Wednesday - February 01, 2012

A Simple Solution

It’s February!

It’s going to hit 60°F here today. Unreal.

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. If that little fatso sees his shadow, we get 6 more weeks of winter, even though we haven’t had any yet. I think not Phil. I think you need to move on ...

The standard .22-250 is a bona fide 700-800 yard varmint cartridge, which means it’s accurate enough to hit critters the size of a bottle of shampoo at those distances and turn them into mincemeat. A long standardized wildcat version called the .22-250 Ackley Improved takes a lot of the body taper out of the round and gives it a steeper shoulder angle. This gives the reloader a bit more room for more gun powder, which in turn gives slightly higher velocities. But this is a custom made rifle, so you would be smart to also get a top quality barrel with a faster than normal rifling twist and a slightly longer, tight and parallel throat built in. That lets you seat big (for the caliber; eg 80-90 grains) a bit further out for even more powder capacity and thus velocity, and it all adds up to make the Ackley version a 1000 yard squirrel gun. Also suitable for eliminating pesky groundhogs, even in the “dead of winter”. In some parts of Texas, I hear they use the .22-250 to hunt deer with. Wisconsin too? I hope those that do so are good enough hunters to go for the head shot on still deer at close ranges; I’m not positive that even the heavier non-frangible bullets (60gr Nosler Partition)are enough for a body shot but they might be.

For just about everything you’d ever want to know about this cartridge, go here. And here is a “white mist” .22-250 video that’s safe for tender stomachs.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/01/2012 at 12:27 PM   
Filed Under: • Animals • Guns and Gun Control •  
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political America’s wholesale retreat from the great fantasy of global warming.

OK so as long as I was on the subject of Obama .....

Take a look at this.  Yes, I know. I’m a bit late posting it but hey.  Does not make it less worthwhile a post. Besides, I want our American readers to see some of what’s being written here on the subject. 

Soon as I get up the nerve and I think my weak stomach can handle it, I might start posting a few things from the libtard press.  Maybe. But not today.
Maybe not tomorrow either.  Maybe next week.

I read Booker a lot, but I am not so sure he is correct with regard to the headline I have that leads this story.  I do not think the USA political or otherwise has retreated wholesale from the fairy tale as preached by the new religion of things green. 

How I woke up to the untruths of Barack Obama

The President’s State of the Union address was as weaselly as any politician’s could be.

By Christopher Booker

When I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last Wednesday and caught the BBC World Service’s live relay of President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress, two passages had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief.

The first came when, to applause, the President spoke about the banking crash which coincided with his barnstorming 2008 election campaign. “The house of cards collapsed,” he recalled. “We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them.” He excoriated the banks which had “made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money”, while “regulators looked the other way and didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behaviour”. This, said Obama, “was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work.”

I recalled a piece I wrote in this column on January 29, 2009, just after Obama took office. It was headlined: “This is the sub-prime house that Barack Obama built”. As a rising young Chicago politician in 1995, no one campaigned more actively than Mr Obama for an amendment to the US Community Reinvestment Act, legally requiring banks to lend huge sums to millions of poor, mainly black Americans, guaranteed by the two giant mortgage associations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was this Act, above all, which let the US housing bubble blow up, far beyond the point where it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of homeowners would be likely to default. Yet, in 2005, no one more actively opposed moves to halt these reckless guarantees than Senator Obama, who received more donations from Fannie Mae than any other US politician (although Senator Hillary Clinton ran him close).

A later passage in Obama’s speech, when he hailed the way his country’s energy future has been transformed by the miracle of shale gas, met with a storm of applause. Not only would this give the US energy security for decades, creating 600,000 jobs, but it could now go all out to exploit its gas and oil reserves (more applause). Yet this was the man who in 2008 couldn’t stop talking about the threat of global warming, and was elected on a pledge to make the US only the second country in the world, after Britain, to commit to cutting its CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by 80 per cent within 40 years.

