Misplaced Priorities Nearly Disarmed US Jet Fighters

One of the problems of allowing edicts from the top go forth based on spurious “science” is that you get unintended consequences. Most of the time it just costs the tax payers money and inconveniences. But when it affects national defense, it becomes apparent things have gotten ridiculous.

For the past several years, a serious problem developed in the radar guided air to air missiles carried by U.S. and foreign ally jet fighters. After racking up hours of high altitude flight, the AIM-120 AMRAAMs and AIM-7 Sparrows rocket motors failed to ignite on launch. Suffice it to say that a missile is useless if it can’t be fired off the rail in the first place and the AIM-120 is the main armament of the F-22A Raptor.

Since defense consolidation has resulted in single source suppliers since the end of the Cold War, the maker of the rocket engines, ATK, insisted it wasn’t their fault. You can get away with that to some degree when you have a monopoly. Well, the problem was finally identified after much hair pulling.

The engines have failed because federal environmental regulations forced a change to the chemical formula of the propellant. It makes me wonder what other wonderful surprises will be uncovered thanks to the asinine meddling of bureaucrats?

The good news is that another company can make replacement motors for the missiles. The bad news it that it is in another country, Norway. There go American jobs due to theoretically well meant intentions.

Stupidity has killed this once great nation and this is a small example of how.

Runaway Inflation Is Now Unavoidable

Bernanke has chosen to do the worst thing possible and that is an open ended qualitative easing. If you have savings or an IRA, expect to lose your shirt since interest will be held low and hyper inflation will lower the value of every penny you have. I suggest looking up the Weimar Republic in German history to get an idea of what is going to happen now.

Stock up on foods and goods while you can, your purchasing power is going to decrease very quickly now. Buying ammo would also be prudent since it will be going sky high after this news is absorbed.

Incompetent and suicidal are the only words I can find to describe this development. It looks like a desperate bid to influence the election.

Trust

A post in which I ramble about trust, lies, and forgiveness.

Inspired by a post by Hanny, I have been pondering the topic of trust for the past day. While he writes about his personal issues with trust, the decline of trust in our society is what has dominated my thinking. There have been two eras in my life where trust has disintegrated within our society with the first being the Watergate fallout. The second is harder for me to figure out when it started and for good reason. I will get back to that in a bit.

It would be good for me to write a disclaimer of sorts.

A year and half ago, I went through a pain therapy course involving meditation to relieve chronic pain. In order to join the course, I had to take the multiphasic personality test that professionals belief reveal all about you. According to it, I trust too easily.

Anybody who knows me in any kind of depth knows I do not trust people one whit. My favorite mental phrase is “I don’t trust them any further than I can shoot them.” Seriously, I am not joking. When I was very young, I was trusting. It was interactions with other humans that completely destroyed that. Betrayal is something I learned about early and repeatedly.

Obamacare Upheld Entirely

Article here.

So much for the survival of the Republic. Now that government intrusion into every facet of life is justified as long as it is considered a “tax”, anything and everything can be justified. Anyone who believes this to be a center right nation needs to look long and hard at the United States, for it has drifted firmly into the hands of the left. Tyranny has risen and will continue to rise unabated.

I wish I could feel more emotion about this than I do. But it is hard to when the writing has been on the wall for some time. What is surprising to me is how many on the right thought the Supreme Court would defend the Constitution like it was supposed to. That has not been the case for many decades.

It is fascinating that taxation was used as the justification for the package of laws called Obamacare. This country was founded by a rebellion against unfair taxation and so it seems appropriately ironic that it dies by taxation. People never learn that governments are infinitely greedy and have a hunger for taxes that is insatiable.  I pity the small business owners who will be crippled financially by all this.

There are those who believe this will be repealed. That is pretty much impossible, but running on that will give Romney the win in November.

I wonder if anyone still believes George W. Bush was a conservative after his biggest court appointee went hard left on the most important ruling in a generation?

Insert Title Here

Pick a title, any title, my creativity is not flowing today. While I have more energy than I did over the weekend, yesterday was a busier than usual Monday and so today is already dragging and it is not even 10:00 am yet.

