Tea Party and Occupoopers

The Tea Party of Richmond, Virginia has a gripe – and it is a legitimate gripe.

It has asked the City of Richmond for return of the $8,500 the Tea Party has paid to the City for a permit, insurance, ports-potties and police  to rally for a few hours – while the local “Occupy” group did their demonstration for weeks for NOTHING!

Not only has the City of Richmond denied the Tea Party request, it has sued the Tea Party for something about “excise tax” unpaid.

The only thing that needs excising is the City fathers on the Richmond City Council!

Around the country, the Occupoopers have been compared to the protests of the short and civil protests of the Tea Party – while escaping the penalties assigned to the Tea Party rallies.

Something definitely wrong with this picture.

The Union Will Point Fingers Elsewhere, But…

The American Airlines filing for bankruptcy filing should be an object lesson for labor unions, but of course it won’t be.

American has not previously filed for bankruptcy, so the labor costs it has are the results of concessions made over the successful years that the unions have refused to moderate in this new climate.

Bankruptcy judges have immense power to actually abrogate union contracts, so it would have been better for the unions involved to have given back something rather than have the judge do it.

The judge may listen to the union, and management — but he or she has no obligation to listen to anyone.

Labor union leaders don’t want to take the heat for “Givebacks” — even when they might well have been able to get their workers a better deal. Union leaders would much prefer that someone else take the heat, since judges are virtually immune to pressure while union leaders can be voted out.

The workers will suffer the most, and never believe that they have been cheated by their leaders.

But they have. They will blame it on the rich who own the stocks of the corporation.

“…anything you subsidize you will have more of”

In Britain we see the perfect example of the Dictum: Anything you tax, you will have less of, and anything you subsidize you will have more of.

 

An unemployed British man from Dundee, Jamie Cumming has  had 16 children – by 14 different women.

(Jamie’s mother says he has not worked for years and shows no inclination to ever work again.)

Why not? It’s free! The medical is free, the food is free, and the child raising is free.

The good old British dole system – what we call welfare.

He has still another child (17th) due in January with still another woman (#15).

It’s sort of his hobby, supported by the British taxpayers – who, by the way are undergoing the most drastic austerity in Europe, about which we hear little because the British are not part of the Euro monetary system, although they are part of the EU political system.

Actually, as badly as Greece, Spain and Italy are in the news – Britain is worse – but it does not threaten the Euro because they kept the British Pound so they operate alone without impacting their 17 EU neighbors.

We don’t hear much about the British economic problem, but it is significantly worse than any other European nation, and as the Jamie Cumming problem ably demonstrates, whatever the Brits are doing is not nearly enough!

Please! No More European Socialism!

O.K. Herman Cain is toast, and there is another non-Romney, and it is Newt.

(Note to philanderers: Don’t dump your long-time lover just as you are running for the presidency. Come to think of it, NEVER dump a long-term lover. SHE WILL TALK!)

I love Newt, and the best description I heard came from a liberal on the weekend Chris Matthews show — but then his show only has liberals.

Anyway the liberal, whomever it was, said words to the effect that Newt has five huge ideas a minute — one is brilliant, two are workable, one is unworkable and one is absolutely insane.

I agree with that.

But Newt is brilliant with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails.

But I still favor Mitt.

Either one will do. Mitt caries the mantle of appearing too much like the 1%. Newt has personal women baggage.

Neither is a European Socialist – and so either is an improvement over what we have.

Wrong At The Top Of His Mumbles

I will really miss Bawney Fwank — the man has a way with words. You can’t understand his words necessarily, but he has a way…

But, honestly, he can be said to be wrong at the top of his voice. He is not wishy-washy and defends his wrongness vigorously.

He really believed in a home for everyone as a social good, which would be excellent except some simply could not afford the payments.

Even George W. Bush bragged that his administration had the highest percentage of home ownership in history — and you see what THAT got us, It’s not nice to mess with Mother Nature, and Mother Nature says not everyone should own a home.

Or a Rolls Royce.

Anyway, Barney really believed in his liberal utopia, and he will never admit that it was doomed from the start. Like all liberals he thinks that if we had just tweaked it here, had better people there..

I loved to see him interviewed. He was antagonistic whether interviewed by liberals of conservatives. The man never smiled. He always looked like he had a stick up his…

Oh!

