Have you ever wondered just what happens to all those people we keep reading about in the news, and in the government’s seriously flawed demography, who have just dropped out of sight in this depression? Yes… depression.

I’ve had it with the cutesy defining of a recession that in no way ended in 2009, as the politicians and their pet economic idiot savants claim. “Why, Skip” you say, “we had two quarters of positive growth in 2009?. Okay, and if you believe that math, I have some shares in Solyndra for sale for you, cheap.

Ask just about anyone in the great San Joaquin and Central Valleys here in California, agricultural regions that could have fed the world with their bounty, if the recession has ever ended. Ask them if they see anything on the horizon except more crippling regulation, taxation or punitive regulatory dictat from both the Federal Government and that runaway bunch of Marxist radicals infesting Sacramento.

There are pockets of chronic unemployment in some of those communities as high as 30% or 40%, with an average of a whopping 25%. A figure I found difficult to swallow until I heard them re-stated by some people in the valleys and by one of the few conservative lawmakers in California, Devin Nunes. I wish he was my representative. This guy is the real deal.

Parisian Rag-Pickers, by Raffaelli.

…and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly.
But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.
He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106BC - 43BC.

We, in all our arrogant sophistication, have utterly failed to grasp what this ‘primitive’ philosopher knew forty two years before the birth of Christ.

The critical situation in which America now finds itself is a gut check of monumental proportions. There can be little doubt in any rational person’s mind that there are forces at work in this country which, left unchecked, will certainly extinguish the greatest beacon of democracy in the history of the world, resulting in the enslavement of free people’s souls. We’ve been served a constant diet of lies and prevarication for close to a century.  read more »

It would seem that the country has seen and heard every single falsehood that Obama and the DeMarxists have foisted on the American people. If there was ever an address that underwhelmed the public purview of Barack Hussein’s pitch for ‘balance’ and more taxes against the ‘rich’, this was it.

The top 10% of earners pay 70% of the taxes in this country to start with. If you confiscated every dime of the wealthiest people in this nation it would scarcely run the Federal Government for more than about ninety days. I’ve never gotten a job from a poor person. So, then, it stands to reason that Obama is determined to to forever destroy the job creators in our country.

Never in my lifetime, and very possibly in the history of this country, have we seen someone who is so wrong in so many different ways. If Mr Hussein was a private citizen it wouldn’t make a hoot or holler of difference. We all know incorrigible knotheads… people for whom abject ignorance is a virtue. But they’re not the President of the United States.

There’s a lead picture on ‘Drudge’, showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barry Obama at a meeting earlier today. Pull it up and check it out for yourselves. Obama looks like a man at the end of his rope. He’s presiding over a completely failed and ineffectual foreign policy with the sole purpose, as far as I can determine, of isolating the State of Israel, and doing everything in his power to advance the aims of the people who would see Israel in flames.  read more »

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. This has been the clarion call of marketplaces around the world since the beginning.

During the late Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, a culture sprang up through most of Europe called the Bell-Beaker culture. Extensive trade based on people’s desires, wants and needs crossed inter-tribal and cultural lines. Known for their distinctive bell-shaped pottery it was probably the world’s first example of an idea or product going viral. Used for everything from drinking vessels for beer or mead (a sort of wine made from fermented honey and water) to smelting vessels for bronze, copper and gold, and funerary urns.

The obvious point being, before I get too far afield with this, is that there was a marketplace for these goods and services that crossed cultural and ethnic lines. Trade for goods and services was established wherever the need arose apart from, or perhaps in spite of, tribal warfare and conflict.

Examples are many, flint nodules found hundreds of miles from any source, finished products such as arrowheads, hand-axes, flensing tools and baskets. There are many examples of that here on the west coast of America. There was extensive trade among the Native American culture here on the west coast of the United States.  read more »

This president and his rise to power will be chewed over and spat out by generations of writers… left, right and in the mushy middle. Historians will not treat Barack Obama kindly. Nothing with this ‘man’ (as much as it slays me to refer to him as such… in the company of real men he wouldn’t be given the time of day) is as it seems. He is as illusory as the will-o’-the-wisp over a southern swamp. He could put any carny barker to shame with his meaningless, high-flown rhetoric.

As a side note, Dee and I just celebrated our 600th publication last week. It’s the first time I’ve given more than a cursory examination to our archives. I don’t claim to be prescient, however, going clear back to the beginning of this column it’s really spooky how accurately I described Barack Hussein Obama and his political agenda. I pegged him as a Marxist ideologue from day one. But then, I didn’t allow the hype to sway me. At best, as I said at the time, we should reserve judgment, since at that time he was still selling himself as a moderate to the boobs.

The Potemkin was a Russian battleship built in 1898, glorified in Bolshevik and, later, communist literature in Stalinist Russia as the exemplar of revolutionary zeal, when the Potemkin’s crew revolted against their Tsarist officers in 1905.  read more »

I was astounded. I didn’t think he’d really do it… well, yes I did, but I didn’t think it would be as blatant as it was. I’m referring to Barack Hussein Obama’s national address before the joint chambers of Congress, of course. It should have been billed as what it was, a campaign speech, and not a very good one at that.

It was vintage Obama. It was 2009 all over again. It was virtually identical to every other speech he has given since his election. Let’s just say that the speech itself had nothing new. It did run the entire gamut of the ever-present leftist shopping list.

