Tuesday, April 24, 2012

If I Wanted America to Fail

This video has gone viral.



If I Wanted America to Fail

Very powerful!

So powerful that Twitter temporarily closed the organizational account of the folks who produced the video. They blamed some sort of spam filter. Give me a break!

And if you listen closely, you can hear nearly every economic platform of the left and progressives.

At the altar of Obama!

There was a time that the environmental movement was something worthwhile. I think we can all agree that clean water and air are admirable and, as has been proven, achievable goals. But the conservation movement has been hijacked by extremists hell bent on shutting down any form of economic use of lands that could provide plenty.

One of the more interesting moments in the video, from a personal standpoint, was the Spotted Owl. Back when the whole save the spotted owl movement was killing high paying jobs in the PACNW, my father worked for the Forest Service. He was involved with the whole spotted owl issue. He was an advocate of further study as he was concerned that the numbers were being skewed in favor of the environmentalists. While my father was not a biologist by training, he was smart enough to be able to read the reports and study the data. And the data didn’t support the view the public was getting from the media and the “other side.” It showed not only was the spotted owl number declining because of predatory animals (there is always a larger predator), but the spotted owl’s favorite meal actually liked the more open space created by logging. He argued that if had open spaces surrounded by forested land, the spotted owl would thrive. This has turned out to be the case. The spotted owl has thrived, not in the old growth forests, but on lands that get logged.

When he saw that the environmentalists were going to win this battle, he decided to retire. He didn’t quit because he was a quitter, rather, he saw the writing on the wall. When he first joined the FS, it was an organization dedicated to multiple uses for our National Forests. The forest lands could provide jobs, recreation, mining, logging, wilderness areas, and be all things to all people. But the culture of the FS was changing, become less multi-use and more focused on extreme environmental issues. The spotted owl issue was the final straw, so to speak.

What is Going On?

NOTE: This post is going to raise some hackles. It is related to race relations, but it is not from the perspective that you are used to. And if you are a racist looking for a place to spew your hate, you have come to the wrong place. If you want to post a comment, go ahead, I will just delete it. Or better yet, I'll post it just so others can see how ignorant you are.

So, do you suppose that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the NAACP will speak about what has just happened in Montgomery AL? It seems that a crowd of black men beat a white man senseless, beating him so badly that he was admitted to the hospital in critical condition. After the beating ended a witness said that she heard one of the assailants say "Now that's justice for Trayvon," referring to the teenage boy shot and killed in Fla this past winter.

I doubt very seriously this is going to make the nightly news on any of the major networks nor will it see the front page of any major newspaper.

I don't know if it just me but it seems like race-relations are deteriorating at a rate that concerns me. Over the past several years there have been several cases of crimes against another race and it seems like those cases are on the rise. In recent weeks we have seen an uptick in actual and threatened black on white violence. The incident in Montgomery is just the latest, triggered, in part, by the Trayvon Martin tragedy.

None of my liberal readers will be surprised that I lay the blame for this deterioration squarely at Obama's feet. When he did not order the Justice Department to go after the Black Panthers for illegally putting a bounty the individual who is now charged with killing Trayvon, it had to have sent a signal to the more radical elements with in the black community that it was OK to target those who they felt had done them wrong. There have been other incidents during this administration that has emboldened the more radical element in the black community to strike out, sometimes with violence. Think back about the events surrounding the "beer summit" and the dismissal of voter harassment charges against the Black Panthers.

I know first hand that there is a segment of society, black, white and Latino, where there is a festering sore of racism.

Several years ago I was attending a professional development course in Shreveport, LA. There is no way one could miss the simmering tensions between blacks and whites. Twice during my six week stay I witness it first hand. And it was not white racism towards black, but the other way around.

In my first few days there I was playing in a softball game. The team I played for was made up of all Air Force members. Most of us were white, but we did have about four blacks. The team we were facing was entirely black. During the game I never even gave the make up of the teams any thought at all. That soon changed. At the conclusion of the game I headed over to the dugout of the opposing team to shake their hands, as has been customary in any softball league I have ever played in, whether it be the local "beer league" or a highly competitive traveling team. As I approached the dugout one of the players looked up at me and said "What the F**K do you want white boy?" Other players joined in with the name calling and veiled threats. I just turned around and headed back to my dugout. One of my teammates basically told me that teams that are not diverse don't shake hands.

The other incident occurred towards the tail end of my six weeks. For anyone who is a college football fan, Eddie Robinson is a name that stands among the legends of college football coaches. For nearly his entire career, Robinson coached at Grambling State University, a traditionally black school. He was bringing his Grambling State Tigers into Shreveport to play NW LA Tech. I couldn't pass up a chance to see a legend in action, especially since it looked like his career was coming to a close. So I gather up a few friends and we went. Or should I say attempted to go. When one of my friends (who was also white) and I were crossing the parking lot, the level of hatred directed towards us had me utterly baffled, and frankly, quite scared. Scared is a normally reaction when receiving threats of violence if we attempted to enter the stadium. Needless to say, I did not get a chance to see the game.