One thing worked on yesterday was revamping and partially rewriting an old movie review. While I have done this to a minor degree before, this is a much more comprehensive overhaul which makes it a learning experience. Today it should get finished and it is about time I figured out how to bump a post to the front page. If I remember to, that is.

It is spring, so thoughts of maybe following baseball have emerged again. I find it ridiculous that streaming MLBTV online costs $20.00 a month. How sports fans can continue to fork out insane sums of money for PPV, tickets, and merchandise is beyond me. All I can surmise is that it is the latest form of idolatry to afflict the masses and there isn’t even a dollop of spiritual rewards promised.

I am not pleased with the Supreme Court ruling on strip searches. While it is a sad testament to the decay of society that such searches are often needed, the ability to force them on a person if they are arrested for anything is way over the line. The argument that ruling against them would have a “chilling effect” on law enforcement is somewhat legitimate, but when are we going to stop ceding all our civil liberties to the government?

Meanwhile, President Obama took another step toward tinpot dictatorship by threatening the Supreme Court over Obamacare. Why he thinks this will work when even Franklin Delano Roosevelt could not pull it off? FDR was far more popular and had much broader support, but the public completely rejected his attempts to bully and replace that branch of government. Rallying the base is one thing, but when it alienates everyone else it is not even a zero sum gain. It is a loss.

That is a lesson that seems to have been forgotten by a lot of politicians across the spectrum of late.

The wrong hood was ordered for the car and a new one has been placed. Hopefully a sunny day will arrive soon (forecast says tomorrow) to continue work on straightening metal. There is still a radiator attachment made of plastic that I have not figured out how to repair. Since the only other option is replacing the entire radiator, it has to be solved. Normally, a pin could be inserted into a drilled out hole, but I am afraid of leaks from the area if I do drill. Sigh. I probably could seal it well enough if that happens.

I am puzzled how people think that increased manufacturing with decreased demand is a positive sign, even in the short term. All it means is inventory will increase, which is not a good thing in a “just in time” economy. But if there is one thing I have learned about economic experts and investors is that anything can be tortured into becoming good news when desperate.

My growing suspicion is that the US stock markets will become the last haven for money for the wealthy before that wealth is permanently destroyed. Metals and real estate are the best places to sink money into, because the value of both will never reach zero. You will not be able to avoid losing money so it is all about having something rather than nothing in the end.

On that subject, the single most awesome thing I have seen on the Web so far this year. See, the Canadians are good for something!

Mass Effect 3, Entitlement Culture, and Endings

Over at Bioware’s Mass Effect 3 forums there is a considerable uprising in protest of the grim ending to the game. Without going into the merits of the how the ending was written and presented (there is very legitimate and not legitimate criticisms), what strikes me is the rage at not having a happy ending possible. There is sloppy writing involved and the ending was rushed along with other parts of the game, no doubt about that. But it is a cohesive and logical ending despite what those who are angry are writing.

Part of what I like about the Mass Effect series is that it does not shy away from hard choices and painful outcomes.  The idea of sacrifice runs through the entire series, starting with the Virmire mission in the first game where you have to choose which one of two main companions dies. At the beginning of the second game, the death of your character, Shepherd,  was a red flag that you would probably die when all is said and done, despite the resurrection after the opening titles. I took it as meaning Shepherd was on borrowed time from then on out.

But a lot of people reject that concept and are demanding a new ending be made and released. Thanks to the afore mentioned sloppy writing, there is an accidental out for Bioware and EA if they choose to use it. Yet I find it amazing that gamers believe they have a right to a happy ending. Long have gamers clamored that games be taken seriously as art, alongside movies and novels. So when a game takes an artistic chance and reaches for that brass ring, this happens. Sigh.

There is additional anger that the vaunted choices imported from the previous games do not effect the ending. My reply to this is that Mass Effect 3 is a final act in a larger story and those choices are shown to have large repercussions for the galaxy. Entire races can live or die depending on the choices you have made. Conflicts between races can be ended and paths for their cultures changed. That is not small in scale, is it? So a great deal of the reward for past choices is delivered well before the ending sequence and I consider that argument a nonstarter.