Even more telling than his audience’s response to this, however, was what happened when Obama referred briefly to the need to develop “clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes”. But no mention now of vast numbers of wind turbines – those props beside which he constantly chose to be filmed back in 2008. No harking back to his boast that “renewable energy” would create “four million jobs”. And even to this sole fleeting reminder of what, four years ago, was his flagship policy the response of Congress was a deafening silence.

A few months after Obama entered the White House, I suggested here that the slogan on which he was elected – “Yes we can” – seemed to have changed to “No we can’t”. It was already obvious that, having won election as an ideal Hollywood version of what “the first black President” should look and sound like, he was in reality no more than a vacuum. His speech last week was as weaselly as any politician’s performance could be, not least in its references to the sub-prime scandal.

But on no issue has this been more obvious than political America’s wholesale retreat from the great fantasy of global warming – which leaves Britain as the only country committed to the insanity of cutting “carbon emissions” by four-fifths in less than four decades. President Obama and the rest of the world have moved on.

BOOKER ON OBAMA

Posted by peiper     on 02/01/2012 at 11:51 AM   
Filed Under: • Obama, The One •  
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myths about republicans and can we actually win come november.

I happen to catch Janet Daley on the radio last night for the first time.  Hope it won’t the last cos she can wipe the floor with any lib. they put against her.
Oh how I wish she could take the time to answer each of her critics on this article.  Of course, there may an honest point or two made by those who oppose her comments here. I’m not posting the comments cos while interesting, they are also anger inducing. So you read them if you want to, at the link.

Three myths about the Republican primary contest

Explaining the more arcane procedures of the American presidential primary system to my British friends is difficult enough. The distinction between a caucus and a primary ballot, and the various forms of the latter – those that are open to everyone in the state, as opposed to those that are restricted to registered voters of a particular party; those that are winner-takes-all as opposed to those in which the delegates are distributed in proportion to the votes won, etc - can take up half a lunch time by itself. But once these technical matters have been mastered, there are more serious political misconceptions that must be dispelled. So in the interests of international understanding, let me take on three prevailing confusions about the current Republican primary season.

Myth 1:
There is so much acrimony and bile being expended between the candidates that irrevocable harm is likely to be done to all of them in the eyes of the electorate. The mudslinging – all the negative ads and personal malice – will leave a permanently unsavoury impression of the party, whoever wins in the end.
Refutation: no, it won’t. Primary contests are always bloody and bitter. In 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gouged lumps out of one another for months. She accused him of being hopelessly callow and inexperienced – and worse, her husband unforgivably dismissed Obama’s campaign as being similar to Jesse Jackson’s ie just another futile attempt from an over-ambitious black politician to leapfrog over the legitimate candidate. Obama in turn, implied that Mrs Clinton had no legitimate political credentials at all: that she seemed to think that having lived in the White House as a First Lady was sufficient qualification to be president. All of this nastiness was forgotten once Obama got the nomination whereupon the entire Democratic machine got behind him and propelled him to victory. What the melodramatic vitriol had served to do was make the Democrats seem like the centre of the political universe, providing a setting in which its rising star could establish a national reputation.

Myth 2:
The longer this ugly race goes on, the worse it will be for the Republicans who will end up looking like vindictive children, and damage each other so much that they will be crippled when it comes to the actual election. It would be better if everybody except the obvious front-runner pulled out now.
Refutation: The longer the race goes on, the more the mettle and personal courage of the candidates will be tested. There is always something of the OK Corral shoot-out in American elections: behaving like a gentleman is fine for a president once he is in office but a candidate needs to be able to remain standing in a long and bruising fight to prove his fitness. And, as I noted above, the longer the national drama is centred on the Republicans, the longer voters will pay attention to them. As soon as the nomination is seen to be a done deal, the public gaze will move away.