I make these points to show my readers who might not be aware, that racism runs both ways. There is no question that racism from whites towards others does exist; I acknowledge that. But it also runs in the opposite direction and to ignore it or to say it isn't possible is just the wrong attitude. But the media does not cover it to any degree. It is not part of the progressive narrative to show that a racist attitude has nothing to do with your skin color. You don't have to be white to be a racist.

I have no desire to further drive a wedge that will continue to separate us along racial lines, I'll leave that to Obama and his Justice Department. I just wanted my readers to be aware that we need to recognize that unless something is done soon, relations are going to pass a point where the damage to to great to repair. I personnally don't ever want to reach that stage.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Humor

Some fun for us guys

Why it’s good to be a Man

Your last name stays put.
The garage is all yours.
Wedding plans take care of themselves.
Chocolate is just another snack.
You don't have to stop and think of which way to turn a nut on a bolt.
Wrinkles add character.
New shoes don't cut, blister, or mangle your feet.
Phone conservations are over in 30 seconds flat.
You know stuff about tanks.
A 5 day vacation requires only one suitcase .
You can open all of your own jars.
Your underwear is $8.95 for a three-pack.
Three pairs of shoes are more than enough.
You are unable to see wrinkles in your clothes.
Everything on your face stays its original color.
The same hairstyle lasts for years, maybe even decades.
You only have to shave your face and neck.
You can play with toys all your life.
One wallet and one pair of shoes
One color for all seasons.
You can wear shorts no matter what how your legs look.
You can "do" your nails with a pocket knife.
You can do Christmas shopping for 25 relatives on December 24 in 25 minutes.

Linkage


A few links that might be of interest. Of course, those who come by often know that I can’t ever just post a link without commentary.


I love this one because it is so true. What makes it all the more appealing is that there are only categories of people who don’t realize or care the truth of what is being highlighted at the provided link: The media themselves and the conservative/Republican Politian. There are a few smart pols out there that are beginning to understand how the media treats them and that it is a losing battle from the beginning to even attempt to accommodate the leftist media. As for the media, it really does boil down to the fact they just don’t care. Their agenda is to get left-wingers elected as often as possible and they will do whatever it takes. It wouldn’t surprise to hear at some point these people will sell their grandmothers to get their favorite politician (not a conservative) elected.

2. Doug Powers, writing over on Michelle Malkin’s blog, has a bit on Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to stifle free speech by amending the Constitution. These people who want to severely curtail free speech is this country are calling this the People’s Rights Amendment.

Essentially what Pelosi wants to do is for Congress to determine what is and isn’t political free speech. Last year the SCOTUS decided that the First Amendment protects the right of free speech for both individual and corporations. Pelosi and most other democrat members of Congress want to overturn this decision via amending the Constitution.

I heard this comparison on the Michael Medved today. Imagine that you are a book publisher, which is a corporation, and you want to publish a book that is critical of a politician or a policy platform of one of the political parties. If Pelosi has here way, these books would not be able to be published using general corporate funds, they would have to be funded by political action committees (PACs).

Mr. Medved also referred to an editorial posted on National Review that kind of outlines some of the more obvious dangers (and maybe unintended consequences) of this so-called People’s Rights Amendment.

  • The so-called People’s Right Amendment would have some strange consequences: Newspapers, television networks, magazines, and online journalism (blogger I assume he means PCANW Righty adds) operations typically are incorporated. So are political parties and campaign committees, to say nothing of nonprofits, business associations, and the like. Under the People’s rights Amendment, Thomas Friedman would still enjoy putative First Amendment protection, but it would not him much good inasmuch as the New York times Company, being a corporation, would no longer be protected by the First Amendment. In short, any political speech more complex than standing on a soapbox at an intersection would be subject to the whims of Nancy Pelosi. (Source: National Review)
For you liberals out there who do stop by on occasion think about this. If there is a Republican controlled Congress and a Republican President they could keep people like Ed Schultz and Rachael Maddow from publishing books through large book publishers. PACs aren’t going to fund the books written by liberals/progressives because they don’t sell worth a dang. Not worth the money.

3. Mugshots of some of our finest occupiers.

Good gravy, don't these people believe in personal hygiene?

Climate Changers Growing Desperate


Signs that the climate change advocators are growing desperate.

(Source for all the links comes via Infowars.com)

1. A Professor sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon has called for so-called climate-change deniers to be to be diagnosed as sick and for them to be treated.