It speaks a great deal about how well written the characters are when players get this emotionally wrapped up with them. A lot of this ire has to do with failing to get a happy ending and seeing your Shepherd happy with his or her love interest as a reward. Life is messier than that and these games have always reflected that.

Currently, the people in most industrialized/Westernized nations have come to believe that happiness is a right to be guaranteed by their governments. Usually that takes the form of a welfare or socialist system of some variant. Expectations are high that failure will always have a safety net. Economics and demographics are starting to assert their terrible and unstoppable refutation of such systems being sustainable in the long term. Watching the riots and demonstrations in Greece has been informative as to how people will react when such nets begin to unravel.

By the way, “happiness” is not guaranteed in the Constitution of the United States of America. The word is not even found in it or the Bill of Rights. So where does that mistaken belief come from? It comes from the Declaration of Independence. To make things even clearer, that statement of intent (which is not legally binding) had “the pursuit of happiness” as a right. Last I checked, pursuit is not a guarantee you will catch the thing chased after.

But back on topic. So what does that have to do with a silly video game, you ask? (Or at least I ask for you.)

Well, people had the expectation of getting their way at the end and when that was dashed, they became disenchanted, bitter, and often furious. So now petitions have begun and an organized movement to force Bioware to release a free happy ending patch or DLC is well underway. This is not too different from protests seen in Greece and soon to be seen in other parts of Europe.

Somewhere along the way, great swathes of people began to believe happiness could be guaranteed. Reality and history say otherwise, but we have so much that we have become spoiled rotten. Thanks to the melodrama playing out over Mass Effect 3, some things I have been pondering have come into better focus. Too many people are utterly unprepared for worst case scenarios, at least emotionally. This is not good, given what is coming.

Odd that a PR disaster for a game is giving me a better grasp of some societal mechanics, but hey, I take my inspirations whenever and wherever I get them.

I wish to note that this is not meant as a full blown apologia for Mass Effect 3’s ending. There are plenty of flaws to it and to the series in general. I cannot present the trilogy as a paragon of storytelling or game making, for it does have plenty of warts. While I do not like how it became a gay rights propaganda platform, a player had the choice to avoid it for the most part – until this installment when it was rammed through with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Still, it is an entertaining and interesting science fiction property that might be best served in other media than games in the future.

Something occurred to me while playing through it the first time. The sensation was much like when I saw Return of the King and it can be described as a feeling that nothing will top what I just viewed. For me, Mass Effect 3 is the last video game I will ever get excited about, much like the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy affected my movie viewing. Oh I will get the DLC’s and play out all the bargain games I have gotten on Steam over the years. But it feels like the end of an era in my life and the enthusiasm will never be the same, not due to disappointment but completion.

For me, that is the biggest and perhaps best ending.

Going Intellectually Bankrupt

One of the more interesting chapters in the Intellectual Property (IP) wars was the takedown attempt of the Pirate Bay website. While Sweden sent the creators of the site to prison, it did not really end the site. Conspiracy theories abounded about the Unites States government being involved and now it has proven to be true. It is interesting material for those fascinated by IP laws getting out of hand, but there was a talkback post by an anonymous person that lays out the real reason this is going on. Read the whole post, but this is the best paragraph:

The drive is to twist the world into accepting intellectual property as if it were something tangible. The US pushes this hard because it is the only thing they have left. The idea is not to own the methods of production, but to own the instructions for the methods of production, and make others pay for using the instructions.

In a nutshell, that is exactly the situation and why Hollywood has disproportionate say in Washington, D.C. When NAFTA was passed back in the 1990’s, it was the beginning of the end for American manufacturing and, in my opinion, nation security/stability. What we are seeing today is the final result of believing in getting money for nothing.

And that is not going to end well.

Shades of Orwell

The FBI has a new flyer out suggesting people watch other Web users at internet cafes. If this isn’t playing Big Brother, I do not know what is. The vague definitions of what you should watch for cover a wide range of legitimate behaviors. For some reason I no longer mock people complaining about a growing police state.

Sigh.

Found at DSL Reports forums.

