Isn’t the definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”? From The Hill:

House Democrats this week have amplified their calls for new spending on infrastructure and other federal projects in the face of May’s discouraging job-creation figures.

Even as Republicans are insisting on “trillions” of dollars in spending cuts, Democrats maintain that a targeted injection of additional federal dollars in the near-term would go a long way toward reversing the hiring slump. Friday’s disappointing job report, they say, only bolsters their case…

This is seriously what they’ve got – spend more money on infrastructure and federal projects. They expect none of us to notice that, hey, we just spent a lot of money on just that…shouldn’t we have some primo infrastructure, by now? But, this what Democrats will run on…just spend more money; and aren’t those Republicans meanies for not spending?

The real purpose here, of course, is to keep unionized workers on the job through 2012. The last thing Democrats need is a huge pool of campaign cash and political muscle to dry up. So, spend bags of more money – print it up in whatever amount proves necessary. Gotta get Obama re-elected, ya know?

We can crush them. They’ve got nothing. Their plans have fallen off from silly to downright stupid. All we need do is attack, attack and then attack some more. As long as we fight this out, the people will come our way…we offer a future of greatness, they offer another hand out to their special interests. We can win this running away, if we set our selves to the task.

A dire prediction quoted over at Zero Hedge:

…We consider it likely that food inflation will prove to be more pernicious and durable this time than in the Seventies.

Why?

Because, back then, food shortages generating food inflation were almost entirely caused by weather or crop diseases. Today, we still have problems with weather disruptions in key grain-growing regions, but pesticides and herbicides have dramatically reduced crop losses of earlier times. However, we now have man-made assaults on food supplies, and they have every indication of being both dangerous and durable. Politicians cloaking their personal political greed in green garb could easily create food shortages of Biblical proportions.

Indeed. We have the capability not just of feeding the whole world, but of over-feeding it. The last thing which should be suffering inflation is food. We’ve really got the technology on this one nailed down. But a series of short sighted policies ranging from government subsidies to environmentalist idiocy has curbed the ability of the United States and the rest of the world to produce sufficient food. The bowl is getting empty and we’re busy killing off the means of re-filling it.

This doesn’t affect Americans too much. For Americans, higher food prices are really an inconvenience. If food prices spike another 10 or 15%, it will hurt and it will have a severe effect on the economy (more spent on food, less spent on other goods…presto!, recession)…but it won’t ever risk an American’s life. On the other hand, those areas of the world which have short food supplies at the best of times and where people spend half or more of their income just on food would be catastrophically hit if food prices continue to rise. As is usual when liberal elites set to work (in this case, in “saving” the planet) it is the poorest of the poor who suffer the most.

We really need to reform American government from top to bottom. A century’s worth of liberal idiocy has wormed its way in to our institutions and unless we can purge this nonsense we’ll never fully recover. America is supposed to be the economic powerhouse of the world – in food as well as in all other activities. We’ve bound ourselves hand and foot with liberal policies, and now some places of the world are running out of food because of it. Time for a real change – and 2012 just can’t get here fast enough.

Remember the day:

They are almost all gone now, the men who liberated Europe. A few very old men linger on and we are thus privileged to have them with us for a little while. But the day will soon come when all of them will have gone home – gone to be with the brothers they left on the beaches and fields of Normandy. I wonder who will laugh most – those who died there, or those who died many years later?

For us, it is a matter of remembering – what they did and why they did it. We forget too fast these days, especially in the younger generation. We forget that regular, every day Americans quitted their lives and went to liberate people they didn’t know and places they had never been. Evil had risen in the world, and in trusting faith they went forth and did their duty – more than 300,000 of them giving, in Lincoln’s words, “the last full measure of devotion”.

From Reuters:

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou starts a campaign on Monday to secure a new international bailout by imposing years of austerity on a nation already seething over corruption and economic mismanagement.

Unease is growing within Papandreou’s ranks about the consequences of waves of budget cuts demanded under successive deals with the European Union and IMF — and this could turn into alarm after at least 80,000 Greeks crammed a central Athens square to vent their anger over the nation’s dire state…

To put it in proportion – this is like more than two million Americans showing up in DC to shout defiance at the government. Can you imagine what would happen if such an event took place? More than likely, our government would cave to that level of anger…or, the party on the “out” would swiftly take advantage of it and clean up at the next election.

So, why, then, does the Greek government seem prepared to buck their people and go forward with the bail out? Because if you think the Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin, you’ve never seen nothing like Europe. Over there, all the parties really are the same…with only the most minor differences. The difference between, say, Labour and Tory in Britain is that the Tories will have Britain go bankrupt slightly slower than Labour would. Portugal just tossed out their government because of the bail outs…and what do the winners propose to do? Go forward with the bail outs, naturally.

Everyone of the elite in Europe is simply aghast at all this – the deal was they’d provide lavish benefits and the people would just quietly accept the dictates of government. But now popular revolt is brewing…and you just watch: if this keeps up, the more extremist parties in Europe will start to gain strength. Not because Europeans are particularly extremist, but because of frustration with all the current major parties…no one is speaking up for the people who are to be burdened with taxes for a generation in a vain attempt to pay off bondholders who should have been smart enough not to loan money to States which cannot repay.

It is quite a mess over there – and it where we’re heading unless we get our act together in the 2012 election.

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.)