Myth 3:
Gingrich is now a dead duck. Defeat in Florida has finished him.
Refutation: This is likely to be true but not necessarily so. In 2008, Hillary’s campaign came back from the dead repeatedly. She was written off – only to recover again – so frequently that it became the received wisdom that Obama had failed “to seal the deal” until virtually the last moment. The outcome which seems in retrospect to have been inevitable was very much touch-and-go during the primaries – and the dramatic suspense of that uncertainty almost certainly helped the Democrats in the presidential election.
Moral of the story? American politics is very, very different from our own. US voters are not so repulsed by “unpleasantness” as the British, and they really, really do not like being second-guessed by the media.

COMMENTS AT SOURCE

Hope I don’t P.O. my friends here but .........

I am not feeling very confident about the election.  People who voted for Obama and are now unhappy, are not necessarily Republican friendly.  But they might vote for him again if only because of ill feelings about our side.  And to be frank, while I like Gingrich, and I think he’s far and away smarter then any of his opponents, I don’t think he can win.  And that leaves who as a choice? 

When I was in Ca. a few months ago, I watched one of the debates and was thoroughly put off by the bad behavior of Santorum.  If some didn’t spot it, and I was surprised hardly anything was made of it, then some just weren’t listening and watching as closely as they might have. 
I’m not crazy about Mitt either and I heard him singing on the radio last night.  Good grief how embarrassing.  I thought he appeared desperate.  Some may not see it that way.  I don’t feel too good about this. The prospect of another term for Obama is genuinely a very scary thought.  So I suppose I’ll either have to pass on voting, which is not an option, or vote for whoever wins the Republican nomination, which is the only option open to me that I can see.  And it’s far too late to run for office myself and anyway, even I wouldn’t vote for me. Depressing thought here.  We may not have anyone on our side who will be able to defeat Obama.
I am not feeling very well at that thought.  In fact, I am increasingly sick over it. 

Posted by peiper     on 02/01/2012 at 11:08 AM   
Filed Under: • Politics • Republicans • USA •  
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   Tuesday - January 31, 2012

Is This Why Christopher Retired?

Posted by Drew458     on 01/31/2012 at 11:57 PM   
Filed Under: • Humor •  
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Are We There Yet?

Even though the weather has been quite mild here, January has just dragged on forever for me.

It feels like it’s been January all year.

D’oh!!! It has!

So here’s Brit soap actress, undie model, and “sex poppet” Jorgie Porter. Why not?

Posted by Drew458     on 01/31/2012 at 02:46 PM   
Filed Under: • Daily Life • Eye-Candy •  
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pc health police shut down hospital burger king

This is I gather, what happens in a socialist nanny state.  What an outrage.
It is not as though Burger King doesn’t sell salads and other items with less calories and fat.  But that aside, there are damn few hospital cafeterias and none in our area, that are worth much.  So personally, I’d welcome mouth satisfying food as served by BK. And it isn’t like I eat there every day or even every month.
Why can’t people choose for themselves without having other people decide for them? 

And talking about sending out the wrong messages.  I have seen a few medical staff who didn’t exactly fit the image of exercise and healthy eating. 
I wonder what sort of brainwashed world this new generation born in 2012, will see in 2037 when I won’t be here to see it for myself.  And perhaps I won’t want to witness it all and so might be lucky.  They’re being born into a world where everything will be proscribed for them.  Things will be forbidden but it won’t matter since they won’t grow up in a world where they’ll have the experience of choice.
Pessimistic I suppose but that’s how I see it.

Hospital facing $4.8m cuts forced to pay $31,395 to shut Burger King on its site

Fast food store which opened in 1997 has been replaced by Costa Coffee
By ROB COOPER

An NHS trust paid £24,000 to shutdown a Burger King restaurant inside a hospital.

The outlet in the entrance area of Croydon University Hospital in Surrey has sold burgers and high fat meals to patients for 14 years.
But it was replaced with a Costa Coffee outlet at hefty cost to the taxpayer in December last year following pressure from health campaigners.
The £24,000 ($31,395) cost is enough to cover the salary of lower grade nurse for a whole year.