Mr Obama wants another half trillion in ‘stimulus’ dollars to grease his campaign coffers and appease the unions. He’s planning on enlisting ‘the unemployed’, along with his AFL/CIO and SEIU goons, in their ‘war’ against the Tea Party.

Um, that would be their war on American citizens. We’ve seen all of the government’s tactics, time and time again. First, gin up unreasoning fear, then inject all of the DeMarxist straw ponies into the mix… use all of the oft-repeated talking points, the blatant lies which have served the left so well in the past. Scare the bejesus out of the elderly and the infirm. Ratchet up government giveaways. More shovel ready jobs that don’t and won’t exist outside of union and government welfare programs. Barack Obama’s ‘American Jobs Act’ is a fraud, through and through.  read more »

The ‘Main Stream Media’, as it has come to be known, has ceased to exist. It wasn’t even given a decent burial. The advent of the new conservative media has thrown down the gauntlet. Despite near-hysterical attempts to sell America the Administration’s statist line, Americans have not been fooled.

The new media has forced a transparency on their MSM counterparts that they’ve never had to face before. They were like a moth circling closer and closer to the flame. In the MSM’s drive to be closer and closer to the seats of power in this country they sold out their independence, their integrity and, as we’ve observed, some have sold out far more than that.

It’s sad, really. American journalism had a great tradition and a worldwide reputation as seekers of truth, no matter where that truth took them. I’ve been calling the Main Stream Media the Lame Stream Media now for a couple of years, but in fact I’ve watched the decline of truth and objectivity in journalism since Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite sold us out on the war in Vietnam, with politically motivated lies and distortions that were unfortunately taken for gospel truth by the folks at home, and most especially by craven politicians on both sides of the aisle.

The very instant any journalist or writer sells out for political advantage or favor, he or she ceases to have any claim on objectivity. The very moment that they lie to protect that privilege, they become the creature of that political entity with vested interest in the furtherance of their benefactor’s aims and desires. It’s actually far worse than that.  read more »

In any rational political environment, Barack Hussein Obama would be toast. Notice, please, the use of the word ‘rational’.

The left has been on a collision course with all things American since the 1903 Bolshevik revolution, led by Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, whose political-economic theories formed the basis of what was to become the Communist Party in Russia and the launch of the international Communist Party and its avowed aim of extending its tyrannical and repressive philosophy throughout the globe.

Trotsky and Lenin were political and economic theorists. That their collective ideology caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens seems not to have caused them a moment’s pause. Lawlessness, fear and hysteria, generated by ideological zealotry and an inflexible and indiscriminate one-party political authoritarianism, led to poverty and repression that rivaled and exceeded the worst the Tsars could have ever conceived. The people of Russia simply traded one inflexible authoritarian rule for another.

That this pernicious political ideology would clash with the enlightened western democracies was never in doubt. Political and economic subversion were always the preferred method of attack.

America was never fertile ground for the expansion of communism. Given a choice, people invariably choose freedom. Hence, the left has been relegated to using lies, distortion, outright invention and the subversion of the moral fabric of the country.  read more »

This week we were shy of a couple of key technicians where I work. “So what?”, you say… “we all have to work short handed once in a while”. True, and no argument there. What is different, or more likely in Barack Obama’s America, what has sadly become the norm for many businesses is that we are all operating with reduced staff and management. This, in turn, makes the absence of key personnel felt much more in most organizations.

I just went through a week exactly like this one, hence no articles this week. No excuses, work is work and we’re damned grateful for it. The end results of the various cuts, layoffs, consolidations and downsizing has turned American business into a sort of survivors’ club.

We have been forced to fine tune our operations and hone our procedures to razor sharpness by the maelstrom of a decimated economy and the overbearing hand of a blatantly business-unfriendly statist regime, whose only accomplishment to date seems to be the ability to vomit forth copious volumes of repressive and regressive regulations and onerous enforcement burdens on an already overtaxed and vastly over-regulated private business community.

We have, without a single doubt, the greatest workforce on Earth. Don’t buy the bull bleep that America has seen its better days… get out of our way! That’s all… that’s all it would take to end this depression. Yeah, folks… zero job growth, in a now-continuous four year economic train wreck that is the Barack Hussein Obama government and its disastrous policies, qualifies as a depression.  read more »

Another week of long days and longer nights. That’s okay by me, beats the hell out of not working. Makes it a little hard to write, though. First and foremost, our wishes and prayers go out to the folks on the east coast who find themselves in the path of Hurricane Irene. For heaven’s sake, if you’re in a position to get out, leave. I was in two typhoons when in the Pacific and south-east Asia with the Marines. I know that sinking feeling of realizing that you’re in the path of one of these monsters.

I wrote that last night just before I got called out again. The nation’s attention is rightly focused on the developing situation around Hurricane Irene. Maybe not with the punch the first worst-case scenarios forecast along with various exotic computer models, but still plenty dangerous and with the potential to cause immense damage.

Meanwhile, out here on the left armpit of the nation, it’s tough to say what came first, the chicken or the egg. Is Barack Hussein Obama modeling his brilliant economic strategy on our equally brilliant Jerry Brown, or is it the other way around? Sure looks to me as though they went to the same school of economics. Jerry Brown heads a state with an out-of-control bureaucracy with a radicalized legislature owned lock, stock and barrel by the environmentalists and the unions.

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