IP Rights Battles Are Only Beginning

There seems to be a great deal of celebration over having derailed SOPA and PIPA in the U.S.A., but they are not completely dead yet. In the meantime, ACTA has been passed by the majority of the EU nations. It still has not yet been ratified. That is little comfort, for I suspect it will be ratified easily when the time comes. To get an understanding of why this is a big deal, please check out my earlier posts on it here and here.

Another blow to the free travel of information came when the Supreme Court ruled that works in the public domain can be taken out of that status and copyrighted again. So those of you who have downloaded eBooks and movies in the public domain may end up becoming law breakers in the future. This aggravates the erosion of having limited copyrights and sets them well on the way to perpetuity, despite what Justice Ginsburg wrote.

It is ironic that there is such an effort to stifle the flow of knowledge and creativity in a time when we can finally share such things quickly and easily. Innovation is dying out in large part to actions such as these. Sure it sounds warm and fuzzy to talk about helping families of celebrities who were ripped off by their managers/producers/record labels, but resting on the laurels of those who came before is lazy. In the end, only the big media companies and their puppets in government truly benefit as most copyrights will be held by large corporations, not individuals.

So while a battle has been temporarily won, the war continues. If things keep up the way they are going, a long period of cultural stagnation is ahead for us. I firmly believe that humanity needs to keep striving and creating to advance. To my eyes, we have ceased doing so over the past twenty five years and the momentum generated in the past is fading away. We need some intellectual turmoil and the best way to create that is to ideas, concepts, and collaborations bouncing around like mad. Caging those is a huge mistake.

Stop SOPA and PIPA!

Contact your local Senator and Congressman to let them know you support free speech on the Web.   Allowing web sites to be taken down by the government simply based on a complaint from someone else about copyright violations is ridiculous. The whole idea of the world wide Web is to allow linking to other sites to share information and these bills would jeopardize the very structure of the Internet.

Wikipedia, Minecraft, Craigslist, and Reddit Go Black Tomorrow

While it is only the English language version of Wikipedia going black to protest SOPA and PIPA, it will not go ignored by millions of users there and at the other sites participating. WARNING: the link will have a video start up automatically, but the text also covers the details.

It will be interesting to see how much this affects things. I have to say that Dick Costolo of Twitter has it very wrong from reading that quote in the article. Of course, Hollywood types live and die by Twitter these days, so I am not surprised by his stance. I do not have a way of blacking out my blog so that will not happening here. Instead I'll let my posts opposing SOPA and other IP "protections" speak for themselves.

Ding Dong, the SOPA Bill Is Dead

Some good news that Eric Cantor has killed the bill in the House after a weekend where the author, Lamar Smith, started backing away from it and the White House came out in opposition. The latter shows what use an election year can be for activists to derail unpopular legislation. I highly doubt this positive outcome would have happened otherwise.

I hope the Senate version dies as well.

China Going Backwards

It has been fashionable in multiple circles to believe that China will take over the title of most powerful nation during this century. Much has been made of their economic growth and of their acquiring companies, land, and ports in other countries. This has presented an impression of an unstoppable juggernaut backed by the reality that they have become the main manufacturer of goods in the world. But does this mean China is ready or able to take over the lead?

I do not think so. Despite their growing military aggression in Asia, there are cracks appearing. With protests sporadically appearing in different regions, the specter of civil unrest has cast a long shadow across the very large country. In December, the village of Wukan rose up against land seizures and managed to make international news. That inspired another uprising in the nearby city of Haimen despite knowing they would be beaten by police.

It is no wonder that the authorities are spooked  for they have witnessed successful uprisings in Arab countries this past year. They too sit on a powder keg of poor and oppressed citizens. But what is interesting to me is that the latest uprisings are in in southern China, which is supposed to be the wealthy part of the nation.

Another intriguing tidbit of information is that the wealthy are looking to escape the country in the future. From other things I have read, there is a sense of fear that another peasant rebellion could happen. So we have the wealthy prepared to pull the handle on their personal ejection seats at the first sign of serious unrest.