They accused the hospital of hypocrisy for taking money from the fast food chain at a time when Britain is undergoing an obesity crisis.
The Burger King was located close to notice boards promoting healthy eating.
Explaining the decision, Croydon Health Service said the ‘world had changed’ since bosses signed the contract with Burger King in 1997 to open the fast food restaurant.
Figures obtained under freedom of information laws reveal the NHS Trust paid £24,000 to Compass UK - the company operating the fast food franchise - to terminate the contract.
The trust said none of the money would go to Burger King itself. 
The hospital has to find £34.7million savings over the next three years and has been forced to axe 200 jobs and close four wards.
Hospital bosses hope to claw back some of the money by opening a new pharmacy in the entrance area.
The decision has been welcomed by Croydon North MP Malcolm Wicks.
The Labour MP said: ‘From the first time I saw the wretched burger joint, I was upset about it.

“The trust said none of the money would go to Burger King itself.”
They make it appear as if money going to BK would be a high crime, and saying that none of the money would go them, makes it look more like an apology.  But we’re not giving money to “those people.”

A Labour MP. Tells ya all you need to know.  Not that many conservatives don’t deserve a swift kick. The left is ever happy to be outraged or offended on behalf of others and will happily do the thinking for others as well.

‘Advertising and selling fast food, which is generally unhealthy, really grates with what a modern hospital is about.
‘I’ve badgered successive chief executives about getting rid of the thing, so I wouldn’t criticise the hospital for finally taking the right decision, though the costs are substantial.’
Folake Segun from patients group Croydon Shadow Health Watch said: ‘Hopefully the trust will take the opportunity to properly consult with the community before bringing in such companies in the future.’
he original contract was signed in 1997 between the hospital’s landlord Heathcrof Properties and Compass UK.
Croydon Health Service chief executive Nick Hulme said the hospital had never had direct control over what businesses operate in the entrance area.
He said: ‘We made a business decision to invest in this change which will give our patients and visitors a better service.’

Wanna bet? Don’t hold your breath for that. It’s what they always chant. It’s a mantra. Better service, we’ll learn from our mistakes, it’s good for the kids who are our only concern, yadda,yadda.  It all translates to, stop thinking for yourself. We know what’s best for you.

Posted by peiper     on 01/31/2012 at 01:38 PM   
Filed Under: • Big Brother • Commies • Daily Life • Health and Safety • Nanny State •  
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Picture of the Day

Prisoners grasp the bars of a hell-hole jail cell — a stark warning of the fate that awaits Somalia’s notorious pirates.

Read it all here.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/31/2012 at 10:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Pirates, aarrgh! •  
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Monkey See, Monkey Do

California boy, 10, arrested for scaring woman with toy gun

BURBANK, Calif. – A 10-year-old boy was arrested in California after he pointed a toy gun at a woman who believed it was real, The Burbank Leader reported Monday.

The boy, who was not identified, went to the 67-year-old woman’s Burbank home Sunday and knocked on the door because he believed her grandson had beaten up one of his friends at school, Burbank police Lt. John Dilibert said.

When the woman answered, he reportedly pointed the plastic gun at her and yelled, “You suck,” before running away.

The woman told police she thought the toy weapon was real, the Los Angeles Times reported. Several neighbors also reported that they saw a boy apparently running down the street with a gun.

The boy was arrested on suspicion of brandishing a weapon. After searching his home and speaking with his mother, officers released him to his parents’ custody, Dilibert said.

I’d say this was a case where he was just aping how the adults around him act. Acts of violence are solved with larger acts of violence, and the cycle repeats. Notice that the only men anywhere in this story are the police. Rather telling, yes?

Posted by Drew458     on 01/31/2012 at 06:19 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime •  
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My baby niece got married!

Erika & Phil.

Posted by Christopher     on 01/31/2012 at 04:36 AM   
Filed Under: • Personal •  
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   Monday - January 30, 2012

a few photos to glorify the eye candy at 50 and over

Just to change things a little. 

