Love America, Love Guns.

Rob Cunningham USA ^ | Dec. 18, 2012 | Rob Cunningham

Posted on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 11:34:12 AM by RobaWho

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
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China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.
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Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, 1 million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.
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Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th Century because of gun control: 56 million.
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You won’t see this data on the US evening news, or hear politicians disseminating this easily verifiable information.

Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws adversely affect only the law-abiding citizens.

I’m a firm believer in the 2nd Amendment. Do you truly appreciate the value of well armed, law abiding, God fearing citizens in a civil society?

Evil exists. Throughout history and forever into the future, evil will exist. Evil exists in the hearts of children, men and women, be they civilians or politicians, police or clergy.

If ever we disarm ourselves we will become dangerously vulnerable to a Godless, secular, power crazed government with unchecked powers, just as the 56 million who were murdered at the hands of “government officials” described above. We will cease to exist as the greatest nation in the history of man.

Never forget, there are many politicians, our current President included, that proudly proclaim their intent to weaken America’s stature and global influence. Fundamentally transforming the United States of America mandates the weakening of our inalienable 2nd Amendment rights. This is perhaps the most fundamental step for politicians seeking to achieve this goal.

I would no more trust Rahm Emanual, Michael Bloomberg, Barack Obama, Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, George Bush or Eric Holder (God help us) to honestly safeguard my inalienable rights than I would have trusted similar narcissists that previously used lethal force against their fellow citizens.

Perhaps one of the most insightful, thought provoking, brilliant books ever written regarding the nature of man and the historical record of governments killing their citizens was written by Andy Andrews in his 2012 book, “How Do You Kill 11 Million People?”

With guns, we are ‘citizens‘. Without them, we are ‘subjects‘.

If you value our freedoms, please spread this message to all of your well intentioned, less informed friends.

Merry Christmas, America. Share the Love.

Invincible Ignorance (Thomas Sowell – Creators Syndicate)

 

Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries— and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

In the middle of the 20th century, you could buy a shotgun in London with no questions asked. New York, which at that time had had the stringent Sullivan Law restricting gun ownership since 1911, still had several times the gun murder rate of London, as well as several times the London murder rate with other weapons.

Neither guns nor gun control was not the reason for the difference in murder rates. People were the difference. Yet many of the most zealous advocates of gun control laws, on both sides of the Atlantic, have also been advocates of leniency toward criminals.

In Britain, such people have been so successful that legal gun ownership has been reduced almost to the vanishing point, while even most convicted felons in Britain are not put behind bars. The crime rate, including the rate of crimes committed with guns, is far higher in Britain now than it was back in the days when there were few restrictions on Britons buying firearms.

In 1954, there were only a dozen armed robberies in London but, by the 1990s— after decades of ever tightening gun ownership restrictions— there were more than a hundred times as many armed robberies.

Gun control zealots' choice of Britain for comparison with the United States has been wholly tendentious, not only because it ignored the history of the two countries, but also because it ignored other countries with stronger gun control laws than the United States, such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico. All of these countries have higher murder rates than the United States.

You could compare other sets of countries and get similar results. Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

Guns are not the problem. People are the problem— including people who are determined to push gun control laws, either in ignorance of the facts or in defiance of the facts.

There is innocent ignorance and there is invincible, dogmatic and self-righteous ignorance. Every tragic mass shooting seems to bring out examples of both among gun control advocates.

Some years back, there was a professor whose advocacy of gun control led him to produce a "study" that became so discredited that he resigned from his university. This column predicted at the time that this discredited study would continue to be cited by gun control advocates. But I had no idea that this would happen the very next week in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Education's Great Divide: My Time in the Trenches (American Thinker)

 

By Glenn Fairman

In thinking about how valuable education is in cultivating the next generation of Americans, my mind took me back nearly twenty years to when I was a graduate student functioning as a substitute teacher at La Puente High School in Southern California. On one assignment, I was to cover a social studies class of some old-timer; he had written down in his instructions that since his classes were on a field trip, my sole duty was to show a movie at 6^th period to those who did not attend. What I found that day opened my eyes.

