Venezuela North

Moonbattery: The Venezuela of North America: "Joe Vranich explains why California's rule by moonbats has businesses in relocation mode:"

Lights out.

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Of Herring And Cosmics

Something to go with all the pickled herring you're eating:

Global Warming - Some Real Science - Hmmm Imagine That!: "I'm an personally sick of the global warming hysteria. I was talking to my 84 year old dad the other day and he clearly remembered all these same 'experts' were freaking everyone out about an impending ice age back in the 70s. Yes, global warming is happening, but it's not because of CO2. Those with the most wealth and power have whipped this CO2 myth into a frenzy to advance their own selfish globalization goals. These people are just doing what they always do, lie, distort and manipulate reality then launch a massive sales campaign to con us all into believing it. Remember, having a PhD is no guarantee that you are someone who tells the truth."

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Wizards

Moonbattery: Merry Christmas!: "On a tip from Dan."

Just in case you found yourself let down on your quest for Christmas lights:

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Merry Christmas

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Have A Very CARBy Christmas

Moonbattery: What CARB Would Do to Santa's Sleigh: "Why Santa might find that with his busy schedule, California will have to be cut from his itinerary — at least until they get the moonbattery under control:"

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Hitler's "Christmas" Party

You have been brainwashed to believe that Hitler was a "right wing" Christian. Frankly, you have been brainwashed to a point almost beyond belief:

Hitler's Christmas party: Rare photographs capture leading Nazis celebrating in 1941 | Mail Online: "The pictures from December 18, which have only just come to light, show Hitler and his generals at a party for SS officer cadets in Munich.

But the Nazi Christmas was far from traditional.

Hitler believed religion had no place in his 1,000-year Reich, so he replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas with the Norse god Odin and urged Germans to celebrate the season as a holiday of the ‘winter solstice’, rather than Christmas.

Out of sight at the top of the tree behind Hitler was a swastika instead of an angel, and many of the baubles carried runic symbols and iron cross motifs. The remarkable pictures were captured by Hugo Jaeger, one of the Fuhrer’s personal photographers."

Here's what's really been going on:

After watching this, click through to YouTube and follow the links over right through the multi-part series.There are the wolves, the sheep and the sheepdogs have all gone on strike. The ending is predictable.

You know that treaty with Putin that O Duce just rammed through in total contempt of the 20th Amendment? (Even Wikipedia has a reasonable understanding of the 20th Amendment.)

Did I forget to mention that Putin was (is) a KGB Colonel?

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Nothing They Like Less

I get a great belly laugh when lefties say the "free market" has failed us! LOL!

Why Businesses Can't Stand Free Markets: Veronique de Rugy - Bloomberg: "For almost two decades, the monks of St. Joseph Abbey in Covington, Louisiana, supported themselves by making and selling unadorned handmade pine and cypress caskets.

But if embalmers and funeral directors in the state of Louisiana have their way, the monks will be barred from earning a living by making coffins without a license issued by a state government board, eight of whose nine members work in the funeral industry.

Business people love to say how much they cherish free markets, all the while decrying government that limits entrepreneurialism and personal freedom.

But the truth is there is nothing most business people like less than free markets."

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The Game

I'll believe the "wins" when I see them happen -- until then I don't even trust Paul or Rubio farther than I can throw them after this latest lunacy by their "peers":

Lindsey Graham Gives Away the Game | RedState: "There has been a lot of speculation this week about why the GOP rolled over in the Senate on virtually every issue. From Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’s repeal to START to you name it — the GOP became the party of capitulation. So much so that even Lindsey Graham is blasting the Senate GOP “for a ‘capitulation … of dramatic proportions’ to Democrats and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in the lame-duck Congress.”

In his statement about why the GOP folded like a cheap suit, Graham gives away the game. He says, “I can understand the Democrats being afraid of the new Republicans; I can’t understand Republicans being afraid of the new Republicans.”

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Why worry? Because the Senate GOP wants to cut deals with the Senate Democrats and they know that just Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Jim DeMint will be able to force deals much more conservative than the Senate GOP is.

So Senate Republicans decided to roll over on big issues now knowing that next year they will be forced further right than they might be comfortable.

Here’s a golden truth some of you won’t like, but is true nonetheless: Mike Lee and Rand Paul are worth ten regular Republican Senators any day of the week. They’ll fight. And they’ll win."

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The Only Thing Worse

There's the bullsh*t the Obamedia feeds you. Then there's reality:

The Real Story Behind the Comcast-Level 3 Battle: Tech News «: "All of this said, no one here did anything wrong; these disputes aren’t uncommon. Well, no one did anything wrong until Level 3 whined to the press and regulators. When you’re on the losing side of a peering dispute, you’re always tempted to complain to regulators about how you’ve been treated unfairly. Then you remember a regulated peering arrangement is the only thing worse than what we have now. More regulation puts more power in the hands of the big providers, not less, as they have the experience, resources, and the legions of regulatory lawyers necessary to “play the game.”