I happen to see someone in the paper who I had never heard of, and they said she’s turned 50.  For those who have and watch TV, I guess you know Marcia Cross.  But I didn’t.
Anyway, I thought just for a change I would find a few ladies who still had ‘it’ and who were past 45.  I ended up with a few who were 50 and over and who I thought still really looked good. Of course there are dozens and more then that, but I arbitrarily settled on the few here.
I’m not interested at all in seeing former beauties on the skids. I want to remember them while they still have the allure (to a degree), that makes em eye candy.
I really, really love this lady.

CAROL VORDERMAN - 52

MARCIA CROSS - 50

I think her age shows a fraction in her hand. But darn if she isn’t still beautiful.

MARIE HELVIN - 60

I don’t think she’s 60 here unless there’s been a lot of touch up. But she’s pretty so what the heck.

not quite the end .....  I know what some of you expect and so to keep you happy, not for me you understand, I make this great sacrifice.

Posted by peiper     on 01/30/2012 at 05:05 PM   
Filed Under: • Eye-Candy •  
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I need a bigger tarbrush

I need a bigger tarbrush, to paint the whole city of Duluth Minnesota with. Looks to me like they’re all a bunch of self-haters, pushing white guilt down everyone’s throats.

I don’t think I’ll buy from them again.  At least until they clarify their stance on this, and that will require them to walk uphill along the edge of a giant razor blade and not get cut.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/30/2012 at 02:26 PM   
Filed Under: • Racism and race relations •  
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Churchill might be more then just dismayed

I said what I wanted to in a previous post, so this one will stand alone.

No explaining needed as you will see.

Mr. Randall has it right, as usual.

And btw .... his column appeared to late for him to mention the latest demand, not passed into law as yet, by the European court he mentions here.
The news lately has been focused a bit on kids not being disciplined or held to any standard, because parents have become fearful of being accused of child brutality for mere spanking.  Not talking now about actual child abuse, but where a parent might simply swat a kid’s backside for being naughty. Well, the European court through a spokesman has said that ALL member states (which includes Britain) should immediately make it a crime to spank or use corporal punishment of any sort on any child. Spanking they said, is violence against children and violates children’s human rights.  They are as usual full of s***.

What kind of people have we become?

Churchill would be dismayed by modern Britain’s capitulation to jackboot egalitarians

By Jeff Randall

Between Christmas and New Year, the 70th anniversary of an event, which in no small way helped change the course of history, passed almost unnoticed. On December 26, 1941, less than three weeks after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill addressed both branches of Congress in the United States. The prime minister, who was in Washington to agree military strategy with President Roosevelt, used the invitation from Senators and Representatives to excoriate the Axis powers and pose a simple question: “What kind of people do they think we are?”

This wasn’t Churchill’s finest oratorical effort, but it was clever. As well as denouncing the forces of darkness and the enormity of their aggression, it was an invitation to ordinary Britons, suffering the horrors of war at home, to reflect on the challenge ahead. He was, in effect, asking fellow citizens: “Of what are we made?”

Seven decades later, one wonders how the great man would view the kind of people the British have become. What has happened to the freedoms and independence for which he urged us to fight? It’s hard to imagine our wartime chieftain being anything other than dismayed by the erosion of sovereignty, capitulation to the “equalities industry” and enslavement by debt. We have lost control of domestic borders, ceded legal primacy to Europe and allowed the Storm Troopers of political correctness to stamp their corrosive version of right and wrong on British law.

For evidence of our self-inflicted abasement, look no further than this month’s ruling from Europe’s Court of Human Rights that Abu Qatada, a radical Islamist preacher, regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s main inspirational leaders in Europe, cannot be deported from Britain to his native Jordan because his trial there might have contained evidence obtained by torture.

According to a recent government report, some 3,775 former foreign prisoners, who were in line for deportation by the UK Border Agency, have been released from custody and are living here, most thanks to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a family and private life. A Nigerian rapist was due to be sent home after losing a series of appeals in British courts over his jailing for an attack on a 13-year-old girl. But Strasbourg’s worthies insisted that they must protect the culprit’s “social ties” with Britain, which had blossomed while he defied expulsion.