So when President Hu wrote a piece saying that China is under cultural attack from the West and then the government restricts television broadcasts in order to present a more pure socialist message it made my antenna go up. This strikes me as being both a reaction to domestic control problems and preparations for conflict. The latter could be internal or external, with the latter being of particular concern to me.

It is not unknown for nations to attack others to bleed off internal pressures that have become too difficult to regulate. However, this may not be the conventional bombing or invading of another country kind of attack. The communists running China have been orchestrating cyber attacks on other countries for years. Asymmetric warfare is at the heart of Chinese military planning, being a theory of fighting a foe who is more powerful by using unconventional means. Right now, that means using cyber warfare against America.

Frankly, I do not think that will do a thing to vent social pressures at home. So the odds of an open confrontation with the United States to whip up patriotic fervor are increasing. While the OWS idiots focused on the spurious one percent here, the income disparities in China make us look well balanced by comparison.

With a housing bubble bigger than the one that popped here and a massive population that are truly dirt poor, China has problems too big to easily fix no matter how much state control is imposed. Actually, state control rarely fixes problems and just breeds more from what I have seen. Aggravating this is how they are driving out Western companies and nationalizing companies again. Wealth and power are being consolidated in the hands of an elite few, as is typical with socialist systems. It is sadly reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm.

With Europe and the United States poised for even worse financial problems in 2012, China will become even more unstable as the buyers for their manufactured goods dry up. November and December saw drops in manufacturing there, so those ballyhooing increased manufacturing in the States should take a reality check, stat. Demand is still not coming back. The fact that Hu and company think that the US is deliberately taking economic hits to undermine them financially does not help things either.

An unstable China will be prone to doing things that would be out of character for them in recent decades. People in the West have forgotten the China that invaded their neighbors Vietnam and India. Suffice it to say, nobody in the region has though. There is quite a military build up going on throughout Asia right now due to Chinese naval aggression at sea.

I would like to be a fly on the wall in some of the intelligence briefings in the region. Even the cash strapped Philippines government is looking to get F-16 fighter jets because of what has been going on.

It is going to be an interesting year.

Wikipedia May Go Blank in Protest Against Bill

There is an odious piece of legislation called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) being pushed in Congress right now that jeopardizes a large amount of the Web. Wikipedia is considering blanking their pages in protest of this corporate paid for bill. Intellectual property (IP) rights have gotten out of hand as failing movie and music industries try to stem the bleeding in lost profits. Instead of blaming their very poor products for the decline, they would like to censor the entire Internet in pyrrhic fashion thinking it would up sales.

While legislation against pirate sites is a reasonable goal, this implementation is dangerously excessive. Wikipedia would go under due to it and many a blog would as well. Linking to photos, pictures, and articles would be potentially criminal under this law. That kind of kills the whole concept of the Web, doesn’t it?

It is not the only attack on freedom of speech online. A recent ruling against a blogger by an Obama appointee is a direct attack on the idea of the “citizen journalist” that has flourished on the Net. Not a good precedent, but one I had been expecting for some time. The desire to control others gets stronger the bigger a government gets.

I can only hope this bill fails, for it will be a disaster for free speech not just in the United States.

Shape of Things to Come

As the economic conditions continue to deteriorate to the inevitable collapse, governments at all levels will become obsessed with picking the pockets of the citizen completely clean. There has already been discussion of confiscating private retirement accounts, which has been done in other countries. Pumping up inflation is another way savings are wiped out and that is the plan in the United Kingdom.

But here is an idea that blindsided me and is already law in Louisiana. All secondhand goods are to be paid for by check or plastic from now on. Curiously, pawn shops are exempted. But what about Goodwill and Salvation Army stores? This also effectively outlaws rummage sales and any other private sale, since you would have to have enough money to survive checks bouncing or to have a credit card scanner. Those have fees per transaction to use, by the way.

Asinine barely begins to describe this. Supposedly this is to stop materials thefts and theft in general. Most of the buyers there are shady and doing it off the books anyway, so it will not stop crime. But it will destroy a lot of small businesses.

So why pass this law?