In a dusty corner shelf of the room was a set of thirty-year-old textbooks from the mid-1960s, and although my memory cannot now relinquish their title, their contents burned themselves into my brain. As I flipped through the pages, I was astonished to find what I would now consider an upper-level college textbook under color of what in the high schools used to be termed "civics." This text contained a very detailed understanding of political theory, constitutional law, macroeconomics, American history, and comparative political systems. I spent the rest of the day in slack-jawed amazement, perusing what a student in a working-class town was expected to know before the mavens of education began tinkering with the curricula of our schools.

When the instructor returned at the end of the day, I revealed my astonishment to him, and he informed me that he had used those texts when he first hired on. Now, however, could not do so, since they would be incomprehensible to nearly every student -- especially considering that the nature of history and American government had been changed in the current texts. The teacher related to me that the current texts had been scaled down to what used to be a grammar-school understanding, and they carried within them a jaundiced view of America, preferring to accentuate the warts and blemishes rather than the achievements of our political system.

I then made it my business, when finding an older teacher, to ask if education had been "dumbed down." To a person, I found that this question unleashed volatile diatribes on how dull children had become since the responders had begun as idealistic young men and women in the field. Algebra teachers informed me that every year they were forced to eliminate problem sets that previous years had mastered. English teachers who once taught Shakespeare and Dante were now reduced to leading seniors through Orwell's Animal Farm or postmodern novels featuring teens in existential moral dilemmas. Moreover, the analysis of themes in book reports had been deconstructed into not what the author was attempting to portray, but what personal emotions were elicited in the reader.

Teachers, who are part and parcel the products of our New Education, can never be fully aware of what diminution has been wrought subsequent to the Great Divide. From elementary school and into the colleges, disciplines of objective knowledge have been either discounted or leveled, and critical thinking has been pushed aside for the subtle indoctrination of a specific worldview. Students are deemed to be merely clever animals, and the slow, simmering replacement of a spiritual for a biological self-definition is therefore woven into the fabric of how they are taught life and the world.

Campus speech codes and filtered curricula have denuded the classical goal of the acquisition of a free and analytic mind. The capacity to seek and apprehend truth has devolved into the project to fashion pliable minds with correct and proper opinions, in which truth itself is a problematic, wavering, conventional construct. Passion and commitment in service to a politicized cause are indeed more valuable than the veracity of that cause, since the absence of truth renders one construction of the world coequal with another.

The moral equality of lifestyles, as well as the preferred end of an equality of material results, is deemed by those who design curricula to be consistent with "anointed ideologies." All permutations of sexuality are to be held valid, protected from the scrutiny of blighted paleo-moral judgments. All cultures and religions are also worthy of celebration -- with the exceptions of Christianity and the American regime, who are guilty of a plethora of crimes throughout the earth and must therefore be lowered in stature to ensure the final egalitarian assessment of distinction-free understanding. The fiction must be implanted that we are all one worldwide loving and happy family, benevolent and divided only by geographical and artificial political overlays.

On perhaps my saddest day of teaching, I was witness to an assembly presented to juniors and seniors at La Puente High School under color of "AIDS Awareness." Within the 45-minute series of very cleverly devised humorous skits and demonstrations, I beheld the barbaric demolition of the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West before my very eyes. Along with provocative descriptions of male-on-male coitus and the disparagement "twisted and perverse" directed at anyone who found fault with the emancipated vision of a sexual free-for-all was a single demonstration that elicited only wild applause and profound laughter amongst the audience.

A mid-twenties young woman, in showing how the transmission of AIDS would be nipped in the bud by condoms, unwrapped a condom, placed it in her mouth, and proceeded to insert a cucumber -- using her lips to unroll the condom around the circumference of the vegetable. She then brought students of both sexes on stage and had them perform the same activity -- some with a strange adeptness and others rather clumsily. I looked around the auditorium to see if a teacher or administrator would stop this, but those in attendance were laughing as hard as the students.

