This kook is trying to find ways to punish us global warming deniers, of course – early in the piece he suggests tattooing us but then mulls over the Nazi implications of that and comes up with a better sanction:

…So how about they are forced to buy property on low-lying islands, the sort of property that will become worthless with a few more centimetres of ocean rise, so they are bankrupted by their own bloody-mindedness? Or what about their signed agreement to stand, in the year 2040, lashed to a pole at a certain point in the shallows off Manly? If they are right and the world is cooling – ”climate change stopped in the year 1998” is one of their more boneheaded beliefs – their mouths will be above water. If not …

Deal, with this caveat – we don’t have to pay for the beachfront property until 2040. If it is underwater, we agree to pay double the price it would bring today. If its still above water, we get to keep it, for free. And I am hereby staking my claim to Al Gore’s new beachfront digs.

Well, heck, it is only Syrians being massacred…so, what do we care?

Homeowners foreclose on Bank of America.

Poll: 43% are involved in politics just to keep the idiots at bay.

The (Unemployed) Man of La Mancha – seems that the government there is really, really broke.

Profiles in Running Away.

The good news? A Catholic valedictorian is fighting for her right to pray at graduation. The bad news? That she has to fight for this basic, human right.

Obamunism! Dow has longest weekly slide since 2004.

RIP: Twin brothers, who became friars, die at 92 on same day.

Iowahawk strikes again: Farewell, My Weiner

Just prior to the French Revolution as government started to break down, the peasants of France started to arm themselves in what is called the “Great Fear”…it seems that with Mexico descending in to drug-lord anarchy, that is happening in Mexico, too. From the AP:

…The mutilated body of a man was found inside the trunk of a vehicle along a federal highway, police said on Monday. Officials also reported finding the bullet-riddled body of a 20-year-old man with his feet and hands tied in a residential neighborhood. Police gave no motives or identities of the men killed.

Ramon Almonte, the Guerrero state police chief, said on Monday he will ask the federal congress to make it easier for common citizens to get permits for weapons to defend themselves.

Almonte’s brother was killed on Jan. 1 in a rural town in Guerrero by unidentified gunmen. The state has been plagued by such executions.

“When you fight someone and at least you have a ‘piece,’ the person who is attacking you might think twice,” Almonte said. “We cannot go on the way we are.”…

Mexico has very strict gun control laws – the sort of laws our liberals would love to have: you can only have low-powered weapons and you have to go through a difficult process with, believe it or not, the Mexican Department of Defense in order to get a permit. Naturally, most law-abiding Mexicans don’t have weapons…of course, the criminals get all they want, including very powerful, military-style weapons (and not, it must be noted, by buying them from gun dealers in the United States…in fact, it seems that they get a lot of their weapons via corruption in the Mexican law enforcement and military departments). Just as we bitter-clingers have always said, if you make it illegal to own guns, only criminals will own them.

The fact of the matter is that the Mexican army and police, even if they were freed from corruption (a very tall order) cannot be everywhere at once. The joke “when seconds count, the police are only minutes away” is exceptionally true – especially in Mexico. Under the best of circumstances, the people of Mexico cannot rely upon the authorities for their safety. As is usual – and as is in direct accordance with American ideals – the people must in the last resort defend themselves. Thus our “right of the people to keep and bear arms” in our Constitution.

An armed population would give the drug lords no end of trouble. They wouldn’t be able to just lord it over the people of Mexico. To be sure, an armed Mexican population would almost certainly result, in the worst hit areas, with some vigilante committees…but desperate times call for desperate measures; and while such committees would make mistakes, it is still far better than just allowing things to continue to deteriorate.

I hope Almonte gets his way – and that his views prevail over the whole of Mexico. The people are being oppressed by a horrible injustice, and it is time the people were allowed to strike back.

HAT TIP: The Truth About Guns

Ok, so here’s the news from Market Watch:

Greece may need a new aid package worth more than 100 billion euros to stay afloat, far higher than what was expected, according to a report Saturday.