On-Line Beats Crowds

Every time I see the crowds that are out shopping, I thank Amazon, Lands End and L.L. Bean.

Come to think of it, I thank the on-line military exchange system also, although this weekend Amazon was cheaper than the military exchange in iPODS. Ordered one from Amazon for a grandson.

My Christmas gift to me is a new computer, built around an Intel i7 2600 chip and 12  GB of RAM. Yes, overkill. It’s a guy thing when combined with an engineering degree overdesigns EVERYTHING!

My wife’s present? Why she gets to live with me!

(Please! No heavy objects!)

Our Systems Are Reversed

Ahhhh….the British dole system! A man has fathered 16 children by 14 different women — and just about the whole lot is on the dole!

(Anything free is oversubscribed! You can give away scorpions in bottles if they are free!)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2067029/Jamie-Cumming-Dundee-16-children-14-women.html

When there is no economic penalty to proscribe behavior, then there is a benefit to bad baavior – and that is the difficulty with all third-party payer programs, and unrestricted welfare and medical care are just two such systems.

Insurance based strictly on risk will greatly diminish smoking and overeating without government intrusion.

Going hungry is a great incentive to get a job – any job!

Our systems are currently designed backward.

Nature or Nurture

The American Enterprise Institute walks into quicksand with an article about the IQ of Jews – it is an ineresting article and is controversial ONLY because if some ethnicities are smarter than others then some are also dumber.

Looked at objectively, Jews make up .02% of the world’s population but win 39% of all merit-based Nobel Prizes. In a 1954 New York City school analysis designed to find the 28 brightest students – defined as those with IQ over 170 – 24 of the 28 were Jewish.

So, the real question is: Nature or Nurture?

http://www.american.com/archive/2011/october/the-2011-nobel-prize-and-the-debate-over-jewish-iq

Beats me. What I do know from observation is that those cultures that prize education, perform better. Certain, but not all Asian societies. Certain, but not all Black societies, and certainly what has been in the past a very homogenous Ashkenazi Jewish society.

When it comes to scholars and scientists, there is no question.

Why is a legitimate question.

Re-Examine Priorities

We have spent $2.5 BILLION to send a mission to Mars to examine if the planet has ever had life, and if it can sustain human life,

I favor space exploration at some level, and this simply exceeds my level. It seeks an answer that simply is not worth billions — at THIS time.

I understand scientists wanting the answer to every question, We need answers, jst not ate the rate and the cost that scientists want.

I understand the nations desire to protect Europe, if and wn there is a practical threat to their existence — right now there is none. There is none in sight, and we can deploy rapidly when there is — assuming there is a need for the second largest combined economy (the US) to EVER protect a larger combined economy (Europe).

We need to examine our priorities. They are not the same priorities we had when we were flush with money. Some of those previously high priorities could not be stopped or stored so easily, but the launch of that Mars mission alone must cost a fortune, and the Mars lander can be stored until we are ready.

Yes, it’s hard to store the expertise necessary to do things but when you are out of money you are out of money.

That project was a BILLION dollars over initial estimate, and it took a year longer than predicted – but we knew more than a year ago that we were BROKE. It was last november that the Republicans TROUNCED the Democrats because everyone knows WE ARE BROKE.

This project is water over the bridge, of course, since we have launched – but I wonder what other projects can be delayed until the nation’s health returns to something approaching normalcy.

Martyrdom is a part of the message

Ya gotta love the Mayor of LA — he thinks his verbal support for the Occupoopers would cause the Occupoopers to simply fade away, perhaps even with a note of thanks to the Mayor for keeping his police from evicting them earlier.

Wrong!  the Occuspokesperson interrupted the Mayor’s edict with a statement that the campers were going nowhere.

LA  is one of the few camps left. even other Mayors who supported the aims of the movement eventually had to dispossess the campers. If the campers had a coherent message, they have made it.

The Mayor says Monday. The Occupoopers say never, but never is a very long time. The Mayor has tried bribery, offering 10,000 s.f. of downtown business district space plus a farm — although I wonder how much authority the Mayor has to give away taxpayer-owned property.

The Mayor, a Bill Clinton act-alike dating one beauty after another and a rising Latino figure in the Democratic Party will be betting his future on the campers compliance, a shaky reed at best. My impression is that the campers don’t care much about the Mayor or his future and eventually it will take the police to move them out simply because that is the way the campers want it.

Martyrdom is a part of the message.