There is no doubt within my mind that the lesson learned that day, under camouflage of health safety, was that any traditions of restraint or sexual boundaries that implied that we are any more than passion-driven, erotic animals should be demolished or at least seriously called into question. After all, schools are the provinces of authority, and they function in loco parentis. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall in the homes of those students when their parents asked Johnny and Mary what they learned in school that day. In hearing the Tale of the Cucumber, I wonder if any were as dumbstruck as I was -- that the children they loved above all else had been instructed in an action well-known to any back-alley prostitute.

In a world where knowledge is a commodity we value in the extreme, wisdom, or the possibility of it, is becoming an endangered species. Leo Strauss said that it is better to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. If we can no longer grasp his epigram, then perhaps we are farther along toward our day of reckoning than we can ever know -- and of the volley being fired across our broadside, it can truly be said that we never saw it coming.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/12/educations_great_divide_my_time_in_the_trenches.html at December 09, 2012 - 07:27:10 AM CST

RAW v ADJUSTED GHCN Data (Brisbane)

 

Those of you following the Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero post (from Watts Up With That web site) I made yesterday will have already noted that it is essential in order to scrutinise the data feeding into the IPCC and CRU climate models that we have access to the raw data, the adjustments to that raw data, and the reasons for the adjustments which I will assume have been documented in a professional and reproducible manner as all good scientists would do without question. We hear climate alarmists saying that yes the Climategate scientists at the CRU destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals … but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good. Well Willis Esenbach’s research shown over on Watts Up With That casts serious doubt on that belief.

Just out of interest I decided to plot the raw temperature data for my home city of Brisbane, Australia from the GISS (ie the raw GHCN data) against the homogenized or adjusted GISS GHCN data. The temperature sensor is located at the Brisbane Eagle Farm Airport which is now our busy main international airport. The data used is the series available from 1950 to 2008. I have animated the result to highlight the difference.
As you can see the raw data shows a downward trend of about -0.6 C per century. The adjusted data however shows an opposite trend of +0.6 C per century. Intuitively as the airport grew from a quiet strip to a busy international jet airport one would think the more recent data would be adjusted downwards for the heat island effect. Instead we see that the data prior to 1978 is adjusted down and the data in recent times was adjusted up. This is why it is essential that the relevant scientists disclose the reasons for each adjustment - the entire warming trend in the Brisbane data is due to the adjustments as the raw data clearly shows a cooling trend. Without being able to check the veracity of the adjustments used the trend cannot be relied upon. Our default position must be that until all data is made available to other scientists to scrutinize and test the data temperature data used to derive the graphs and models used by the IPCC is not to be relied upon for climate modeling or policy making. Now that the cat is out of the bag failure by the data keepers to disclose this data is in direct contravention to UN scientific procedures and indicates that the data has not been dealt with either in a competent or an honest manner.

Below are the individual plots of the Brisbane temperature anomaly used to construct the animation appearing above. All data was downloaded from the GISS website on 9 Dec 2009.

The Welfare Spending Chart You Won’t Want to See

 

• Posted on December 7, 2012 at 11:00pm by Becket Adams
• Today’s depressing chart is brought to you by the Senate Budget Committee Republican staff under Ranking Member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.):

Yep. As the chart clearly illustrates, total welfare spending in the U.S. (if converted into cash payments) equals approximately “$168 per day for every household in poverty,” higher than the $137 median income per-day.

From the senator’s office:

… spending on federal welfare benefits, if converted into cash payments, equals enough to provide $30.60 per hour, 40 hours per week, to each household living below poverty. The median household hourly wage is $25.03. After accounting for federal taxes, the median hourly wage drops to between $21.50 and $23.45, depending on a household’s deductions and filing status. State and local taxes further reduce the median household’s hourly earnings. By contrast, welfare benefits are not taxed.

The universe of means-tested welfare spending refers to programs that provide low-income assistance in the form of direct or indirect financial support—such as food stamps, free housing, child care, etc.—and which the recipient does not pay into (in contrast to Medicare or Social Security). For fiscal year 2011, CRS identified roughly 80 overlapping federal means-tested welfare programs that together represented the single largest budget item in 2011—more than the nation spends on Social Security, Medicare, or national defense. The total amount spent on these federal programs, when taken together with approximately $280 billion in state contributions, amounted to roughly $1 trillion. Nearly 95 percent of these costs come from four categories of spending: medical assistance, cash assistance, food assistance, and social/housing assistance. Under the President’s FY13 budget proposal, means-tested spending would increase an additional 30 percent over the next four years.

