears likely that it is EPA rather than these groups that may be blamed for this error.”
That the IPCC should be discounted as a serious scientific entity should be proven by their gullible and ideological acceptance of a “hockey stick” model (so named because the data were manipulated to appear as though temperatures which had supposedly been flat for centuries suddenly shot up to form a hockey stick-like graph) was entirely fraudulent.
Anyone who takes a long view of things – and takes a few minutes to actually look at the scientific evidence – isn’t particularly alarmed about the “global warming.” What we find instead of anthropogenic global warming is a consistent cycle that has continued steadily long before man began to do anything to change the environment.
(Accessed via Newsbusters, which has a write-up on the chart).
I read the powerful book, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, which presents such an overwhelming case for naturally occurring warming and cooling cycles (having nothing to do with carbon dioxide or human activity) that it is posivitively unreal. Based on my reading, I wrote 2 articles that summarized some of what I learned:
Not only is the current Obama cap-and-trade legislation based on bogus science, but even if it WEREN’T bogus, the massively costly program would STILL have absolutely no impact on “global warming.”
Americans should ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. Since the U.S. share of global CO2 production is now less than 25 percent (and is projected to decline as China and other developing nations grow), a 15 percent fall in U.S. CO2 output would lower global CO2 output by less than 4 percent. Its impact on global warming would be virtually unnoticeable. The U.S. should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before committing to costly reductions in the United States. […]
In my judgment, the proposed cap-and-trade system would be a costly policy that would penalize Americans with little effect on global warming. The proposal to give away most of the permits only makes a bad idea worse. Taxpayers and legislators should keep these things in mind before enacting any cap-and-trade system.
The people who are advancing the global warming agenda don’t give a whig about climate change. What they want is statist government control, and the implementation of economic redistributionism in the name of “science.”
Revelation 6:6 – “And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.”
There are plenty of financial experts out there assuring us that any comparison between our current economic situation and the Great Depression are utterly baseless. The problem is that most of these experts are either demonstrated hypocrites who have themselves compared our economy to the Great Depression, or they are employing extremely flawed logic in their dismissals that may well even cross the line into outright deception.
CNBC “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer said on NBC’s “Today” show Dec. 2 that comparisons between the current economy and the Great Depression are “scare tactics.” Maybe he forgot about his own reliance on the juxtaposition….
But Cramer has been among the most vocal scaremongers when it comes to throwing around Great Depression warnings.
Criticizing economists who opposed the $700 billion taxpayer bailout of the financial industry on the “Today” show Oct. 1, Cramer warned the country was “on the precipice of Great Depression II.”
He made a similar claim about the financial bailout in September, arguing that if Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson didn’t find a way to get a rescue package passed, “we are going to have The Great Depression II on our hands.”
On Nov. 11, Cramer supported another proposed bailout – this time for the U.S. auto industry by saying it would prevent another depression. “It’s like look – we got to bail them out,” Cramer told CNBC “Street Signs” host Erin Burnett. “We have to. We have to keep the Great Depression off the table.”
In other words, the “Great Depression” basically becomes a shell game, where you see the shell when the shysters want you to look at it, and then you don’t see the shell when they want to keep it out of sight. It’s a bogeyman that some journalist, or some academic, or some government official can trot out to frighten us into doing what s/he wants to advance an agenda, and then put it away until they want to frighten us again.
Now, there was a time when a story like this one would have completely discredited a media personality such as Jim Cramer. But in these Bizarro World days, being discredited seems to be to a journalist’s career what having a tawdry sexual affair does to a movie star’s career.
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday the current economic situation bears “no comparison” to the much deeper crisis of the 1930s Great Depression.
“Well, you hear a lot of loose talk, but let me just … say, as a scholar of the Great Depression — and I’ve written books about the Depression and been very interested in this since I was in graduate school, there’s no comparison,” Bernanke said in a question period after an address in Austin, Texas.
Bernanke cited “an order-of-magnitude difference” in the current situation compared to the 1930s.
“During the 1930s, there was a worldwide depression that lasted for about 12 years and was only ended by a world war,” he said.
“During that time, the unemployment rate went to 25 percent, at least, based on the data that we have. The real GDP (gross domestic product) fell by one-third. About a third of all of the banks failed. The stock market fell 90 percent.”
