Culture Does Matter

Mark Noonan6 Comments

From NRO’s The Corner:

During my recent trip to Israel, I had suggested that the choices a society makes about its culture play a role in creating prosperity, and that the significant disparity between Israeli and Palestinian living standards was powerfully influenced by it. In some quarters, that comment became the subject of controversy.

But what exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? In the case of the United States, it is a particular kind of culture that has made us the greatest economic power in the history of the earth. Many significant features come to mind: our work ethic, our appreciation for education, our willingness to take risks, our commitment to honor and oath, our family orientation, our devotion to a purpose greater than ourselves, our patriotism. But one feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out above all others: freedom. The American economy is fueled by freedom. Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality…

Read the rest of it here.  Romney is completely correct – is the the culture of barbarism which prevents the Palestinians from enjoying a better life.  Give up the terrorism, give up the “death to Israel” nonsense and get rid of the kleptocrats who run the place and the Palestinians will swiftly be as prosperous as the Israelis.  It is up to the Palestinians – they have to decide what kind of life they want to live.  The world waits – you can be sure of it that the United States, alone, would pour untold billions in to the West Bank and Gaza.  Make the West Bank and Gaza a free market enclave like Hong Kong used to be and in 20 years you wouldn’t recognize the place…and you’d have Israelis asking real nice if they can join in (Israel does have a lot of success, but they still over-tax and over-regulate a bit; a leftover from the socialist days of the past).

Things can change.  People can change.  But they have to want to – and as an aside, all you liberals out there who are supporting the current Palestinian regime:  you’re part of the problem.  You’re propping up the very people who ensure endless war, endless oppression and endless poverty for the Palestinian people.

UPDATE:  Yet another reason to vote for Romney – our recovery weakest in all the world since 1970.

What America Really Needs: An Anti-Stupidity Movement

Mark Noonan79 Comments

While running through the Facebook thread, I came across the following quote:

To be beautiful means to be yourself.  You don’t need to be accepted by others, you need to accept yourself. – Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich, as it turns out, is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who has gained some vogue in the West – probably initially from the fact that he was one of those dimwits during the Vietnam War who figured that if the United States would just leave and the war just “end” then everything would be just swell.  How anyone by the 1960’s could think that a communist regime would (a) seek cooperation with non-communists or (b) be anything less than hideously brutal once triumphant is beyond my understanding.  But, of course, Thich wasn’t alone – around the world literal tens of millions thought the same way.  In other words, they thought stupidly.  But no one ever called them that.  Reading the quote listed above, though, got me thinking that we who refuse to be stupid have to be a bit more forceful lest stupidity overwhelm us.

Because someone would only post a quote like that if they thought it wasn’t stupid.  You only post something like that if you think it wise.  But, my goodness, what a vapid bunch of pantheist nonsense is wrapped up in that short quote!  To be beautiful means to be be yourself?  What if yourself is a drug addict?  Or a thief?  Or a lazy bum?  It is, indeed, true that you don’t need to be accepted by others but before you go accepting yourself isn’t it rather important to determine if  yourself is worthy of respect?  Suppose you’re a hooker or a con artist – are you supposed to accept that yourself?

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What’s In A Name?

Leo Pusateri43 Comments
Make no mistake. They are no longer the “Bush tax cuts.” They were tax cuts when they were enacted in 2001 and 2003. They have been the going tax rate for the past 9 years. They are the Bush tax rates. Any move to increase the current tax rates amounts to a TAX INCREASE. The Bill passed in the Senate today was NOT A TAX CUT BILL. It would simply maintain CURRENT TAX RATES for those making 250K or less. 

And for some reason known but to God, Harry Reid thinks that if you make $250,000 (many small businesses fall into this category) that you’re magically a millionaire! (Liberals were never very good at math, were they?). 

Not only that, they think that taking resources from those who have the ability to create jobs during this economy will somehow help the economy. 

Moronic thinking such as this deserves no quarter. These clowns MUST GO.

articles.chicagotribune.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s fellow Democrats in the Senate on Wednesday won passage of a bill to renew tax cuts for tens of millions of Americans, while 

War on Poverty, Fail

Mark Noonan71 Comments

From the AP:

…The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965…

The AP, being an MSM outfit, naturally puts part of the blame on a “fraying social safety net”, totally ignoring the fact that in real dollar terms we are spending vastly more on social programs than we ever did before.