Are we really powerless to resist this nonsense? It would seem so.
One reason is the complicity of Britain’s home-grown human-rights obsessives and jackboot egalitarians who, in the words of sociologist Peter Saunders, professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, “seek nothing less than hegemony for their moral values and beliefs”. This requires the unconditional surrender of adversaries and the criminalisation of those who dare to oppose. It’s a war of attrition through relentless assaults on popular consciousness by masters of subversion.

Their goal, according to Prof Saunders, is “eroding the ideals of independent thought, self-reliance and personal responsibility and replacing them with the language of thought-crime, group rights and equal outcomes”. This is modern Britain, where a foreign-born paedophile cannot be put on a plane back to Pakistan but traditional Christians are arrested for disobliging comments on homosexuality — a triumph of intolerance over faith.

After 13 years of the Brown Terror, ( ref. to the former left wing Labour govt ruled for 13 miserable years , italics peiper ) during which reckless state borrowing and out-of-control consumer debt masked economic and social failure, the Coalition is trying to reverse a pernicious tide of grievance culture and something-for-nothing expectations. George Osborne claims: “We are reducing welfare entitlements, imposing new conditionality on benefits and capping overall awards.”

That, at least, is the aim, but an insurgency of human-rights lawyers, grandstanding bishops and professional do-gooders is defending every ditch. Only this month, a Romanian living in the UK, who claims to make a living selling the Big Issue, but qualifies for more than £25,500 a year in benefits, was told by a court that she was not receiving enough. Despite objections from the local council, she was awarded an additional annual housing allowance of £2,600. Chancellor, please take note.

Do not conclude, however, that the immigrants are to blame for this mess. Who among us faced with a choice between penury in a Bucharest rat-hole and £500 a week in handouts plus a subsidised home would not be on the train to London? The only surprise is that so few are already here.
What’s more, the influx of foreign workers is forcing us to confront a problem which those seeking to blame high levels of unemployment entirely on public-spending cuts would rather ignore. Why does London have the highest rate of youth joblessness in the country when so many services in the capital are underpinned by newcomers?

Last week,Pret a Manger, which pays above minimum wage, admitted to the London Evening Standard that only 19 per cent of its payroll is British (in London the figure is far lower). Are we really saying that our education system is so poor and work ethic so diminished that Britain can no longer produce staff suitable for a sandwich shop? That is the conclusion of many business folk to whom I put this question, though they prefer sanitised phrases such as a “deficit of lifestyle skills” instead of the less euphemistic “welfare addiction”.

Given that 70 per cent of Britain’s state-educated pupils do not even take GCSE history, never mind pass it, one can bet confidently that the majority of young people trying to enter a difficult jobs market will never encounter the Churchill question: what kind of people do others think we are?

RANDALL

Posted by peiper     on 01/30/2012 at 02:03 PM   
Filed Under: • Commies • CULTURE IN DECLINE • Nanny State • UK •  
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Barack Obama is trying to make the US a more socialist state.

A word first about the photo used here.

I have no idea if it was shown in the USA anywhere.  My guess is, if had been seen or much used, Drew and Vilmar might have been on it.
As it happens, it was in the papers here and naturally, I could not resist using it. 
At first, I was going to use it on its own.  But there were two very intense columns this week.  One by Janet Daley of the The Telegraph, which is posted here.
There’s another I’ll get to.

I hope any Americans seeing this column and one that will follow in another post shortly, will share same with others.
Read and find out why.  I have been ranting on for some time about America becoming Europa, I just wasn’t very eloquent in presenting the case.