Bernanke said the situation at that time represented “very difficult circumstances,” because “we didn’t have the social safety net that we have today. So let’s put that out of our minds; there’s no — there’s comparison in terms of severity.”
Well, first of all the fact is that Bernanke – just like Cramer – has himself made the comparison between our economy and the Great Depression, as the bottom of the same article clearly demonstrates:
In a related matter, President George W. Bush said in an interview released Monday that Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson warned him weeks ago that bold action was needed to avert a new Great Depression.
“I can remember sitting in the Roosevelt Room with Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke and others, and they said to me that if we don’t act boldly, Mr. President, we could be in a depression greater than the Great Depression,” Bush told ABC News.
Which clearly means that comparisons to the Great Depression clearly aren’t so silly after all – as evidenced by the very people who are most loudly telling us that such a comparison is silly.
Bernanke and others also imply that our social support structures and our financial expertise would prevent the worst effects of any so-called “Great Depression.” But is that really so?
The notion that a Great Depression could never happen because we know so much more doesn’t hold much water for me in the light of our “Keystone Cops-approach” to all of our various bailouts and attempts at political legislation. The fact is, after seeing our “experts” at work the last couple months, I have less confidence in them than I’ve ever had before.
But there’s another giant problem with Bernanke’s analysis, and it is difficult to imagine that he doesn’t himself recognize it. The problem is that he’s comparing apples to oranges; he’s comparing an economy that may well be on the throes of a future Great Depression to a 1930s economy that was already well into the worst stages of a depression. And he’s pointing out the obvious – but in fact completely irrelevant and actually completely absurd – fact that they don’t look alike. Of course they don’t look alike – yet.
But what would have happened had Bernanke compared the economy as it was in 1929 with our economy today, rather than the worst period of the 1930s? What would have happened had he looked at the economy just before the Black Tuesday crash of October 29, 1929, or even shortly after that crash? The numbers would have hardly appeared anywhere near so dire, which means Bernanks’ comparison would have failed.
The Great Depression was not triggered by a sudden, total collapse in the stock market. The stock market turned upward in early 1930, returning to early 1929 levels by April, though still almost 30 percent below the peak of September 1929.[7] Together, government and business actually spent more in the first half of 1930 than in the corresponding period of the previous year. But consumers, many of whom had suffered severe losses in the stock market the previous year, cut back their expenditures by ten percent, and a severe drought ravaged the agricultural heartland of the USA beginning in the summer of 1930.
In early 1930, credit was ample and available at low rates, but people were reluctant to add new debt by borrowing. By May 1930, auto sales had declined to below the levels of 1928. Prices in general began to decline, but wages held steady in 1930, then began to drop in 1931. Conditions were worst in farming areas, where commodity prices plunged, and in mining and logging areas, where unemployment was high and there were few other jobs. The decline in the American economy was the factor that pulled down most other countries at first, then internal weaknesses or strengths in each country made conditions worse or better. Frantic attempts to shore up the economies of individual nations through protectionist policies, such as the 1930 U.S. Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tariffs in other countries, exacerbated the collapse in global trade. By late in 1930, a steady decline set in which reached bottom by March 1933.
Keep in mind that OUR stock market began to tank only a little over two months ago. And if the exact same thing were to happen now that it did to the United States in the 1930s, we actually would expect our market to pick up significantly in the coming months – and our economy to even appear to be rebounding – shortly before a downward slope into collapse that would occur one to three years later. It wasn’t until March 1933 – 3 years and 4 months after the Black Tuesday stock market crash – that the bottom really fell out of our economy.
And while “Great Depression” comparisons may be silly in terms of the actual economic numbers RIGHT NOW (the number of banks going under, the jobless rate, etc.), we actually face potential economic nuclear bombs that would very likely have made 1930s American financial experts faint with dread.
We are looking at $700 TRILLION in derivatives. Compare this stupefying fact to the associated fact that global GDP is only about a lousy $50 trillion! Assets have been leveraged as much as a hundred and even two-hundredfold. The Institute for Economic Democracy have an article titled, “Hedging and Derivative Risks Become Infinite Risks.” The result is MASSIVE exposure such as the world has never seen lurking like some incredibly deadly plague in the form of financial vehicles that few even begin to understand and only advanced computers can calculate. As these highly leveraged financial obligations result in losses – as has already begun to happen – the result is cataclysmic failure in financial markets beyond the power of any government to prevent. And anyone but a fool should be able to recognize by now that such disasters can send the entire global economy crashing down very quickly, seemingly from out of nowhere.