Be that as it may, this is the final proof that Big Government welfare programs don’t work.  Of course, this has been easily demonstrable for several decades, now, but I don’t see how liberals can escape (save by flat out lying) the bald fact that their programs have failed.  This is it.  Its done.  Welfare doesn’t work.  No argument can be made that people would actually be worse off if we never started the War on Poverty, while plenty of arguments can still be made that we will be better off once we start dismantling this Big Government monstrosity.

Obama Runs a Deficit

Mark Noonan10 Comments

No, not just a US deficit – but a personal, campaign deficit:

Amid a heavy barrage of advertising by opposing “super” political groups, President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign spent more than it collected in June. While outraised again by Republican Mitt Romney…

To be sure, at the end of June Obama still had nearly $100 million on hand, but the fact that he’s burning through money faster than he takes it in doesn’t bode well – he’ll needs sacks of cash for the  September-November sprint and right now it appears that Romney will at the very least match him and may end up outspending him (and this is keeping out of the picture the super-PACs working for both sides).  This is undisciplined – this is a campaign which is not running effectively.  The vaunted Obama machine seems to be getting itself in to trouble – but no surprise to me because I never had any respect for Obama’s 2008 effort…he coasted to a win against a man who simply refused to hit hard (Obama also had a huge number of outside factors working in his favor).

But here’s the real kicker – with all this massive advertising and spending more than he took in, Obama didn’t move the electorate even an inch closer to him.  Even the biased, pro-Obama MSM polling still shows him in a bad position:  approval rating under 50%, now less than four months before election day.

 

 

 

Alexander Cockburn, RIP

Mark Noonan6 Comments

From Counter Punch:

Our friend and comrade Alexander Cockburn died last night in Germany, after a fierce two-year long battle against cancer. His daughter Daisy was at his bedside.

Over the years, from time to time, I’ve read Mr. Cockburn’s articles and no doubt out it, he was always a far-out, leftist extremist of the most commie type.  But I have to say that I always admired his grit and determination – as well as his style of writing.  He was, naturally, quite harsh in his condemnations of conservatives, but as a good radical leftist he also had plenty of fire for the hypocrisies of the liberals – from October 28th, 2004:

…Just as Kerry consistently disdained his eager and all-forgiving left supporters before November 2, he’ll redouble his public and private displays of rejection thereafter, contemptuously wiping Michael Moore’s moist kisses from all his cheeks. The constituencies President Kerry will be eager to placate and to satisfy will be exactly the ones he has courted the whole of this election year: the Neocons in Washington, and the bankers in Wall St…

A voice of extreme dissent is stilled and I’m sorry to hear about that.

 

You Didn’t Build That – Redux

Cluster31 Comments

I want to further the conversation on the current issue of business vs government as recently defined by our President who no doubt has a healthy disdain for success, in my opinion. I believe that this issue is one of the fundamental differences between conservative and liberal thought. Liberals, or at least the majority of current progressives, believe in social justice engineered by a large central federal government, taking from those at the top of the economic ladder and distributing to those on the lower rungs. This is hardly a new concept and has been done numerous times throughout history with little success. It has never resulted in lifting people out of poverty, nor has it resulted in creating a higher standard of living, or brought out the best in any individual. It has only served to enrich a ruling class at the expense of a permanent under class. What’s frustrating from a conservative position is that if you oppose the progressive agenda, than you are an evil over lord without any compassion, when in reality, conservatives do care, and have much more effective ideas on how to administer safety nets to those truly in need.

