Category Archives: Government

Another Storm in a Tea Cup, Apparently

Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Government, Ilana Mercer, Media, Private Property, Regulation

This blog title replicates one written in 12.19.06. The repetitiveness reflects the lack of change in the media status of the people of the “provinces.” Thanks for asking, Robert, we are okay, having weathered a major ice storm that hit the Pacific Northwest. But we were without power for close to three days.

FoxNew reported only yesterday that “250,000 electric customers around Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia were without power Friday because of a winter storm that coated much of Washington state in ice, swelled Oregon rivers and brought the expectation of more flooding in both states with warmer temperatures and rain.”

Scratch that: Power went out on Thursday morning. By nighttime, the temperature inside my home had plunged to 52 degrees. Even though we have a generator (purchased after the 2006, first “Storm in a Tea Cup”), we were caught with practically no fuel, having listened—and heeded—the weather reports. No warnings were issued. If anything, our weather experts predicted a big thaw come Thursday.

However, cold air and an arctic north wind saw temperatures drop into the 20s across much of the region. Fluffy snow (20cm, at least), on which I had jogged happily a day before, was soon covered in a thick sheet of ice. All through the night we listened as clumps of the stuff fell from the giant ceder trees onto the house. Fortunately we had had the trees windsailed, so they seemed stable, but the weight of the ice saw big branches snap off like twigs.

We had been thinking of having a few trees felled, for safety. But, as you know, your property is not your own, and each such consideration demands a letter from an arborist and a hefty shakedown “baksheesh,” paid to the local goons at the municipality. Such regulation is probably responsible for loss of life.

Indeed, sadly, a falling tree killed an unknown neighbor, RIP: “The tree fell on a person backing an all-terrain vehicle out of a shed this morning near Issaquah, said King County said King County sheriff’s Sgt. Cindi West.”

This post reflects upon the stasis among the statists and media sycophants. And since any oscillation in the form of a learning curve is absent from the system called the state, local and federal, I will repeat the questions I posed after the 2006 storm in the Pacific Northwest:

Utilities are only nominally private and are heavily regulated. How have regulations affected their response times and, most crucially, the maintenance of the power grid?

The grid and power lines suffered mostly tree damage. In this part of the world, the trees everywhere are intertwined with the cable. Why? Why isn’t a wide tree-free swath maintained around these vital structures? Why are trees not chopped back?

I suspect the explanation lies in the self-defeating dementia of tree fetishists, and “Watermelon” legislation — green on the outside; red on the inside. However, as usual, the “Watermelon” worldview creates more havoc than it prevents. Because of wood fires, the usually pristine air in our part of the world resembles the air above the shanty town of Soweto. The resources and energy spent–and the lives lost–because of this mess are many times the cost or worth of a few thousand trees.

On a less personal note, this week’s WND column was an especially hot one, but there is no point in posting it to the blog now. I will, rather, post the column once it goes up on RT. My “paleolibertarian” column now features on the Russia Today broadcaster’s website. I ask all my BAB readers to “Recommend/Like” the RT column, each week, and retweet it. RT deserves your support for its support and interest in ideas other banal minds won’t touch, don’t you think?

And on a funny note: It was a struggle to keep our African parrots warm, but they settled into the routine. When T. Cup awoke this morning to warm, normal house temperatures and light levels, he demanded happily, in his old cute voice: “yummy-yummy.” And then he quickly comforted himself, “It’s coming, it’s coming.”

A recent image of T. Cup and his “mommy” is on the gallery. To view TC, wait for the page to upload all the images.

Captain Coward Will Pay

Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Crime, Ethics, Europe, Government, Morality

How does a subhuman like Francesco Schettino get a job ferrying 4000 people across the seas? It could be worse. Someone of George Bush’s ilk or Barack Obama’s caliber could—and did—get the endorsement of millions to shepherd them into war and economic ruin. Not once, but twice in Bush’s case. So, in counting the sick-making ways of the Captain who capsized the Costa Concordia off the Tuscan coast—causing the death of five, so far (least 15 people are still missing, including two Americans)—remember this: Schettino will be punished. Bush, Obama and their progeny will be pampered and paraded around with pride for the rest of their sorry lives. Back to Costa Concordia:

The dumb-as-a-rock captain blames a rock that was not supposed to be there.