None of the bailouts have done ANYTHING to fix the systemic structural problems with our financial system (the worst probably being the massive flow of capital out of production and into speculative markets due to the shift from being a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy). And the fact that the $852 billion bailout package went from being used to buy bad mortgages to a completely different solution should kind of serve to tell you that no one really knows WHAT to do.
So our financial experts are throwing out our money the way out-of-control craps players throw dice.
The government’s financial bailout will be the most expensive single expenditure in American history, potentially costing around $7.5 trillion — or half the value of all the goods and services produced in the United States last year.
In comparison, the total U.S. cost of World War II adjusted for inflation was $3.6 trillion. The bailout will cost more than the total combined costs in today’s dollars of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the entire historical budget of NASA, including the moon landing, according to data compiled by Bianco Research.
It remains to be seen whether the government’s multipronged approach to bail out banks, stimulate spending and buy up mortgages will revive the economy, but as the tab continues to grow so does concern over where the government will find the money.
One critical thing to understand is that the aforementioned historic massive expenditures – which combined still only amount to half of the expenditure we are talking about today – took place over many decades, such that the various costs to the economy were absorbed over many years. What happens when we spend trillions of dollars in only a few months? Who knows? No one has ever tried it before! And unlike the what had been the greatest – now the second greatest – expenditure in history, the costs associated with World War II were spent producing, building, and developing, whereas frankly most of the costs associated with our current bailouts essentially amount to paying off Wall Street’s gambling debts.
Meanwhile – as we contemplate forking over still more billions to bail out our automakers – we need to realize that we’re entering a potentially insane realm where there’s simply no end to the companies and now even the states who are “too big to fail” and need bailouts of their own. And what of the moral hazard incurred by giving money to people, corporations, and states simply because they were the biggest fools and failures? What impact will this have not only on the economy, but on the hearts and minds of honest people who played by the rules and ended up with nothing to show for it while the failures and the gamblers walk away with money in their pockets? How many previously stable people will begin to angrily demand, “Where’s my bailout?”
What’s going to happen as our financial system attempts to absorb absolutely mind boggling government debts that dwarf anything ever before seen in human history?
A lot of financial experts aren’t so much anxious about what happens in the next few months. We might well be able to throw so much money at the economy that we can stimulate it again; rather, they are worried about 3-5 years down the road as our dollar devalues dramatically due to interest payments that can only be repaid by printing more and more money. You don’t just double an already insanely-out-of-control national debt without severe consequences.
And given the very real probability that massive spending is going to be the cause of our undoing, the social safety net that Bernanke refers to as being a preventative would actually merely be one more causative factor in a pending economic collapse. We won’t be able to hand out food stamps and welfare checks if our government itself goes bankrupt.
So while it’s obviously not accurate to describe our present situation as a “Great Depression,” the simple reality is that we might well – and in the very near future – experience an economic meltdown that would likely make the Great Depression look tame in comparison.
The so called “science” of global warming is increasingly being revealed for the straw man it always has been (see my articles: “What the Science REALLY Says About Global Warming“, and “What You Never Hear About Global Warming“, as examples). Yet the more evidence that discredits the theory of anthropogenic global warming, the more hysterical its proponents become.
“We have reached a critical point,” NASA scientist James Hansen said Tuesday in an interview. “If we don’t get on a different path within the next several years, then we’re going to pass tipping points in the climate system with large consequences that will be felt especially by our children and grandchildren.”
The head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen was in St. Paul with Arctic explorer Will Steger to participate in several forums Monday at the Science Museum of Minnesota. He was one of the first scientists to issue warnings about global warming more than two decades ago.
Already, the Earth’s surface temperature is 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was a century ago. Many climate scientists predict it will rise many more degrees in the next century, melting glaciers, raising sea levels and leading to other ecological changes.
So here we are: an incredibly weak scientific case for what amounts to an enormously costly socialistic redistribution program, and global warming advocates becoming increasingly over-the-top in their rhetoric. What comes next?
Dennis Prager has said that he majored in Soviet studies to learn how the other side thought. And he has said that his studies of Soviet totalitarian communism revealed numerous parallels with the mindset of the American liberal.
So how did the Soviets deal with their dissidents?
They put them in gulags and treated them as mentally ill.