The diffuse and overlapping nature of federal welfare spending has led to some confusion regarding the scope and nature of benefits. For instance, Newark Mayor Cory Booker has recently received a great deal of attention for adopting the “food stamp diet” in which he spends only $4 a day on food (the average individual benefit in his state) to apparently illustrate the insufficiency of food stamp spending ($80 billion a year) or the impossibility of reductions. The situation Booker presents, however, is not accurate: a low-income individual on food stamps may qualify for $25,000 in various forms of welfare support from the federal government on top of his or her existing income and resources—including access to 15 different food assistance programs. Further, even if one unrealistically assumes that no other welfare benefits are available, the size of the food stamp benefit increases as one’s income decreases, as the benefit is designed as a supplement to existing resources; it is explicitly not intended to be the sole source of funds for purchasing food.

The Real Second Amendment (American Thinker)

 

By Bart Wilburn

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed

As simple as these word are, we have been arguing about what they mean for a long time. Part of the problem is that many people engaged in the argument do not interpret the 2nd Amendment with respect for its historical context, but rather in light of what they want it to mean in support of their purposes. If we want to be honest about it, we must look to the origins of the amendment to understand it in the context of the framing of the U.S. Constitution, and only then can we consider it in our present context. The issue is further complicated by the fact that an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population has no experience in the use of arms; they see arms as irrelevant to their lives at best or a threat at worst. This is important because the 2nd Amendment is always susceptible and becomes vulnerable when too many think it is an archaic artifact.

We must first understand that we did not invent the 2nd Amendment; we inherited it. The justification of the 2nd Amendment is rooted in late 12th and early 13th century England with the innovation of the Welsh; later called English, longbow. The longbow was a formidable weapon that made the English army the most feared army in Europe and determined the course of European history. It links to the 2nd Amendment because standing armies are expensive and the King of England did want to bear the cost; he relied on the barons of the shires to provide an army on demand. But the barons were not willing to bear the cost of a standing army either; they preferred to rely on the villagers of the shires for a militia of longbow artillery to support the king's demands. (See G.M. Trevelyan, The History of England, Longman Group, 1973, p. 268)

This arrangement was complex in an economic as well as political context. In the 12th century, England was well on the way to shaking off feudalism and developing a corporate civil structure of local governance. William the Conqueror restructured England and introduced the manorial structure; Henry I introduced the legal notion of a jury with his Charter of Liberties, and Henry II introduced the peculiarly British notion of Common Law. The barons of the shires were tasked to raise the taxes demanded by the king under the manorial structure. This put the barons in the predicament of taxing the villagers while at the same time having to manage the productivity of the shires to provide the revenue demanded by the king. They were caught between 'keeping the king's pleas,' and 'keeping the king's peace.' The barons understood that a willing farmer was more productive at less cost to them than an unwilling farmer, and soon realized they had a vested interest in having a voice in the king's demands, governance, and his expensive adventures. The barons also realized that, in principle, they had the power of arms effectively under their control. Their problem was maintaining unity in the face of royal power, but more than that, the challenge of sustaining the basic resource -- the artillery of longbow archers.

The longbow was not a simple weapon either to use or to make. It took four years to make a longbow, and generations of experience to properly use it. The longbow was simply not something a local, ad hoc militia could train inexperienced conscripts to use. To solve this dilemma, the barons directed that villagers should keep a longbow in their homes and maintain their skill in the art of making and using it. Further, they established regular tournaments to achieve this goal. The barons were wildly successful in their efforts. They entered London on June 15, 1215 with their militias and forced King John to submit to the rule of law prescribed by the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta subordinated the king to the rule of law based on Henry I's Charter and the notion of common law throughout the realm, and it set England on the path to developing representative parliamentary democracy.

