PN:
Joe’s Comment – Gotta take a page from Mr. Natural to get through this winter madness. Lots of folks scratchy and nasty. Old folks dying in large numbers each obit page, 3 times a week. Come on crocuses (crocii?, crocusii?) and make my day!
Quote o’ the Week
“People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.” – Will Rogers
Economics
Joe and I ponder how it works (one of many ponderables we ponder).
We had an uncle who made his living teaching Economics at prestigious colleges and universities. We loved our uncle. Didn’t understand how he made his living.
Joe and I are simple-minded about the subject. Our theory has been the same o same o for most of our adult life: more coming in than going out = GOOD, more going out than coming in ≠ good, i.e. BAD!!! Very straight forward.
Our fantasy just isn’t economics. The same way weather isn’t climate.
Professor Mark Blyth is an economist Joe and I can follow. He is not Marxist, not “Chicago School”, not Keynesian, not Austrian, not Hayekian – he describes his brand of economic understanding as “Political Economics”.
Anyone who says “I got annoyed enough to write a book” is talking directly to Joe and I.
And he’s got a great accent that James C. will appreciate – what better source nation for an economist? Hoots mon! And again! And again!
Try this on for size:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsMiAzkr6H8
For a much more extensive mile-a-minute economic primer, scroll down (below the break) to the SUNDAY SERMON and listen to a man destined for a Nobel prize in economics – Mark Blyth.
The Sky Is Falling (take 3,592)
More and more evidence about less and less accurate data keeps surfacing.
The GCGWCC commandos (global cooling global warming climate change) are fighters for fiscal reward, not scientific understanding.
Dr. John Bates (ex-NOAA) has come clean.
Or, he has blown the whistle.
Or, he discovered evidence of frauduliskyism and cannot in good conscience propagate the hoax perpetrated on We The People.
Read all about it here.
Word o’ the Week – Lebensborn
noun – wellspring or fountain of life.
That is a direct translation from the German.
The Lebensborn program originated in 1935. It was a government registered program created to counter a flagging German birthrate by promoting and supporting the creation of the pure German race; i.e. the Aryan people. Lebensborn encouraged single women to produce “racially pure and healthy” offspring with approved German (or other) men.
Lebensborn was found across Europe after the start of WWII.
Here is a thorough history of the Lebensborn project.
The children of Lebensborn often lived a life of persecution and shame.
How preposterous! Blaming the sins of the fathers and mothers on the children. (Something akin to a 20 trillion dollar deficit tax burden in modern times). There are Lebensborn children who speak out about their lives.
Joe and I learned a new word today.
We also learned (again!) how politics can pervert a culture.
More on Lebensborn (with videos and links) here.
This is a good time and place to quote Charles Krauthammer from his book “Things That Matter“. The introduction to this book is as valuable as the entire collection to Joe and I for the insight Mr. Krauthammer has about politics. Here are a few paragraphs –
…….”Accordingly, this book was originally going to be a collection of my writings about everything but politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound or just odd. Working title: There’s More to Life than Politics.
But in the end I couldn’t. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.
Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” – every schoolchild is fed. But even Keats – poet, romantic, early 19th century man oblivious to the horrors of the century to come – kept quotational distance from such blissful innocence. Turns out we need to know one more thing on earth: politics – because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.
This is no abstraction. We see it in North Korea, whose deranged Stalinist politics has created a land of stunning desolation and ugliness, both spiritual and material. We saw it in China’s Cultural Revolution, a sustained act of national self-immolation, designed to dethrone, debase and destroy the highest achievements of millennia of Chinese culture. We saw it in Taliban Afghanistan, which, just months before 9/11, marched its cadres into the Bamiyan Valley and with tanks, artillery and dynamite destroyed its magnificent cliff-carved 1,700-year-old Buddhas lest they – like kite flying and music and other things lovely – disturb the scorched-earth purity of their nihilism.
Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns. The entire 20th century with its mass political enthusiasms is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding circles of ruin. World War I not only killed more people than any previous war. The psychological shock of Europe’s senseless self-inflicted devastation forever changed Western sensibilities, practically overthrowing the classical arts, virtues and modes of thought. The Russian Revolution and its imitators (Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly – to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the state – that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience came to near dissolution. Of course, the greatest demonstration of the finality of politics is the Holocaust, which in less than a decade destroyed a millennium-old civilization, sweeping away not only 6 million souls but the institutions, the culture, the very tongue of the now-vanished world of European Jewry.
The only power comparably destructive belongs to God. Or nature. Or, if like Jefferson you cannot quite decide, Nature’s God. Santorini was a thriving island civilization in the Mediterranean until, one morning 3,500 years ago, it simply fell into the sea. An earthquake. A volcanic eruption. The end.
And yet even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of man – more particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise power.”
Very convincing rhetoric. A book well worth reading more than once.
Immigration
The following video is getting old.
It has been embedded in this rant several times over the past 5 years. It gets better with every passing year.
The facts however, haven’t changed much if at all.
Joe and I suspect if the facts have changed it has become worse…..
To accept “the best and brightest” from these countries as immigrants is immoral.
The inscription on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty is –
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Nice words, but those are NOT the majority of immigrants that gain entry to the West. Outside of natural disaster or humanitarian aid or political / religious persecution refugees, the West takes the Best – the best qualified from whatever source country the immigrant is leaving.
Joe and I consider this form of “immigration” as unethical. If the West truly cares about the Third World, help them learn the steps to join the West in prosperity and security.
As Roy Beck insists, “immigration will never be an effective or significant way to deal with the suffering people of the world – they must be helped where they live. They have to bloom where they are planted”. An incredible optic to hammer home the facts:
Dichotomy
It seemed, in the days of our “yoot”, opposing sides of political ideology could function, indeed, were functioning. Without war-like behaviour.