When the President stated that if you had a successful business, you didn’t build it and that others did, he offered a genuine glimpse into his true ideology, and that is one of collectivism. Of course this should be expected from someone who has never been a part of private enterprise having never started a business, nor even managed one, and yet has been the recipient of the benevolence of others almost at every stage of his life. Obama fails to understand the financial risk that so many people take to start their own business and be independent. If that individual fails, will the collectivists be there to off set the losses? I hardly think so, but the collectivists are sure there to take from that individuals success now aren’t they? Considering that business’s and successful individuals pay the majority of income taxes, it can be easily argued that they are largely responsible for building that infrastructure that others enjoy. It can easily be argued that without successful business’s, the government would not have the money to build those roads that those who don’t pay income taxes use on daily basis, so really, who should be more grateful? Shouldn’t the 47% who pay no income tax be grateful that hard working Americans provide the funds to build that infrastructure that they benefit from? Shouldn’t the president and other elected government officials be grateful to hard working, risk taking Americans for paying their salaries and benefits?  I really believe that this President and most liberals have their priorities all screwed up, and have put the cart before the horse.

Massacre, Redux

Mark Noonan151 Comments

A little later today the President of the United States will give a speech a little like this one or, perhaps, like that one.  The point is that the President will express his shock and grief over the shootings in Aurora, Colorado.

For the next few days we’ll have all sorts of reports about the massacre – we’ll learn about the shooter and about the least details of his sorry life.  We’ll learn if this was just some sort of crazed attack or (less likely) some sort of terrorist attack.  If it was a terrorist attack then it will be swiftly played down by government and MSM because confronting actual terrorism is forbidden right now (too busy with electoral matters – if it was some sort of terrorist attack, the reaction will be akin to the reaction to the Cole incident in 2000).  More than likely, though, this massacre is just another crazed attack in a long line of them – both in the United States and around the world.  Zero Hedge put together a handy list of the major mass shootings of the past 20 years.  Makes for depressing reading – but not so much because of the shootings, but because of our blindness on what it all means.

Even if the attack turns out to be terrorism, the list is still depressing and still so because of our unwillingness to confront reality.  Once upon a time, there weren’t mass shootings.  Not that there were fewer:  there were none.  Crazed lunatics with access to repeating rifles did not go on murderous rampages in the 1880’s.  Crazed lunatics with access to the Thompson sub-machine gun (a fully automatic weapon firing a murderous .45 ACP round at 600 rounds per minute…and anyone could buy it in the 20’s or 30’s…didn’t even need a permit) did not go on murderous rampages in the 1930’s.  Crazed lunatics who have to jump through government hoops to obtain semi-automatic weapons do go on murderous rampages, today.  What has changed?  I mean, other than the fact that it is harder to obtain less effective murder weapons than were available in the 1930’s?

Morality has changed.

Back in the past we didn’t have a society where the family was half collapsed.  We didn’t have a society where lies were officially designated as “politically correct” and thus not to be questioned.  Where the government nanny-State has replaced men in a quarter of all households.  Where violence is glorified in “cool” movies, television shows and video games.  Where obscene and/or anti-social behavior is not a matter for concern (until, that is, the obscene or anti-social person picks up a gun and starts shooting).   The problem we have – the reason people go on shooting rampages – is because we are an immoral society.  Until we become, once again, a moral society this will not change – all you’ll get is ever more shootings and, likely, ever worse shootings.

Until we brace ourselves to the task of rebuilding the family, denouncing the politically correct lies, dismantling the welfare State and start censoring what goes on in our popular culture, none of this will improve.  It will, indeed, only get worse.  Carp and complain about what I just wrote all you want – shriek to high heaven about how I just advocated censorship…but if you don’t agree with me, then you are part of the problem.  Your head is stuck firmly in the sand (though a much more vulgar suggestion of where it is would be more accurate).  You are ignoring reality in favor of one politically correct lie or another.   This is what it is – our collapse in morality leads to mass shootings.  Just as our collapse in morality has led to increased illegitimacy, divorce, cross-generational government dependence, rape, adultery/fornication, child abuse/neglect/abandonment, massively widespread sexually transmitted disease, increased child poverty, crime of all sorts, decayed cities…

Want to end all that?  Then start insisting upon the enforcement of morality.  If you don’t then nothing else you do will work and you’ll just see more and more of this…

UPDATE:  Roger L. Simon gets on the right track:

From Oliver Stone to Quentin Tarantino to Clint Eastwood, many of our best known filmmakers have trafficked in extreme, sometimes even gratuitous, violence. It has long been their contention, and those of others, that violence in film does not beget violence in life.