The 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was derived from our understanding of the British experience that militias were necessary to curb the tyrannical powers of the king. In our case, 'well regulated militias' were necessary as a condition of the colonies to agree to subordinate their sovereignty to a federal government. They wanted a guarantee of power to insure that some future federal government could not egregiously exceed its powers prescribed in the body of the constitution they agreed to. Furthermore, like the militias of the English barons, these state militias were formed ad hoc from the populace as needed on short notice and therefore depended on the populace being already proficient in the art of arms. The only way the Founders of America could guarantee this capability was to encourage civil proficiency in arms and make private ownership and use of arms a tenet of the constitution establishing the government. For these reasons, it should come as no surprise that the rights of freedom of speech and to 'keep and bear arms comprise the first and second amendments to the constitution establishing them as rights of citizenship. We should not consider this rationale archaic. Democracy is fragile and always susceptible to despotism, and we should not be so arrogant as to suppose we are not equally susceptible.

Limiting the power of the federal government to subjugate the populace is the primary purpose of the 2nd Amendment, and nothing in it restricts the use of arms consistent with maintaining proficiency consistent with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What we do with guns is the subject of existing criminal law, but having them is not. Arguments against the 2nd Amendment based on recreational use of arms and the futility of home defense are deflections. Under the 2nd Amendment, owning and using guns is not simply permitted, but is presumed; local, even federal, laws and regulations cannot lawfully infringe on it. The 2nd Amendment is always susceptible to tyrants, but is vulnerable if too many of us are ignorant of its purpose.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/12/the_real_second_amendment.html at December 08, 2012 - 01:39:02 PM CST

How the Government Class Lives

Sultan Knish ^ | Dec 02, 2012 | Daniel Greenfield

Posted on Monday, December 03, 2012 7:59:06 AM by expat1000

Take a ride to a welfare neighborhood some fine morning, evenings are best avoided even in the safest such places. Don't go in expecting Detroit. Even much of Detroit doesn't look like Detroit. Newark and Oakland aren't even there yet. Detroit is what happens when the load is too big and there's no one left to carry it. Most welfare neighborhoods are still located in cities where there is someone left to pick up the tab.

You'll see less charred buildings and more towering multistory housing projects. Some of these are the ugly bestial fortresses that date back to FDR's championing of affordable housing. One such monster, the Knickerbocker Village, former home of the Rosenberg spies, had to be evacuated in the recent hurricane and residents lived without heat and power for weeks.

30 years later they began to run to 20 story gray and brown towers reek of hopelessness. When power company workers came to restore power to the Brooklyn shoreline, they were sent to these places first in the hopes of calming mob reaction. Instead televisions came raining down from the upper floors forcing the workers to flee for safety. But don't expect that to happen during your visit. That sort of thing is reserved for major holidays and power outages.

More recently the trend has been smaller homes that look almost like normal housing, except that there are too many of them lined up all in rows that go on forever, and even the red brickwork and white doors quickly darken with neglect, fumes and that intangible pollutant that comes to all places where the people have nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to.

There are businesses in the welfare neighborhood, but they aren't really independent businesses. The bodegas, cheap corner groceries stores lined with ads for cigarettes, or government ads against them, with malt liquor ads and posters for a local performance by a rap group, Hong Kong crooner or Latin singer, get most of their business from food stamps. The bodegas, despite their name, are usually run by Indians, Koreans, Arabs or Bangladeshis. The few things they sell for real money are, in order, lottery tickets, beer and the occasional magazine.

70 years ago the small corner store was part of an economic ladder. Today it's as static as the rest of the neighborhood. Sometimes the owners make the jump to a welfare supermarket, that deals almost entirely in food stamps. Mostly though they are family businesses whose owners import some of their endless stock of cousins from the home country as unpaid labor. Sometimes the cousins marry into the family and open another one of the stores with money advanced by the patriarch of the clan, and with most of the profits going to him.

Then there are the check cashing places, where welfare checks are deposited, and money is sent home to Haiti, Mexico or Puerto Rico. These places too would dry up and go out of business without a steady supply of government money.