Well, in the global warming debate, enter the white-coated psychobabblers.
By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
Those who make human behavior their business aim to make living “green” your business.
Armed with new research into what makes some people environmentally conscious and others less so, the 148,000-member American Psychological Association is stepping up efforts to foster a broader sense of eco-sensitivity that the group believes will translate into more public action to protect the planet.
“We know how to change behavior and attitudes. That is what we do,” says Yale University psychologist Alan Kazdin, association president. “We know what messages will work and what will not.”
During a four-day meeting that begins today in Boston, an expected 16,000 attendees will hear presentations, including studies that explore how people experience the environment, their attitudes about climate change and what social barriers prevent conservation of resources.
Now, you might dismiss these statements, “We know how to change behavior and attitudes. That is what we do.” You might even ridicule them (Remember KAOS villain Siegfried from Get Smart? In one show he said to a pigeon, “Fly UP!” And when the bird sat there he leaned over and said, “So, you will not fly. We have ways of making you fly. Do you have any relatives in the park?“). But when white-coated “professionals” – who literally have the power to have people committed, take such a radical stand about an issue completely outside of their field and come to such conclusions about people who don’t happen to believe in global warming, it should be alarming.
• News stories that provided a balanced view of climate change reduced people’s beliefs that humans are at fault and also reduced the number of people who thought climate change would be bad, according to research by Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick.
His presentation will detail a decade of American attitudes about climate change. His new experiment, conducted in May, illustrates what he says is a public misperception about global warming. He says there is scientific consensus among experts that climate change is occurring, but the nationwide online poll of 2,600 adults asked whether they believe scientists agree or disagree about it.
By editing CNN and PBS news stories so that some saw a skeptic included in the report, others saw a story in which the skeptic was edited out and another group saw no video, Krosnick found that adding 45 seconds of a skeptic to one news story caused 11% of Americans to shift their opinions about the scientific consensus. Rather than 58% believing a perceived scientific agreement, inclusion of the skeptic caused the perceived amount of agreement to drop to 47%.
American Psychological Association leaders say they want to launch a national initiative specifically targeting behavior changes, including developing media messages that will help people reduce their carbon footprint and pay more attention to ways they can conserve. They want to work with other organizations and enlist congressional support to help fund the effort.
In other words, just a relative few seconds’ worth of skeptical treatment opposing the doctrine of man-caused global warming sufficiently innoculated viewers such that well under half continued to buy the garbage they were being fed.
This is beyond disturbing. The long-politically correct American Psychological Association has essentially determined that only the mentally ill don’t accept man-caused global warming, and that any exposure to alternative views increases the “sickness.”
This is right out of Stalinism. Even worse, it’s right out of 1984 with “Big Brother” controlling the not only the lives but the very thoughts of everyone. The essence of totalitarianism is megalomania: the need to have absolute control over everyone and everything. And anyone who came to think differently from the official doctrine of Big Brother was subjected to “treatment” until he was capable of believing that “two and two made five.”
Lev Trotsky wrote in Literature and Revolution:
“The human species, the sluggish Homo sapiens, will once again enter the stage of radical reconstruction and become in his own hands the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training … Man will make it his goal…to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman, if you will.”
The three major changes postulated to be indispensable for the building of the communist society were economical and political changes, accompanied with the changes in the human personality.
The Soviet man was to be selfless, learned, healthy and enthusiastic in spreading the socialist Revolution. Adherence to Marxism-Leninism, and individual behaviour consistent with that philosophy’s prescriptions, were among the crucial traits expected of the New Soviet man.
Author and philosopher Bernard Byhovsky, Ph.D. writes: “The new man is endowed, first of all, with a new ethical outlook.”
Among the major traits of a new Soviet man was selfless collectivism.
Thus the parallels between the aims of the American Psychological Association (the concept of the “construction of the new man” angle becomes quite clear in the article) and the aims of the “new Soviet man” become clear. And the logical implications between the potential tactics of global warming alarmists and the historical tacts of the gulags become clear as well.
These people are genuinely scary. All they lack to transform society in a terrifying way is the power to fully implement their ideas.
in which all storms develop. As the oceans and atmosphere continue to warm, storms are becoming more energetic and powerful. Hurricane Sandy, and the Nashville flood, were reminders of just that. Other climate-related catastrophes around the world have carried the same message to hundreds of millions.
Start Thinking Right 