Schettino insisted he was twice as far out and said the ship ran aground because the rocks weren’t marked on his nautical charts. “We were navigating approximately 300 meters (yards) from the rocks,” he told Mediaset television. “There shouldn’t have been such a rock. On the nautical chart it indicated that there was water deep below.”

What sickens me is that this excuse for a captain concedes to “maneuvering the ship in ‘touristic navigation,” a mere 300 meters from the shore, “implying a route that was a deviation from the norm and designed to entertain the tourists.”

Costa captains have occasionally steered the ship near port and sounded the siren in a special salute … Such a nautical “fly-by” was staged last August, prompting the town’s mayor to send a note of thanks to the commander for the treat it provided tourists who flock to the island, local news portal GiglioNews.it reported.

Schettino had been paid by the passengers of the Costa Concordia. Yet he was attempting to entertain and impress spectators at the cost of those who had trusted him with their lives, and had paid him too.

Not having a sense of who your asset is; where your financial/fiduciary loyalty/interests belong; who you should treat well because your endeavor depends on him: this is a phenomenon I’ve encountered a lot.

Also clear from the reports is that “the captain abandoned the stricken liner before all the passengers had escaped. According to the Italian navigation code, a captain who abandons a ship in danger can face up to 12 years in prison.”

A French couple who boarded the Concordia in Marseille, Ophelie Gondelle and David Du Pays, told the Associated Press they saw the captain in a lifeboat, covered by a blanket, well before all the passengers were off the ship.

This is not the first time that a captain of one of these floating cities jumped ship first.

UPDATE IV: Payroll Pickpockets: ‘Please, Sir, I Want Some More’ (Pocket Money for the Peons)

Barack Obama, Democrats, Government, Private Property, Republicans, Taxation

It’s intended as a temporary, two-month tax cut. Nothing permanent. Our munificent masters in DC are wrangling over whether to throw their galley slaves (taxpayers) some pennies in time for the Holidays. In and out of our pockets they reach, only to decide, on Tuesday, that “a Senate plan for a two-month extension” of the payroll tax was “irresponsible and unworkable,” and that “it would create uncertainty by failing to resolve the issue past February.”

Swept up in the manufactured drama, CNN observes: “However, the Senate agreement was negotiated by Democratic and Republican leaders and received strong GOP support in passing on an 89-10 vote. … President Barack Obama joined the Democratic chorus, noting that Senate leaders from both parties had agreed to the short-term extension in order to guarantee that taxes don’t increase for working Americans while negotiations continue early next year on the one-year extension that House Republicans say they support.”

Said the agitator from Chicago of House Republicans: “What they’re really holding out for is to wring concessions from Democrats on issues that have nothing to do with the payroll tax cut.”

Why does the thief-in-chief not advocate for permanent tax cuts? Why not cut taxes meaningfully?

The whole routine reminds me of Oliver Twist, the little orphan protagonist in the eponymous Charles Dickens novel. And in particular, the scene where he rattles his breakfast bowel for some more gruel.

UPDATE I: PRIVATE PROPERTY. We’ve been over this before, Pauli, in another post. You are wrong about tax cuts being “hooey.” Not unless private property is “hooey.” Let me put it plainly: I don’t care what DC spends, so long as it’s mitts off my property. A pay check is private property. Your formulations are predicated on communal ownership; mine on private ownership. Throttle the revenue stream, restore private-property rights, and the bastards can do what they like.

UPDATE II: The War Street Journal is furious at House Republicans:

Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he’s spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2013. This should be impossible.