Look at the Telecom Act of 1996; the Baby Bells won that fight due to their superior regulatory game-playing ability. The cable companies, PTTs (national telephone companies), AT&T, and Verizon would surely come out on top of any major movement towards peering regulation which would cut out the large number of small firms that peer 50 percent to 70 percent of their traffic."

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O Chavez Watch

O and Chavez are different how again?

Chavez defends plan for Internet regulations: "'We aren't eliminating the Internet here ... nor censoring the Internet,' Chavez said during his weekly television and radio program, 'Hello, President.' 'What we're doing is protecting ourselves against crimes, cybercrimes, through a law.'

As examples, Chavez mentioned messages promoting drug use, prostitution and other crimes, and said his government has an obligation to take a stand. Questions remain about how the measures would be enforced.

Chavez also rebuffed criticism over the National Assembly's vote on Friday granting him special powers to enact laws by decree in a range of areas for the next year and a half.

Critics called it a power grab, noting that Chavez will be able to largely bypass the incoming National Assembly that takes office next month with a larger opposition contingent."

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Even See B.S. Gets It

And nothing predicts a reality freight train better than see B.S. getting it. Because that means it's far, far too late to get off the tracks.

60 Minutes: Fiscal day of reckoning is here | The Right Scoop: "I know this problem is bigger than Obama, but geez, how can the MSM do fabulous reports like this and not see that the whole trillion dollar stimulus was just a load of crap. It did nothing more than grow our debt, and all the money that was given to state and local governments has now run out. Just like GM, after taking tax payer money several times and finally having to go bankrupt to fix their core problems, state and local governments will have to do the same. It’s ridiculous that they just continue to let Obama and crew lie about this when the facts are staring them right in the face!"

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A Drinking Story

You'll want to get sloshed after you see it. Unless you're a leftist in which case math can never displace your feeeeelings.

Moonbattery: Bar Stool Economics: How Taxes Work: "The crazy chart from the commies at Mother Jones he refers to can be seen here.

Basically, moonbats want an economic system in which the energetic and able are enslaved to a nonproductive parasite class. One problem is that people forced to work not for their own benefit but for the benefit of hostile freeloaders aren't as productive. The closer America comes to the communism our rulers are incrementally imposing, the less productive the slaves will be, until we reach the point that they aren't willing or able to produce anything at all. Then there will be no drinks for anybody, and utopian equality will have been achieved at last."

And by the way, the continuing project of the left is to create a world gulag where people with brains have nowhere left to flee. Looks only a few years away from fruition to me...

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Unintended Consequences

Watch and weep.

Unmasking The Unintended Consequences Of US Central Planning | zero hedge: "The NIA continues with its series of bite-sized video documentaries exposing the stupidity and lies out of the US government. While the previous clip looked at a fictitious world in which the dollar had just died, today's is one which analyzes the plethora of unintended consequences that emerge as a result of the government's centrally planned tinkering. As always, it is a must watch, even if one does not agree with the NIA's overarching theme that government policies will ultimately result in uncontrollable price moves following the destruction of the reserve currency."

Just to be clear: I don't agree with absolutely everything shown -- most notably the simplistic comments about national defense. For instance, most libs have no clue about the existence of this little ditty by someone you might have assumed was in your hip pocket. He has been swallowed by his own memory hole.

On the other hand, defense -- much less outright war -- is unmistakably a costly endeavor that needs careful deliberation and should never be undertaken without either winnable objectives or to demonstrate unmistakably to an enemy that the price of further aggression is unacceptable -- and preferably before the enemy can gather strength. Or to fight for our very survival which is what we always somehow end up in because these are never achieved now are they?

That said, WTWT.

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It Was A Bright Cold Day

Have you been careful to avoid your thoughtcrimes today?

That thing from 1984: Oligarchical Collectivism « Orwell's Dreams: "On April 4, 1984, the main character begins to pen a diary. Winston Smith and everyone around him are strictly controlled in a collective. The collective is so harsh and belittling of the individual that free thinking is illegal, a thought-crime. There is Big Brother, the entity adopted by the state and there is the Brotherhood, a supposed loose group of people who defy Big Brother. Big Brother issues a dictionary that eliminates language with every edition. And the Brotherhood has its own required reading, called The Theory and Practice to Oligarchical Collectivism. It has become known as the book within the book. Oligarchical Collectivism means the linking or joining of institutions, institutions designed to keep control in the hands of the few.
There are three types of institutions in the world, those of state, those of corporate and those of religion. A foundational concept of the United States is, or was, a separation of these institutions to eliminate the potential for oligarchical collectivism. The founding fathers may not have used the term, but they certainly observed such diabolical collectives of institutions, states supported by churches, with corporate functions."

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But Don't Raise The Retirement Age!

We wouldn't want real science so get done now would we? Not when we can spend our lives on drunken vacations instead:

CERN Research Budget Gets Cut: "European particle physics research center CERN located near Geneva, Switzerland has gotten its budget cut by 6% over the next five years. Europe no longer has the money to fund it.