What does the future hold?
Comic Dennis Miller expressed the prospect of acknowledging the “Two Americas” that have precipitated out of the “melting pot” of America over the past 28 years of Balkanizing political strife (Bill Clinton to present). He calls it “conscious uncoupling” – a “divorce” due to irreconcilable differences. Mr. Miller offers a solution. In Mr. Miller’s new America, the “left coast” extends from WA to CA (open to Mexico) and is named “Maxico”. The East coast (NY and “blue” states and a small area including Chicago) will be named “The Bubble”. The rest of the country will be named “Norman Rockwellvania”.
I gave it a thought and think it would solve the discrepancy between popular and electoral college vote totals. Their guy (gal) would always win!
Joe gave it a thought and said “where will the lefties get their money?”
Joe makes me ponder with that one:
Immigration Ban
What a week of whining.
All of them: Republicans, Democrats (lots and lots of Democrats), women (or is that WimeNz?), college students, the Main Street Media™, the “professional protestors”, the POTUS.
Meanwhile, some of the reflective and intelligent folks are watching with reactions ranging from disbelief to rotflmao…
One person who sees clearly is Daniel Greenfield of Sultan Knish. He says all those insisting the Trump embargo on immigration from the 7 identified terrorist hot-beds is an ISIS recruitment blunder are insane.
In an article he has titled “If We Don’t Let in Muslims to America, They’ll Kill Us“, he proves their insanity AND his brilliance (the title sums the paradox of worrying what the ISIS / Muslim crowd think or believe). A few quotes from the article –
…..”When normal people don’t like a policy, they protest or write a letter to the editor. They don’t plant a pressure cooker bomb next to a little boy or stab college students with a butcher knife.
“Let us in or we’ll kill you” is the least compelling immigration argument ever.
We have our current wave of terror despite legalizing some 100,000 Muslims a year. If we don’t manage 100,000 this year, they are saying that maybe more of the 100,000 from a few years ago will join ISIS and start killing us. And if we don’t legalize 100,000 five years from now, the 100,000 coming into the country this year will become the terrorists of tomorrow.
That’s not an immigration policy. It’s a hostage crisis……
…….ISIS recruitment has nothing to do with our immigration policy. Unless the world’s greatest ISIS recruiter was Obama.
ISIS had zero recruitment problems under Obama. There was no shortage of Muslims lining up to run over, rape, behead, bomb and mutilate non-Muslims even when his refugee policies bent over backward to favor Muslims. Instead that’s when “lone wolf terrorism” by ISIS supporters, some of whom had come here as first or generation refugees, took off…..
…..Since none of this could be Obama’s fault, the media took to blaming random people who might make Muslims hate us. A guy who posted a YouTube video was blamed for a Muslim terror assault on our diplomatic compound in Benghazi. Hillary Clinton saw to it that he went to jail. A pastor who planned to burn the Koran got a phone call from the commander of United States Central Command. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that burning the Koran might not be protected by the Constitution. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez refused to rule out blasphemy laws.
None of this shameless unconstitutional pandering to terrorists stopped or even slowed down the tide of Muslim terror attacks. No ISIS recruit lifted a sword and then refused to behead a crying Kurdish teenager because Obama offered Muslims an incredibly generous refugee policy.”
The link leads to the entire article. Mr. Greenfield sees with crystal clarity.
Religion
Joe and I concur: if you must be a “believer”, please do it behind closed doors, alone, and quietly. We do not think mankind is better off with so many competitions pitting people against one another over who has the “real” imaginary friend.
Pat Condell has a message to all the religious folks in the world. Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9flEMs4r3U8
Anti-Semitism
Are all the Arab peoples lunatic anti-semites?
What is the story?
Geert Wilders
Canaries were used in coal mines to give an early warning of lethal danger.
One such canary delivering a warning to Western culture has been persecuted for over a decade. Geert Wilders is a Dutchman who loves his country and speaks his mind. This rant has featured presentations and data from and about Mr. Wilders since inception five years ago.
The Dutch elite have compromised the foundations of freedom in the Netherlands by severely restricting free speech. Pat Condell calls it what it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT0dpAOTgYI
Faith and Lorren
Two of The Rebel staff give their breakdown of the candidates vying for the position of Canadian Conservative Party leader.
Looks like a French Canadian may be the man:
Joe’s Garage
Ken Block is a maniac.
Here’s his Hoonicorn Mustang drifting London, from 2016:
POLITICS, POLITICIANS, WACKJOBBERY, HUMOROUS, STUPID
THE RELIGION OF PEACE (ALL OVER US)
The conflict between the liberal West and the caliphate of Islam is as old as Islam. Here is a short history of the Crusades:
SUNDAY SERMON
Mark Blyth talks fast.
He also makes a lot of sense.
In this Sunday sermon he makes his case that government “austerity” programs are no such thing. In his opinion, not only are they a dangerous concept, as implemented by some governments / banks / systems, they are criminal.
Crank up your listening speed (he REALLY TALKS FAST!), grab a favorite libation, get comfortable, then click on the video below. If you are like me, you will have to watch several times to get your head around his ideas. If you are like Joe, you will sit there with your mouth hanging open, finally hearing what you have been suspecting. It’s a strange, strange world we live in Master Jack:
WEATHER (OR NOT)
This week in Vernon has been a re-run of cold and snow.
Easing up by Friday, the temperatures were above zero Celsius during the day until Sunday. There will be flooding in the immediate future if the temperatures don’t freeze at night. The major highway to Vancouver was closed, which caused shortages on the weekend at the supermarkets. Gotta love that Mother Nature© gig….
Joe (still hibernating) Mekanic
p.s. Ramirez will see us through to Spring –