There are clinics, a surplus of them, running on government grants, taking in government money from their patients, and consisting of the usual uncomfortable multicultural mix of balanced groups, most of whom resent each other. There may be no supermarket in the neighborhood, no store that sells fresh fruit and vegetables, no bank or clothing store that sells anything more upscale than t-shirts and sneakers, but there will be several clinics specializing in every conceivable illness a local could come down with. And several that they can't.

Of the few independent businesses in the area, there will be a restaurant or two, cheap and dirty, where families troop in at night and old men sit during the day, there will be churches that young people rarely go to, and there will be 99 cent stores selling things for more than that. There will be schools, large buildings, and a variety of community centers, day care centers, libraries, prep places for students; all funded by the government. There will be places for teens to sit playing video games after they leave school, full of inspiring posters about achievement. And there will be social workers to help residents fill out forms for more benefits.

Take away government benefits and the welfare neighborhood would become Detroit. Take away the government jobs, the postal workers and the petty bureaucrats, the public sector union members who dream of one day moving to the suburbs, though the suburbs they move to will shortly begin looking just like the place they live, and everything will die. Or perhaps it will be saved. It's hard to say.

Beyond the welfare neighborhoods is the government middle class. The government middle class is not all that different from the population of the welfare neighborhoods and some of them have never bothered moving out.

The government middle class is not Detroit. It's the people who run Detroit. It's the people who make places like Detroit happen. For every welfare neighborhood, there are hundreds of members of the government middle class teaching their children, processing their forms and running their clinics. The money isn't great, but their skills are generally poor and the benefits are spectacular.

Close enough for government work is a phrase born for these people. Getting things right is surplus to requirements. There is no goal to be accomplished. Just the tedious work of a civil service that was funded to manage the inner cities and cope with their problems, that has become the problem. There is as much hopelessness and failure in one of their offices as there is in any housing project. The difference is that the workers are more cheerful because while they might be doing nothing, they are doing less nothing than the men dissolutely playing dominoes or smoking cigarettes under dead trees in the courtyards of learning gray towers left over from the Great Society or the New Deal.

Some in the government middle class do genuinely care. Many of them work completely outside the welfare sector where caring still makes some kind of sense. But this was where the river of bureaucracy was born and this is where it goes to die. Some idealistic souls flit through here and then flit out again. Mostly this is a place where people with college degrees from institutions that would get a laugh from most other employees hold down jobs that no one really needs except the unions and organizations that are on a mission to expand their workforces and budgets.

No one is really happy in the government middle class. It's not just the postal workers who hate their jobs. The difference is that the postal workers have more time to think about the angle that they will start shooting from. There is nowhere to go and not much to do. The job is hopeless, the regulations are overwhelming and the hierarchy is stifling. Nothing is ever accomplished, but group solidarity requires believing that it is and participating in new programs to learn new procedures created by clueless consultants that promise to change everything, but actually change nothing.

Working in the government middle class is exactly how liberal arts majors imagine corporate life was like in the 50s. Then they get the only job they are qualified for and discover that they can experience it all today, while their idealism dies in a little puddle on the floor. They learn to look forward to the only selling point that such work has; early retirement.

The government middle class is the most hopeless middle class in all of history. It aspires to nothing and it dreams of nothing. In previous generations its workers at least flirted with radical politics. Today you can still find some Stalinists in government offices, but most of them are old, and the rest are more likely to read Farrakhan than Karl Marx, and most will settle for 50 Shades of Grey. Their bosses are using them to take over the system from within, but they are just drones, woefully aware of how hopeless their task is, and they will show up at protests to demand more funding and resources, but mostly they just show up to protect their benefits. It's the benefits that keep them from killing themselves. Or going on welfare.

Finally there is the government upper class. The bosses and their bosses who don't just live in suburbs, but lived in gated communities. Racially they tend to be whiter than just about any other group that you can think of. And their neighborhoods of choice tend to be even whiter than that. Imagine the place furthest away, conceptually, though not geographically, from the welfare hood, and you arrive at the places where the consultants, the top administrators and bosses of the government class reside.