In a preview of a story to run Monday, the German magazine Der Spiegel said on its web site that the package — the equivalent of $145.2 billion — could be necessary if the economically ravaged nation continued to rely on foreign aid through 2013 and 2014. That comes on top of the 110 billion euros, or $160 billion, in bailout funds agreed to last year…

There are about 11 million Greeks. To say they need $145 billion dollars means that each Greek – man, woman and child – is to be on the hook for $13,182. Add that to the $160 billion from last year and you get a per-capita debt equal to $27,727 just for the bailouts. How in heck are the Greeks ever supposed to pay that back? Especially since in a year or two Greece will slip in to net population decline? It is just impossible! But here go the banksters and bureaucrats, pretending that this will do the trick. So great is their fear that Greece will leave the Euro…which would probably trigger a string of defaults and the loss of power and wealth for the pinheads who are cooking up this bailout. And here’s the bad news – Greece is easy compared to Portugal and Spain, and both those nations also teeter on the edge of default.

There is no other way out for Greece than to default – the bond holders are going to have to accept a loss, and they should jump on it right now because the longer this goes on, the less they’ll get (ie, as Greece piles on more debt the share for each debt holder in a default will go down). If I were a Greek, I’d be rioting on the streets, too…well, maybe not rioting, but certainly working out plans for a revolution. To be sure the Greeks, themselves, created the mess…too little work, too much government goodies…but if I were Greek I’d never agree to impoverish myself to bail out bankers.

It is time we all learned the lesson – debt is poison. It does no one any good. Now, perhaps, we understand why the Bible condemns usury and calls for a revocation of debts from time to time…and while religious writers over the past thousands of years have always found something wrong with debt. This is not to say that loaning should be banned, but its not something that should be engaged in with a light heart…certainly not for consumer spending or for government except in the most grave, life-threatening emergencies. Let it all default and then just learn the lesson and move on.

From the Daily Mail:

A Gurkha soldier who single-handedly defeated more than 30 Taliban fighters has been awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross by the Queen.

Corporal Dipprasad Pun, 31, described how he was spurred on by the belief that he was going to die and so had nothing to lose in taking on the attackers who overran his checkpoint in Afghanistan.

His gallantry award is second only to the Victoria Cross – the highest honour for bravery in the face of the enemy…

You’d think that it would have been worthy of the Victoria Cross, wouldn’t you?

Tell you what – how about we just put together a mixed unit of Marines, Rangers, Special Forces and Gurkhas and just let them settle out Afghanistan as they see fit…pull out the reporters and bureaucrats and let men deal with it as men should?

Just a suggestion…

At least in housing prices:

The ailing US housing market passed a grim milestone in the first quarter of this year, posting a further deterioration that means the fall in house prices is now greater than that suffered during the Great Depression.

The brief recovery in prices in 2009, spurred by government aid to first-time buyers, has now been entirely snuffed out, and the average American home now costs 33 per cent less than it did at the peak of the housing bubble in 2007. The peak-to-trough fall in house prices in the 1930s Depression was 31 per cent – and prices took 19 years to recover after that downturn…

And it also took a baby boom and a resultant massive demand for new housing to do it. On the whole, we should work on the assumption that the 2007 housing prices will never be repeated – at least, not in a time frame which will matter to anyone 35 and older. While buying a house is a good investment, I would advise – expect in a few markets – against buying a house within the next two to three years. My feeling is that until I see a sustained year-over-year increase in housing prices, we simply have not seen the bottom. And no sweat if you don’t quite buy at the bottom…the way things are going, if you miss the bottom you’re only going to pay, at most, 1 or 2% more than you might have.

The silver lining in this cloud is that once we do hit bottom if we have, in the meantime, reformed our economy towards making, mining and growing things while at the same time instituted genuine financial reform (as regards housing, the most important thing is to forbid the sale of home mortgages between banks and other financial institutions), then the younger people out there will not only be able to buy a decent home at a reasonable price, but won’t be subjected to the temptation to view the home as a piggy bank for endless equity lines of credit.

Because in the end our problem is – yes, you guessed it – moral. We went and got quite immoral about things. We wanted our stuff now. We didn’t want to work and save and then buy…just give us the darn credit card or line of credit and let’s have the latest computer gadget today even though it will be obsolete tomorrow. A poorer but wiser America will, I believe, emerge out of this morass of fiat money, usury and bankster/bureaucrat idiocy…but we won’t be able to get started until we get rid of Obama. So, on to Task Number One.

(Yes, liberals, I know that Obama isn’t the only person responsible for this…it took a century to build up to this collapse. But we on the right learned from the left 2001-09 that each and every thing which goes wrong is entirely the fault of the President…so, turn about is fair play.)

From the Washington Times:

Crossing party lines to deliver a stunning rebuke to the commander in chief, the vast majority of the House voted Friday for resolutions telling President Obama he has broken the constitutional chain of authority by committing U.S. troops to the international military mission in Libya.