I suspect the real answer is that it is all about taxes. It is easier to keep track of what should be taxed because checks, debit cards, and credit cards are all traceable. They want a chunk of unreported “black market” sales that go on all the time between private citizens. The legitimate businesses already keep track of that and pay their taxes, but there is an attitude among some legislators that there is a huge underground economy that can bring in big revenue streams.

To some degree, they are right and that is why a national sales tax replacing the income tax would be very effective. But an individual state doing this will just encourage legitimate buyers to stop buying and criminals will do one of two things: money laundering and shopping out of state.

I feel assaulted by dangerous waves of stupidity.

Moody Minnesota

It had slipped my attention that the state of Minnesota was downgraded from AAA to AA+ by Moody’s last month. So it was somewhat surprising to find out that the financial outlook for Minnesota was revised to negative on Monday. This is not a good thing when looking for bonding in the future.

Strange how my state has become something of a predictor for political problems lately. What’s clear is that the public’s love of having divided government doesn’t work so well during a time of economic crisis.  Big governments are slow to react to anything and divided governments are even worse.

So we are seeing that stop gap measures aren’t effective in keeping good credit ratings, which should be a warning sign to the Federal government. There is a very high chance that there will be a downgrade there as well.

I should see how the stock markets are taking things now that the debt ceiling raise was signed by President Obama…

Well, the Dow has plunged below the 12,000 mark and the S&P has shed most of its gains for the year. Not surprising since there is no good economic news to be had. Gold just went higher with South Korea buying more, it is at $1644.50 an ounce. That’s absurdly high and a huge warning sign.

Interesting times.

Bad Moon Rising

There are those who actually believe we emerged out of the recession and are worried we are going into another. Well, we aren’t. We never got out of the first one and it isn’t a recession, but the early stages of another Great Depression. While we have more social safety nets in place, they aren’t going to last very long at this rate.

One myth on the Left is that Social Security is a “lockbox” and all the funds are safe there to pay it out. If that were true, how could President Obama threaten to not send checks out next month? Note that this is a threat in political speak and his verbal tones suggest he was eager to issue it.  While it is a despicable thing to do, it does unmask the fallacy of the lockbox.  Another Democrat President ended that isolation of Social Security funds from the general fund back in the 1960’s – Lyndon Baines Johnson. They are now controlled at the whim of our government and are not guaranteed.

But the most interesting thing about this is that there will be money to spend on Social Security and other needed things even if we can’t borrow money. It means drastic cuts elsewhere, but that is at the discretion of the Treasury. Which means it is at the discretion of the President. In other words, Obama is threatening to cut off benefits for political gain in the 2012 elections. Some servant of the people he is.

Being on Social Security Disability, this hits me directly. Loss of Social Security means no food, no shelter, no Internet, and the loss of everything I have.  I can’t say I’m surprised how cavalier the President is about the people who will be affected as he is part of the Chicago Machine which is all about thuggery. The willingness to hurt the elderly and disabled just to damage the Republicans shows the quality of Obama’s character.

Sadly, that is only the beginning of our problems. The debt ceiling will mean nothing in the near future because an economic catastrophe has already begun across the globe. Large things tend to be slow moving and people don’t notice the changes until they hit critical mass. And much like an avalanche, they can’t be avoided.

The jobs report for June in the United States is an unmitigated disaster. 18,000 jobs were purportedly created when we need 150,000 new jobs created each month just to match population growth. Notice I used the word “purportedly.” At The NY Post it is revealed that 131,000 jobs were estimated out of thin air to pad the number upwards. In the United Kingdom, their latest report on employment isn’t quite as grim, but it isn’t good.

Meanwhile, the PIIGS crisis in the European Union continues unabated. Ireland just got relegated to junk bond status and Greece continues to be a bottomless sink hole despite hundreds of billions of Euros dumped into it. I don’t even want to discuss the problems China is having with inflation and bad loans. Two ballyhooed stimulus packages have failed to do anything positive at all and now they are talking about another one, QE3. Throwing money that doesn’t exist at something caused by spending money that doesn’t exist is not a sign of intelligent or even sapient behavior.