UPDATE III (Dec. 22): To the defenders below of taxation in all its permutation: I am sure I speak for your sovereigns in DC: They are, no doubt, grateful for your faith in their ability to mange your money. From this scribe’s perspective, however, money stuffed down the maw of the Federal Frankenstein will seldom end up where it’s supposed to (as if that “destination” is so laudable to begin with). Congress, the president and the bureaucracy: These are embezzlers par excellence—so good are they at what they peddle that they have BAB’s fearless bloggers on their side.

Wake up: Money extracted from us by the Feds is fungible. Any additional revenues the Feds receive via taxes they will use to plunge private property owners deeper into debt. The solution to the debt is not to be found in seizing private property (through taxes) and placing it in communal ownership (state bureaucracies), where resources are never allocated efficiently and are always squandered.

But, this is the season of good will, and the oink sector that serves the tax-and-spend police state that Uncle Sam has become is, I am sure, thankful for your confidence

UPDATE IV: The peons get pocket money for two more months. ObamaMedia celebrate a tactical victory for the Prince of Darkness. Details of the deal here. Puke fest all around. CNN correspondents Jessica Yellin is almost yelling, “Political touchdown.” Almost.

UPDATED: Importing Monstrous Morals (The Utouchables)

Business, Ethics, Family, Government, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Labor, Media, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture, The West

The excerpt is from “Importing Monstrous Morals,” now on WND.COM:

“In its contempt for women, India, our democratic ally, has advanced little since the time it practiced Sati, ‘the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband.’

Then, Western values had valiant defenders like General Sir Charles James Napier. When ‘Hindu priests complained to him about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities,’ Napier replied:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.” (Via Wikipedia. )

Nowadays, our ‘national customs’ are exemplified by ‘enlightened’ observers—ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, for example—who gather and disseminate spotty, decontextualized data, in this case, about “the systematic, widespread elimination of India’s baby girls.” Vargas traveled to India for the current affairs program ’20/20.’

Back in the 1800s, Napier understood “Sati” as a cultural barbarity.

In 2011, Vargas is somewhat vague. Critical faculties dulled by the belief in the equal worth of all cultures and peoples, Vargas failed to firmly finger the sacred cultural cow to which Indians sacrifice a million girls every year. (The Economist is more optimistic, putting the number of girls who go missing as a result of a gender preference for boys at 600,000.)

… poverty and lack of education play almost no role in this morally monstrous practice. …

In utero and outside of it, the elimination of women in India is not about what we here in the US call “reproductive rights.” This is about the right to life. In India, a woman’s life, fetus or fully formed, is worthless.

… Empirical proof of these impregnable positions was provided by the University of California, San Francisco. UCSF conducted a “qualitative study of son preference and fetal sex selection among Indian immigrants in the United States,” showing that “Indian immigrant women are using reproductive technologies and liberal abortion policies in the United States to abort female fetuses.” The study was published in Social Science & Medicine. Therein, the objects of observation are quoted as saying that, “There is such a thing as too many daughters, but not too many sons.”

The complete column is, “Importing Monstrous Morals.” Read it now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE (Dec. 16): Pam Maltzman: About the US getting India’s best and brightest: It’s probably the opposite, as those who come here are likely untouchables fleeing the cast-system in India and seeking a better station in life. It is well known, if not documented—for who would have the courage?—that Indians working in our massive high-tech conglomerates, as I stated in the column, are often very average in technical skills. They do, however, excel in exercising bureaucratic power; are quarrelsome, arrogant, and can talk up a storm. As soon as they are in positions of power, they are in the habit of hiring their own kind, often irrespective of merit, and to the detriment of The Other Kind. Massive companies, flush with billions, work much like government, within which fiefdoms with power structures develop. In these chieftainships, the relationship between productivity and profit is loose, at best. So long as the Chief has a good connection to the next top dog, he can chug along for years, before his little nexus collapses. Looking diverse is one of the main goals of the multinational with billions to blow. If a project collapses with a female at the helm, for example, a lot of musical chairs and cover-up action will ensue, as females are a prized minority too.