Professor Kari Norgaard, who is currently appearing the ‘Planet Under Pressure’ conference in London, has presented a paper in which she argue that “cultural resistance” to accepting the premise that humans are responsible for climate change “must be recognized and treated” as an aberrant sociological behavior.

Norgaard equates skepticism of climate alarmists – whose data is continually proven to politicized, agenda driven and downright inaccurate – with racism, nothing that overcoming such viewpoints poses a similar challenge “to racism or slavery in the U.S. South.” (Source: Prison Planet)

This is a very scary line from the University of Oregon Media page that summarizes the “paper.”

“Climate change poses a massive threat to our present social, economic and political order. From a sociological perspective, resistance to change is to be expected,” she said. “People are individually and collectively habituated to the way we act and think. This habituation must be recognized and simultaneously addressed at the individual, cultural and societal level – how we think the world works and how we think it should work.” (Bold belongs to PACNW Righty)

Anytime we have these self-anointed liberal elites talking about how the world should be changed through behavioral changes scares the snot out of me. It almost seems as if these people are talking about re-education camps or some form of brainwashing. I know these people think they are smarter than us, but taking it to this level, insisting on forced behavioral changes (indoctrination), is taking it too far. And bear in mind, these kinds of people support, with a great deal of vigor, our current President.

(Side Note: Please read this blog post over at Rural Revolution. While it has nothing to do with the climate change issues, it discusses how schools have lost their focus on educating our children and become centers of social change and justice.)

2. The same University of Oregon Professor has also called on President Obama to suspend democracy and public opinion and implement climate change rules through Executive Orders.

“Policymakers should not wait for public opinion to take necessary action,” she writes, adding, “Public opinion does matters in a democracy, but this is a time when following it would be a serious mistake.”

But this isn’t the first time that a climate changer has called for democracy to be ended for the sake of the climate. Back in 2010 James Lovelock said the following in an interview with the Guardian in the UK regarding how to tackle climate change (scroll down):

We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – when you can’t do that. You’ve got have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be accountable too, of course.

But it can’t happen in a modern democracy. This is one the problems. What’s the alternative to democracy? There isn’t one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while. (Source: Guardian UK) (Bold belongs to PACNW Righty)

Quick question for you Mr. Lovelock: who gets to decide who these “few people with authority” are going to be, AND who is going to hold them accountable? A couple more questions: Who gets to decide when we suspend democracy? And when do we come out of this period of tyranny?

3. There are even some who are calling for the removal or SIGNIFICANT reduction of the human population. Keith Farnish has written a book titled Time’s Up where he calls for the reduction of human by causing (or at least doing nothing to prevent) the collapse of civilization as we know it. The Telegraph UK sums it up nicely with a few excerpts from Farnish’s book:

“In short, the greatest immediate risk to the population living in the conditions created by Industrial Civilization is the population itself. Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity. That is one reason for there to be fewer people, providing you are planning on staying with civilization – I wouldn’t recommend it though.”


“Unloading essential means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the thing I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage.” (Source: Telegraph UK)

Every once in a while I like to remind some of my liberal friends that this is the kind of people that support Barack Obama. When they fire back at me that those racist nutjobs living in the woods espousing the overthrow of our government also support conservative causes, I like to point out that we conservatives tend to run away from these guys as fast as we can. However, the media is often more than willing to gives these leftwing knuckleheads all the press they desire, and most often, it is glowing terms.

Friday, April 20, 2012

Divide Contunes to Deepen

It seems that the politicalization of America keeps getting deeper and deeper.

Recently, a gun manufacturer in Arizona was basically told that their business was no longer welcome because they were, well, a gun manufacturer.

See the full write-up here by Prof Jacobson at Legal Insurrection. (via Doug Ross at Director Blue

This country is divided and continues to become more and more divided. I place this widening gap at the feet of progressives and democrats. They have done everything in their power to divide this nation into groups. Gays vs. straight, men vs. women, gun owners vs. those opposed to gun ownership, black vs. white.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Best Evah Post on Rosen's Stupidity

As mentioned in the previous post, blogging is going to be difficult, so some of my posts will be links to other sites with some comments of mine thrown in for good measure.

This one of those.

Unless you have been living under a rock there is no way that you could have missed Hilary Rosen’s moment of complete idiocy when she said Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blog sites out there that have commented on this. I won’t try to impress you by saying that I have read them all (I haven’t), but I have read many from both sides of the aisle.

But until I ran across this on at Red State, none had really impressed me. They were all pretty much the same. On the right, there was outrage, and deservedly so. On the left, there was stupidity as they tried to defend Rosen, which is the indefensible.


This is clearly a campaign strategy; try to use the tired old class warfare stuff. Oh, those, Richy Richies! Only silly little tea-having rich ladies stay at home with their kids. And their nannies! So out of touch! Only, that’s not true no matter how hard Rosen’s fellow travelers try to spin it so, and the average stay-at-home mom knows that. Many women choose to make sacrifices and live with less in order to stay at home with their children. Others do the math (I know! How can they understand economics thingies? That’s for boys!) and realize that the cost of childcare would outweigh whatever money they could bring into the household, So, fail again, Obama. Nice try.