For certain I haven’t any qualifications professionally or by way of education or career, to spout off on some of the political things I have. And not too many at that come to think about it.  But I do read what people say, and I do listen to the radio here which can be quite an eye opener for an American. Or should that be ear opener? No matter.  I do pay attention because what I hear and what I read in the papers is clear and is also somewhat frightening.  I have said in the past that one of the things that have saved the USA so far, is our geographical size and the numbers of our population.  But Britain is an island, so over-running this culture and twisting things to satisfy the left is quite a bit easier then it is in the states.  But still, having said that, you’d be blind indeed and perhaps deaf as well if you didn’t believe that America could in time, go the same way. Not because I say so but because I read and hear and know for FACT that there are actually foreign groups at work inside the United States, doing their legal best to transform America to fit their left wing view and fulfill their leftist dream of a united world. Run by them of course. 

If what I say bothers anyone, just ignore it all and go back to sleep.

Barack Obama is trying to make the US a more socialist state

The ideas the President outlined in the State of the Union are based on the very model that is causing the EU to implode.

What was it everybody used to say about the United States? Look at what’s happening over there and you will see our future. Whatever Americans are doing now, we will be catching up with them in another 10 years or so. In popular culture or political rhetoric, America led the fashion and we tagged along behind.

Well, so much for that. Barack Obama is now putting the United States squarely a decade behind Britain. Listening to the President’s State of the Union message last week was like a surreal visit to our own recent past: there were, almost word for word, all those interminable Gordon Brown Budgets that preached “fairness” while listing endless new ways in which central government would intervene in every form of economic activity.

Later, in a television interview, Mr Obama described his programme of using higher taxes on the wealthy to bankroll new government spending as “a recipe for a fair, sound approach to deficit reduction and rebuilding this country”. To which we who come from the future can only shout, “No‑o-o, go back! Don’t come down this road!”

As we try desperately to extricate ourselves from the consequences of that philosophy, which sounds so eminently reasonable (“giving everybody a fair share”, the President called it), we could tell America a thing or two – if it would only listen. Human beings are so much more complicated than this childlike conception of fairness assumes. When government takes away an ever larger proportion of the wealth which entrepreneurial activity creates and attempts to distribute it “fairly” (that is to say, evenly) throughout society in the form of welfare programmes and public spending projects, the effects are much, much more complex and perverse than a simple financial equation would suggest.

It is probably obvious that the people from whom the wealth is taken will become less willing to incur the risks that entrepreneurial investment involves – and so will produce less wealth, and thus less tax revenue. But more surprising, perhaps, are the damaging changes that take place in the beneficiaries of this “fairness” and the permanent effect this has on the balance of power between government and the people.

There is, it turns out, a huge difference between being provided with a livelihood and feeling that you have earned it. The assumption that all the wealth that individuals create belongs, by moral right, to the state, to spend on benefits or phoney job creation schemes (sorry, public infrastructure projects), is proving phenomenally difficult to expunge in Britain, so ineradicably has it embedded itself in the public consciousness.

In the US, it has had only odd historical moments of favour (Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”), which have been beaten back consistently by the dynamism of a country that sees its existential purpose as being to foster and promote individual achievement and self-belief. It is bizarre that Obama should be regarded (or should regard himself) as a kind-of European who is trying to bring a sophisticated kind-of socialism to American economic life, complete with government-run health care and “fair” (high) taxes on the wealthy. If his European credentials were up to date, he would know that this was precisely the social model that is causing the EU to implode, and whose hopeless contradictions the best economic minds on the Continent are attempting, unsuccessfully, to resolve.

A vendetta against the “wealthy” is one of Obama’s favourite themes, and it strikes a peculiarly familiar note. Back here, Nick Clegg is arguing (rightly) that a tax cut for the lower paid should be accelerated on both moral and economic grounds – because people are struggling, and because allowing them to keep and spend more of their earnings would stimulate growth. But he wants to balance this with a wealth tax or some such penalty on “the rich”. Both Obama and Clegg, by an extraordinary coincidence, used the same semantic trick to try to prove the injustice of their present tax systems. In his State of the Union address, the President slipped subliminally from the fact that his likely presidential opponent Mitt Romney paid tax at a lower rate (because his income came from profits and dividends which were taxed as capital gains) than his secretary (who would have paid income tax), to the claim that Mr Romney paid less tax than his secretary.