What will the second Great Depression look like? That’s hard to tell, since there has been so much wealth generated worldwide since the end of World War II. As mentioned before, there are safety nets in place that weren’t previously in developed countries. But there has never been so much debt in place as we have today. It will hit slower than in the 1920’s and 30’s and it has already begun.

We have much more to lose, so the possibility of it being more dramatic and catastrophic increases due to the simple fact the masses aren’t acquainted with real hardship anymore. What happens when food supplies become permanently disrupted? What happens when fuel is too expensive to allow easy migration to better places? What happens when electricity becomes unreliable with rolling blackouts the norm? What happens when groups begin hoarding resources? Those are all questions the world is going to have to face very soon.

Here in the U.S., we have a cultural divide that is now unbridgeable. The Left have gone so far away from common ground with the middle and right that the political frictions we see now are going to look quaint by comparison when the real crisis hits fully.  Though the truth is the middle will do whatever the group in charge tells them to do, so really they don’t matter. It is a sad thing, but the result of apathy/fence sitting is the loss of any real say in things.

My prediction is greater division and rising violence, both of which have already begun. Frustrations will continue to grow and the political class will continue to play games as long as they are comfortable. By the time anything will be attempted seriously, it will be too late.

So where does that leave the little guy? Up a creek without a paddle in most cases.

All we can do is prepare ourselves for the worst outcome and pray for the best. Storing food for more than threes days of supplies is a beginning. Having the ability to protect yourself wherever you are means exercising your 2nd Amendment rights here in the States, no matter how you feel about firearms. Most of all, you need to be spiritually prepared.

In God you can trust, but not man. I wish people would remember that whenever the latest demagogue of any political persuasion shows up.

The Shutdown

The big news in Minnesota is the state government shutdown due to an inability to get a budget passed. As I expected, the media is backing Governor Dayton and one of the main line of attacks is hammering on incessantly about the closure of state parks during the popular camping season of the 4th of July weekend. All very predictable and probably very effective in swaying public sentiment. Portraying the Republicans as only cutting spending when they actually presented an increase in spending is all part of the dishonest game.

I have to give credit to the state Republican leadership who didn’t cave in despite knowing this was exactly what Dayton wanted, contrary to his protestations to reporters. The surprising thing is how many Republicans I know who didn’t think the shutdown would happen. When a reversed version of this happened while Pawlenty was in office in 2005, the Democrats used it to great advantage to vilify the Republican party and it was believed it contributed to the rout of the GOP in 2006. Of course Dayton was going to return to that playbook!

In the end, there is a high probability that doing the right thing on holding back spending will damage Republican chances statewide in 2012. The power of the media is still great and that can’t be ignored. For all the talk of how the new methods of communication like Twitter and Facebook have changed things, the old partisan media is still where most people get their information. However, there is a lot going on nationally that will effect the local races, especially the economy. That keeps things unpredictable for the moment.

Frankly, I don’t think the public has the intestinal fortitude to deal with the extensive cuts that are really required and we will see Minnesota and the nation collapse into economic ruins. Cynical pandering and class warfare are already being used to buttress the Left’s insane devotion to Keynesian economics. Spending when you have no savings will never get a person, a state, or a nation out of debt. So all of that stimulus into the economy just made things worse and yes, both political parties are to blame for it. You would have thought the lessons of the 1970’s would have been remembered.

Dark times are ahead, far darker than most expect because it is a systemic problem with how our government “works.” People look to the demonstrations and riots in Europe while wondering if it can happen here. It can and could get much worse with the Left’s history of violence.

I would like to be wrong about this.

When the Levy Breaks

Watching the Berlin Wall being attacked with sledgehammers as East and West Germany spontaneously reunited left an indelible impression on me in the early 1990’s. The following Russian revolution that took down the Soviet Union had memorable images as well, especially of Boris Yeltsin leading the rebellion. But the unexpected fall of the Soviet Union was a surprise to all and even today it is somewhat of a mystery of why it happened. Leon Aron has written an intriguing theory over at Foreign Policy.

In it, he puts forth the idea that it was a desire to morally reform the Soviet Union that led to its downfall. This is a fascinating idea given the events in Arab countries right now. Economics is usually cited as a causal factor in revolutions by our liberal media and intelligentsia, which reflects their Marx influenced thinking. But what if it is something else entirely?

Lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that governments and businesses are supported by faith in them, or confidence, rather than actual merit or results. As long as confidence remains in them, they stay afloat. But once that is lost, the beginning of the end is soon to be seen. Parliamentary systems of government illustrate this rather well, but it applies to all forms of government.

The money quote of the article:

"Dignity Before Bread!" was the slogan of the Tunisian revolution. The Tunisian economy had grown between 2 and 8 percent a year in the two decades preceding the revolt. With high oil prices, Libya on the brink of uprising also enjoyed an economic boom of sorts. Both are reminders that in the modern world, economic progress is not a substitute for the pride and self-respect of citizenship. Unless we remember this well, we will continue to be surprised -- by the "color revolutions" in the post-Soviet world, the Arab Spring, and, sooner or later, an inevitable democratic upheaval in China -- just as we were in Soviet Russia. "The Almighty provided us with such a powerful sense of dignity that we cannot tolerate the denial of our inalienable rights and freedoms, no matter what real or supposed benefits are provided by 'stable' authoritarian regimes," the president of Kyrgyzstan, Roza Otunbayeva, wrote this March. "It is the magic of people, young and old, men and women of different religions and political beliefs, who come together in city squares and announce that enough is enough."

I would submit that the United States is not immune to this. With the rise of the Tea Parties, a direct challenge to the current system is being made. A large number of people feel that the wheels are coming off of our society and that corruption feeds the growth of the government. Even discounting the vocal protesters, I’ve run into many of the apathetic middle who no longer trust the government to do anything right. This isn’t the “malaise” that Jimmy Carter spoke of around 35 years ago. Instead, it is a feeling of resigned resentment.

Technically, we have a system designed for easy change. Unfortunately, sprawling bureaucracy and Obama’s attempts at an imperial presidency have done too much damage to the system. The system of checks and balances between the branches of government have been compromised to the point of no return.

Nobody saw the fall of the Soviet Union coming until it happened. Are we ignoring the same signs in their infancy here? I wonder.

There is also the problem of revolutions rarely delivering on what was promised. They are glamorized by historians and the media, but tend to unleash the darkest aspects of the human soul with oppression and bloodletting being the end result. In Russia, Putin is poised to openly rule again as an elected dictator. Not exactly what was hoped for when the Soviet system was dismantled.

I can’t say if Aron is correct, but his ideas are very interesting to say the least. We need to be looking around and re-evaluating events like this to find lessons. While we always live in uncertain times, things seem to be more unstable than usual and I have the impression that the world is about to be plunged into great turmoil. Being a history buff, this is exciting but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it!

Misleading Ads and Dayton’s Shadow PAC

Starting this week, I’ve been getting targeted ads in several places I visit on the Net.  They all say “Tell Sen. Jeremy Miller to stand up for the middle class.”  Next to the white text on a somber black background is a poorly dithered grayscale portrait shot of Jeremy with a “Click to learn more.”

Click on it and it takes you to a dishonest video attacking Senator Miller and extolling our rather strange governor’s plan -- which isn’t a balanced budget but instead features massive spending increases.  It is fascinating seeing a rookie Republican State Senator come under attack this way. To me, it shows he is doing a good job at being fiscally responsible in a very bad economic situation. That’s more than I can say about Governor Dayton as he’d rather have a shutdown than not pander to the special interests that got him elected.

This soak the rich campaign shows how utterly out of touch the socialist Democratic Party people have become. You will never hear someone talk about how a poor man gave them their job… Wait, there is one way for that to be true. Overtax and over spend and pretty soon everyone will be poor except the politicians and unionized government workers.  Technically, the public is supposed to be the employer, right? So if we are all poor… Well you get the picture.

Funny how the Alliance for a Better Minnesota is a union funded PAC out to help Mark Dayton. Are they looking out for the best interest of the people of Minnesota or their own pocket books? The answer is pretty clear.

Senator Miller is standing for the middle class, the people who have to balance their budgets and don’t have infinite credit to borrow from.