There is no hopelessness here. Everyone wears ski clothes, even when they aren't anywhere in sight of a white powered slope. They counsel low gas mileage for others, but drive SUVs. They build cages for the government lower and middle classes, but live in sizable houses. They ride bikes, but only when they want to. In behavior and attitude, they are mostly indistinguishable from their fellow wealthy liberals. The only difference is the source of their money and the lower productivity.

It is this group that incessantly manufactures crises, constantly comes up with schemes to make a broken system work better and juggles money between private foundations and government grants, moving back and forth between professorships, government consultancies and private foundations until you need a scorecard to keep up.

They aspire to authentic things and eat up working class misery with a spoon. Many have their own hardship tales of the time they worked as a waiter to pay their tuition, because their parents had cut them off, or their time with the Peace Corps in Africa or with Habitat for Humanity in Costa Rica. Religion is a vague thing to them, but they associate anti-materialism with spirituality and use the plight of the well-off as their own private church. Movies like Precious or Winter's Bone are their poverty porn that they then use to justify their abuses of power. Because people are suffering.

Elizabeth Warren is one of the breed. As are countless others just like her. There is an endless crowd of them, all dressing down, embracing what they think is authenticity, their voice frozen into a lecturing tone, their bookshelves crowded with inspiring tales of white people helping others in the Third World and finding their deeper soul in the process. They all have too many degrees, too many plans and too much power.

Some are dogmatically of the left. Many more are cluelessly so, mouthing dogma that they do not really understand and that has been boiled down for them into simple terms. These don't see politics, just a nebulous compassion that requires forcing everyone to pay for the good of the less fortunate, even if that money incidentally goes to line their own pockets. And worse still, even the most apolitical of this group, have developed an innate busybody allegiance to rules. They are the six and seven figure hall monitors who have become convinced that people need keeping tabs on and that no community can achieve its best self without people like them to compel everyone to follow the rules.

If they are in a position where they cannot make rules, they will seek one out, in some volunteer capacity, such as a homeowner's association, that will allow them to do it. They are cheerful control freaks who dress up an innate lust for power in ski parkas, morning bike rides with the kids and lists of rules and penalties so long that a KGB agent would be set back on his heels. They do not think of themselves as the police state, they even like to imagine themselves as rebels and risk takers, but they are the backbone of the emerging progressive police state.

Is This Why Americans Have Lost The Drive To "Earn" More (Zerohedge)

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/01/2012 17:45 -0500

In the recent past we noted the somewhat startling reality that "the single mom is better off earning gross income of $29,000 with $57,327 in net income & benefits than to earn gross income of $69,000 with net income and benefits of $57,045." While mathematics is our tool - as opposed to the mathemagics of some of the more politically biased media who did not like our message - the painful reality in America is that: for increasingly more Americans it is now more lucrative - in the form of actual disposable income - to sit, do nothing, and collect various welfare entitlements, than to work. This is such an important topic that we felt it necessary to warrant a second look. The graphic below quite clearly, and very painfully, confirms that there is an earnings vacuum of around $40k in which US workers are perfectly ambivalent toward inputting more effort since it does not result in any additional incremental disposable income. With the ongoing 'fiscal cliff' battles over taxes and entitlements, this is a problematic finding, since - as a result - it is the US government that will have to keep funding indirectly this lost productivity and worker output (via wealth redistribution).

As we noted before (details below):

We realize that this is a painful topic in a country in which the issue of welfare benefits, and cutting (or not) the spending side of the fiscal cliff, have become the two most sensitive social topics. Alas, none of that changes the matrix of incentives for most Americans who find themselves in a comparable situation: either being on the left side of minimum US wage, and relying on benefits, or move to the right side at far greater personal investment of work, and energy, and... have the same disposable income at the end of the day.

Naturally, the topic of wealth redistribution is paramount one now that America is entering the terminal phase of its out of control spending, and whose response to hike taxes in a globalized, easily fungible world, will merely force more of the uber-wealthy to find offshore tax jurisdictions, avoid US taxation altogether, and thus result in even lower budget revenues for the US. It explains why the cluelessly incompetent but supposedly impartial Congressional Budget Office just released a key paper titled "Share of Returns Filed by Low- and Moderate-Income Workers, by Marginal Tax Rate, Under 2012 Law" which carries a chart of disposable income by net income comparable to the one above.