CERN's budget gets the axe as Europe pisses away all its money on climate research.
It was just a question of time. With so much money being pissed away on bogus climate research and save-the-world projects, eventually you run out of funds to pay for real science and research.

How many billions have been poured into researching the non-problem of climate change? The IPCC? Hansen’s GISS surface station folly? Green subsidies? The list is endless."

And I'll bet about a hundred dollars that you were unaware of this:

An experiment designed to investigate the link between solar activity and the climate has its first results in the bag. At the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco today, Joachim Curtius presented data from the first runs of the CLOUD (‘cosmics leaving outdoor droplets’) experiment at CERN – the European particle physics lab outside of Geneva.

The experiment has a long and bumpy history. The idea is to test the theory that cosmic rays spur the formation of particles in the air that nucleate clouds, in turn making skies cloudier and the planet cooler. Researchers have noted a dearth of sunspots (which is linked to more cosmic rays) during the ‘little ice age’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a peak in sunspots (linked to a drop in cosmic rays) during the late 1980s, when global cloudiness dropped by about 3% (see Nature‘s feature on the project). No one knows how big this effect might be, and the idea that it might account for a big chunk of the warming over the last century is highly controversial.

CLOUD uses a particle beam from CERN as a stand-in for cosmic rays, and fires them through an ultra-clean steel chamber filled with select atmospheric gases, to see if and how particles that could nucleate clouds are formed. Project head Jasper Kirkby proposed the experiment back in 1998. But it had a hard time getting off the ground – perhaps in part because Kirkby received bad press for emphasizing the importance of cosmic rays to climate change (see this story from the National Post). CLOUD finally got going in 2006, and they started work with the full kit in November 2009 (here’s a CERN video update about that).

The results haven’t yet been published, so Curtius declined to discuss the details. But the important thing is that the project is working – they have seen sulphuric acid and water combine to make particles when blasted by the CERN beam, for example, in a way that matches predictions of the most recent models. The data should help the team to quantify how much of an impact the Sun is having on climate within 2-3 years, Curtius says – though there are a lot more pieces of the puzzle to fill in.

You can watch the most recent lecture by Kirkby at CERN here. WTWT -- you will quickly learn you have been soaked in lies by the oligarchical collectivists.

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Unrestricted?

An Honest Question for Lefties | The Agitator: "If your answer is no, that is, that the Constitution puts no real restraints on the federal government at all, why do you suppose they bothered writing and passing one in the first place?"

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KYAG (Kiss Your A** Goodbye)

In case you will be wondering why all the duck and cover advice suddenly appears:

Instapundit » Blog Archive » NUCLEAR SURVIVAL: Get Indoors And Stay There: The advice is based on recent scientific analyses …: "MORE STILL: “Did Obama and his people get a burst of Lileksian nostalgia? . . . It’s all of a piece with ‘we could absorb a terrorist attack’. What they’re telling you is that you’re going to get nuked, there’s nothing they can do about it, they have no intention of trying to do anything substantive about it, and the best thing for you to do is to learn to be a contortionist — it’s hard to bend over far enough to kiss your ass goodbye. . . . A strong America might well absorb a terrorist hit with little damage, even a nuclear one. A weak America, especially an America with weaklings in its highest offices, might very well feel it had something to prove, and that could be very dangerous to miscalculators — and more so to their innocent bystanders."

RTWT.

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A Rage For Paper Money

In case you wondered about what Madison would have thought of O Duce, here it is:

A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

Did I forget to mention that Madison is widely considered the architect of the Constitution and that Federalist #10 -- from which this is a lynch-pin passage -- is considered one of the two most important of the series? And for that matter, the Federalist is argued by some to be on par in importance with the Constitution as it is the contemporaneous set of arguments published to convince the population to vote for ratification.

The lib loons will tell you it's hard to understand what the founders meant. I don't think so. (Time for a reminder.)

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Busted

Moonbattery: Obama Myths Busted: "Mythbusters will never run short of untruths to debunk so long as the Moonbat Messiah has a teleprompter to read:"

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99'ers Update

A note on the unemployment extension « Hot Air: "There seems to be some continuing confusion over exactly what form the unemployment extension takes in the Obama-GOP tax deal.  On every occasion where I have discussed this, people have understood it to mean that unemployment benefits are being extended past the 99-week limit, allowing people to collect another 13 months of unemployment checks.  That’s not actually the case, which I have stated in two earlier posts this week but not as a standalone point.

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For instance, a person who has received the standard 26 weeks of unemployment from the state and another 20 weeks through the EUC will continue to be eligible for payments, up to another 53 weeks in half of the states. Those who have already received 99 weeks, or whatever the maximum is for their state, will still be ineligible for any other unemployment compensation. The caps remain in place, while the program continues for those who more recently lost their jobs or will lose their jobs in the near future."

Interesting that the Dems would allow unemployment payments to remain capped at 99 weeks. They must think their (unemployed) base must be ready to riot like the Euros...

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