In two votes — on competing resolutions that amounted to legislative lectures of Mr. Obama — Congress escalated the brewing constitutional clash over whether he ignored the founding document’s grant of war powers by sending U.S. troops to aid in enforcing a no-fly zone and naval blockade of Libya…

The GOP resolution giving two weeks for Obama to explain fully what we are doing in Libya passed – the Democrat resolution calling for immediate withdrawal failed, but found 87 Republicans voting in favor of it, along with 61 Democrats. All in all, 91 Democrats voted for one or the other, or both. A stunning, bi-partisan rebuke to the President.

As I’ve said, the reason Obama finds himself in this fix is not because he ordered an intervention in Libya, but because he didn’t seek Congressional approval while at the same time intervening in a manner guaranteed to result in a stalemate. Had he got Congressional authorization then it would be at least a year before anyone in Congress could muster serious support for a withdrawal resolution…and had he intervened with sufficient force at the right time, it would have been over weeks ago, making resolutions for a withdrawal moot.

Our President simply does not understand politics, nor does he understand military operations. This maladroit intervention is going to hang ’round his neck like an albatross from now until the end of his term…which I hope will be January 20th, 2013. He did it all wrong, and now he’s losing support all down the line…because of his boneheaded actions, he’s now someone who is mistrusted in Congress in the use of executive authority, and that weakens him on the world stage. A terrible state of affairs for America to be in.

2012 just can’t get here fast enough.

Seems that San Francisco has a ballot measure coming up to ban circumcision – natural enough for a home of liberal fascism…a place where you can perform oral sex in public, but pretty much everything else is banned. But there is a problem, here – you see, Jews (and Moslems, for that matter) circumcise as a matter of religious practice…and, so, a ban works out as something anti-Jewish. Proponents of the initiative say it isn’t, but a bit of campaign literature put out in favor of the ban indicates otherwise:

Evil looking Jews faced with a nordic super hero. Where have we seen this before? Oh, yeah, in Der Sturmer:

Liberal anti-Semitism? We report, you decide.

(The caption in the Der Sturmer picture goes, “The sword will not be sheathed. The Stürmer stands as ever In battle for the people and the fatherland. It fights the Jews because it loves the people.)

And its an NPR poll, boys and girls – from Life News:

A new poll conducted by Thomson Reuters for NPR, coming after a Gallup survey showing Americans oppose all or most abortions, finds a majority of Americans say having an abortion is wrong.

NPR asked “do you personally believe having an abortion is wrong” and 59.3 percent of Americans polled said yes compared with just 40.7 percent who said no. The youngest age category of those polled, under 35, gave the most pro-life responses with 65.5 percent saying that having an abortion is wrong…

As Lincoln said in reference to slavery – if abortion isn’t wrong, then nothing is wrong. I think this is starting to sink in – after all, you can propagandize all you like about “choice” but the fundamental fact of abortion is that it is a final solution to a temporary problem. It is just unjust – killing an innocent child because the mother and/or the father is an idiot. Let the kid live; put him or her up for adoption…but don’t kill, for crying out loud. That seems to be the growing attitude among the American people.

And do keep in mind that it took decades of relentless education to get us here. The easy way out always seems best – and back in the 70’s the easy way out of growing un-wed pregnancy seemed to be abortion. It was quick, it was easy, it was painless…and the broad majority went along with it when the Supreme Court usurped the rights of the States and of the people to regulate the practice. And, trust me, it looked like it was done, for good – that we would never get back to a nation of Life. Well, those opposed to abortion never lost heart…despite crude propaganda directed against it, the pro-life movement patiently and lovingly kept up the fight, and now the reward is being reaped.

It is probably still the work of another 20 years to get a ban on elective abortion, but its coming that way…life is, after all, a wonderful thing and every person being born is a blessing, not a curse.

From The Hill:

In his speech to the Faith and Freedom Conference today, Jon Huntsman emphatically denounced the idea of a truce on abortion.

“I do not believe the Republican party should focus only on our economic life — to the neglect of our human life.

That is a trade we should not make.

If Republicans ignore life, the deficit we will face is one that is much more destructive. It will be a deficit of the heart and of the soul.”

Smart rhetorical move. He talks in economic terms (“deficit”) about a social issue; thereby, highlighting both…

Indeed, very clever – now let’s see where he goes with this.