Mr Clegg made exactly the same charge against a putative hedge fund manager who “paid less tax” than his cleaner, neatly obscuring the fact that it was the rate of tax that was lower, not the amount which was paid. Needless to say, both Mr Romney and the imagined hedge-fund manager pay vastly more tax than their respective secretaries and cleaners. (The top 1 per cent of earners pay nearly a third of all federal taxes in the US.)

So what does this kind of verbal trick tell us about the honesty – or the desperation – of this argument? At the very least, it is crass populism designed to provoke a particularly counterproductive form of class resentment. What is needed here and in the US are tax cuts for the many, not the few, to adapt Mr Brown, and less demonising of the sorts of people who are able to invest and create the real wealth that will be our only chance for economic salvation.

Obama is clearly living the Left-liberal dream, which still survives in small pockets of American life. He wants to import the democratic socialism that Europe embraced after the war, which was, for European cultural reasons, imbued with aristocratic paternalism and Marxist notions of bourgeois guilt. But neither of these things are part of the American historical experience. The Left-wing intellectuals, including Obama himself, who adopt this language are talking dangerously uninformed rubbish: if democratic socialism was ever a solution to Europe’s problems (and the present crisis is making that seem less and less likely), it is certainly not an answer to any question that Americans are likely to ask.

The United States is a country that was invented to allow people to be free of domination or persecution by the state. Its constitution and political institutions are specifically designed to prevent the federal government from oppressing the rights, or undermining the sense of responsibility, of the individual citizen. If it ceases to stand by that principle, then it will suffer a catastrophic loss of purpose and identity – as well as making a quite remarkably stupid and unnecessary mistake.

JANET DALEY

Janet Daley is American-born, but has lived in Britain since 1965. She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley (BA in Philosophy), and Birkbeck College, London (post-graduate).
She spent twenty years in academic life, teaching philosophy at the Open University, the external department of London University and the Royal College of Art. She wrote art and literary criticism from the late 1960s to early 80s, and left teaching to become a freelance journalist in 1987, writing for The Times, Sunday Times, Independent, Sunday Telegraph and Spectator.

Posted by peiper     on 01/30/2012 at 01:01 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • USA •  
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Washing machine woes…

Ever notice how bad things come in threes?

In just the last week…

1.) My wife’s new Jeep breaks down…again. If she had consulted me before the purchase I’d have advised against buying a Chrysler product. Especially when it had to go to the shop BEFORE she even took delivery. I only found out about her purchase because I got the insurance bill before she took delivery. Then she accused me of ‘opening her mail.’ I had to point out that the insurance bill was indeed addressed to me.

2.) She wakes me up from a nap. Seems the stove caught fire! Her words. In fact, all that happened was a ‘popping’ sound and the smell of burnt insulation. Third time this has happened in the last twenty years. Just needed a new terminal block for that burner. The other three burners worked fine. Fixed now. I bought four new terminal blocks, which means I still have three back-ups. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just replace that burner? It does heat unevenly…

3.) Next day she calls me down to the basement. The washing machine isn’t spin-drying. I turned it on and, yeah, it sounded like one of the cats coughing up a hairball. I spent two days taking that thing apart. I was hoping it was something simple and cheap…like a broken coupler (the part that connects the motor to the transmission–$10+shipping for a replacement.). No such luck. Took it apart, and the coupler was fine. Had to do a few more checks and turns out the transmission was going bad. This was not good. I was not going to spend $200 for a new transmission for a twenty-year-old washing machine. Instead, I spent $450 (+tax and delivery) on a new washing machine. Which just got delivered about 8:30 this morning.

Good thing I socked a lot of money into my savings account before I became unemployed!

Posted by Christopher     on 01/30/2012 at 10:29 AM   
Filed Under: • Personal •  
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