Nah. We’d still be women, warranting only a pat on purty little heads and told to hush so the big, smart men can save us, even from our own anatomies. This is why abortion is a sacrament to them. By devaluing the lives of children, they can assuage their guilt at devaluing women. Children are to be aborted at, and for, one’s own convenience or else a woman can’t function in any meaningful (as judge by the Left) way. Women are too stupid to raise children and do anything else at the same time. It’s lucky we all aren’t constantly tripping as we chew gum. Moms are dumb, incapable, non-functional and should be secluded from the rest of society, apparently. And how dare they ever presume to know anything at all besides how make pipe cleaner animals and such? (Source: Red State)

I loved it. Because it hit home for me.

Several years ago my wife graduated from college and began work in the environmental compliance arena for a government agency. She was on a fast track to success. But the Air Force had other ideas. They sent me (us) to Japan. But all was not lost. At a base not too far away, there was an opportunity for her to continue her career. But it came at a cost. The average commute time was at least 90 minutes each way, and was on a good day. So we made the decision to have her postpone her career and stay at home and raise our two boys who were then four and seven. We have never regretted the choice.

I do have one question for anyone who still supports Obama out there who might read my little blog. Is Rosen a reflection on how you really feel? Do you hold stay-at-home moms in distain as much as Rosen does? When you think of those stay-at-home moms that you hold in such little regard, do you ever think about your mom or perhaps grandmother? How did you feel when Rosen pretty much said those women who raised you were stupid?

As side note here for some of you who support Obama to contemplate. Until I was about 12 my mother was not in the workforce other than part time jobs around Christmas time. But you know what. My mother and father are enjoying their retirement by spending out inheritance on trips and new cars and nice things for their house. This was due to my mom. Even before she starting working she understood what needed to be done to get them to point where they are right now. Even before she went back to school to finish her postponed (to have four children) degree, she knew what needed to be done with investments and savings. She was a stay-at-home mom and she wasn’t an idiot.

AWOL Blogger

First all, I have to apologize to my loyal readers for the complete and utter lack of blog production in recent weeks. I have certainly not lost the desire to post what I feel into the blogosphere. But real life has taken hold.

A couple of years ago, I retired from the US Air Force. It was time to retire. I had been at my last assignment for six years. I loved the duty that I was doing. I was the senior enlisted leader (not an officer) for a unit that had more than 70 young men and women assigned. There is nothing more rewarding than leading these people. I watched several young people become leaders in their own right. Whether it was through my mentorship or not is, at best, arguable.

I had worked my entire career to get to that point and had a hard time letting go. But letting go I had to do. There were others, some much more capable than I, waiting in the wings.

But I retired into an Obama economy. As such, finding work was a difficult journey. I was eventually able to land a job at hardware store, but it was barely more than minimum wage and was only part time. As a family with a mortgage and two teenage boys my retirement income (about a third of my active duty pay) plus the retail income just wasn’t enough.

So I used my education benefits and attended truck-driving school. I attended school full time, plus worked the retail job in the evenings. Yet I continued to blog as best I could. Shortly after graduation and receiving my commercial driver’s license, I started work at a large trucking company based nearby. So out on the road I went as a trainee with a mentor. Gone two to three days at a time (others are gone for weeks) with just enough home time to come home, say hi to the wife and kids, then to bed, only to repeat the cycle once again.

My mentor was great. He showed me the ropes of driving and a lot of what I need to know to survive on the road.

Next week I hit the road on my own as my training (with a second trainer now) is nearly complete.

I will be driving what is called “Heavy Haul.” What is that you might ask? You know those trucks that you see going up hills at 20 miles per hour and downhill not much faster? These trucks also have a third axle behind the cab and the trailer probably has three or four axles. That is heavy haul. Those trucks are carrying 45,000 to 70,000 pounds.

Well, because of the heavy demands on my time driving and so forth there just hasn’t been enough time to really get down and do the research necessary to make my blog tick. Oh, I still follow the news and read all the sites, but formulating my posts and digging deeper into the story has been hard, if not impossible, to accomplish.

I cannot promise that now my training is almost complete that I will be better at updating my blog, but I might give it a try. There is so much going on right now, that it has been hard to not post my comments and opinions. But there are only so many hours in a day and days in a week.

If you have been someone who stops by on occasion but haven’t become a “follower” not might be the time. If you sign up to become a follower you will know when I make my infrequent posts.

For those who were stopping by frequently, thanks so much for hanging with me all this time. And for those who dropped me a personal note asking if things were OK with me, thank you so much.