But perhaps the scariest chart in the entire presentation is the following summarizing the unsustainable welfare burden on current taxpayers:

• For every 1.65 employed persons in the private sector, 1 person receives welfare assistance
• For every 1.25 employed persons in the private sector, 1 person receives welfare assistance or works for the government.

The punchline: 110 million privately employed workers; 88 million welfare recipients and government workers and rising rapidly.

And since nothing has changed in the past two years, and in fact the situation has gotten progressively (pardon the pun) worse, here is our conclusion on this topic from two years ago:

We have been writing for over a year, how the very top of America's social order steals from the middle class each and every day. Now we finally know that the very bottom of the entitlement food chain also makes out like a bandit compared to that idiot American who actually works and pays their taxes. One can only also hope that in addition to seeing their disposable income be eaten away by a kleptocratic entitlement state, that the disappearing middle class is also selling off its weaponry. Because if it isn't, and if it finally decides it has had enough, the outcome will not be surprising at all: it will be the same old that has occurred in virtually every revolution in the history of the world to date.

But for now, just stick head in sand, and pretend all is good. Self-deception is now the only thing left for the entire insolvent entitlement-addicted world.

* * *

Full must read presentation: "Welfare's Failure and the Solution"

Some other thoughts on this topic: DOES IT PAY, AT THE MARGIN, TO WORK AND SAVE?

“You’ll Be Amazed By What Was Observed” – Inconvenient Arctic Observations Before Satellite Measurements

By P Gosselin on 22. November 2012

Die kalte Sonne website has another report about the Arctic. It presents a chronology showing that really nothing unusual is happening today. You’ll find it below translated in English.

US submarine “Skate” at the North Pole in August, 1958. ”Hey, where’s the ice!” US Navy photo. Source: Wikipedia.org/history.

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We’ve seen it once already – Arctic sea ice melting happened in the first half of the 20th century
By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt

When one hears or reads the reports about the Arctic sea ice, it helps to remember that satellite measurement did not begin until 1979. Thus we have data only for a period of just over 30 years. This barely suffices to fulfil the gladly used “climate definition” of a minimum period of 30 years. So we can’t avoid having a suspicious feeling, as we ask what did the sea ice do before satellite measurement began? Can we just simply skip over this and simply add the notation that we just don’t know much about it? Of course not. That would be too easy. Before the days of satellite measurement, ships travelled in the Arctic and brought back information about sea ice cover in the region.

In the following chronology, we present some of these reports. You’ll be amazed by what was observed.

1907 The New York Times reported on an Arctic heat wave. Source: Real Science.

1922 The Pittsburgh Press: “Extraordinary warmth in the Arctic during the last few years. Polar ice sheet to melt down? “Source: Real Science, The Mail.

1923 Fishermen, seal hunters and explorers report on unusually high temperatures around Spitzbergen and the East Arctic Ocean. The Daily News from Perth speculated on whether the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean would soon melt away as a result of a “radical climate change”. Source: Real Science.

1935 Russian vessel travelled over ice-free region that today was still ice-covered just before the previous ice minimum in 2007. Source: Real Science.

1938 Huge melting of Arctic sea ice. Source: WUWT.

Arctic temperatures in the 1930s were warmer and the warming rate was higher than the rate seen at the end of the 20th century. Source: The Hockeyschtick.

At the end of the 1930s, Soviet scientists noticed that for an extended time period it even had been 6°C warmer than during the Nansens ice drift, and a few degrees warmer than today. Source: Donner + Doria.

1940 According to reports, Arctic sea ice in February 1940 was a mere 2 meters thick, which was the same as the thickness of February 2012. Source: Real Science,

1947 Geophysicist Hans Ahlmann sets off the alarm: Climate change in the Arctic is so dramatic that an international agency needs to be set up to address it. Source: Real Science, the reference frame.

1958 During a voyage in the summer of 1958, American submarine ”Skate“ emerged in open water nine times – and once at the North Pole. Source: Donner + Doria.

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