As the mass murder in Colorado has shown, they were wrong. Yes, normal people are able to separate illusion from reality, but for the criminally insane like James Holmes, it is quite clear that ultra-violent films can act as an inspiration for unspeakable acts.

Given the horrifying death toll, rare as the likes of Holmes may be, we have to account for the similarly deranged and aberrant. We owe that to the dead of Colorado and elsewhere. Moreover, we should not encourage these events, wittingly or unwittingly. And by we I mean the people who make films (which includes me)…

But he doesn’t go far enough – he eschews censorship.  But censorship of films, television, radio and video games (especially) is a necessary act in bringing to an end these horrendous massacres.  It is simple calculation:  what is more important, human lives of the ability of entertainment people to make an easy buck?  It is my view that because we have allowed popular culture to become a cesspit that it has not only become soaked in violence and sex but that it has also become lousy – actors are worse, direction is worse, writing is worse than it was in the glory days of Hollywood.  This is because acting in the manner of Spencer Tracy, directing in the manner of John Ford and writing with the style and grace of Charles Brackett (Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, The King and I, etc.) takes hard work as well as talent – much easier to just grind out movies with spectacular special effects, a few flashed boobs, some cuss words and a couple catch-phrases.

Do not, I pray you, try to sell me the utter garbage that censoring violence and sex out of popular culture attacks freedom.  Men and women did not fight and die for the “freedom” to put out disgusting filth and charge $8 to see it.  The heroes of America’s past fought and died so that we could worship God, speak our minds and live our lives without let or hindrance from others.  If the only way you can feel free is when your watching someone be disemboweled in an action flick, then you are a complete slave, so pound sand and get out of this debate and allow the adults to take over.

UPDATE II:  Naturally, the left is trying to blame the TEA Party and the larger conservative movement for this.  They’ll never take aim at the purveyors of popular filth.  Oh, no – that would mean a drying up of invites to the cool parties as well as a drop off in donations…

UPDATE III:  Its not just me thinking along these lines.

How “Progressive” is our Tax System?

tiredoflibbs41 Comments

Professor and chairman of the economics department at Harvard University, Greg Mankiw, took the latest CBO report and ran some numbers for 2009, the most recent year for which we have records.   He wanted to look at not only the amount of taxes someone paid, but also how much money individuals got BACK from the government in the form of refundable tax credits, welfare payments, entitlements and other government goodies.

So here are his calculations for the taxes each income level pays.  What this economist measured here is the amount of taxes the members of these income groups paid TO the government minus the amount of money these people got back in the form of various government payments:

Bottom quintile: -301 percent
Second quintile: -42 percent
Middle quintile: -5 percent
Fourth quintile: 10 percent
Highest quintile: 22 percent
Top one percent: 28 percent

As Mankiw explains the bottom quintile of Americans are essentially receiving $3 in UNEARNED income from the taxpayers for every dollar they earn.  He also points out something rather critical, and this is the fact that the middle quintile of taxpayers is in the negative, which means that they are net tax consumers.  That is almost a 20 point swing since 1979, when middle income earners were tax contributors.

This explains how 50% of Americans pay no income taxes at all … and instead absorb tax money paid by others.

As Ben Franklin has said:

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.

http://jpetrie.myweb.uga.edu/poor_richard.html

These FACTS do not bode well with the proggy LIE, in their class warfare, that the “rich are not paying their fair share”!

Another Obama Investment Goes Belly Up

Mark Noonan29 Comments

From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

The Amonix solar manufacturing plant in North Las Vegas, heavily financed under an Obama administration energy initiative, has closed its 214,000-square-foot facility 14 months after it opened…

…A designer and manufacturer of concentrated photovoltaic solar power systems, Amonix received $6 million in federal tax credits and a $15.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to open the plant in North Las Vegas…

If it was a worthwhile investment then private investors would have ponied up the money for it – that it took a massive, federal grant to get it off the ground demonstrated that it was doomed to failure from the start.  But Obama backed it – just like he did Solyndra and other failed “green jobs”.  And if he’s re-elected he’ll just go right on funding them…because he’s an utter fool who doesn’t know what he’s doing.