Playing Politics With The Pawns

Jihad, Politics, Terrorism, The State

The prisoner swap between the US and the Taliban, last year, trading five fierce-looking Muhammadans from Afghanistan’s Jihad Central for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was problematic for reasons other than that American administrations claim not to negotiate with terrorists. It is of a piece with the “release from Qatar, in December,” of an “al Qaeda operative held in a U.S. prison” in exchange for two Americans held in that country.

If the government intended to swap these prisoners for Americans, why not reserve some swap-worthy swarthies to save murdered ISIS captives Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff?

Likely because the returns were not that great. It’s all about optics and politics.

Finding Free Will And Agency In … Auschwitz

Anti-Semitism, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Psychiatry

International Holocaust Remembrance Day fell on Tuesday, yesterday, “marking the passage of 70 years since the January 27, 1945, liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet soldiers.”

After conversing with a singularly self-centered, narcissistic Jew, I thought of another, very different and magnificent man, who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau “extermination camps where an estimated 1.1 million people—mostly Jews from across Europe, but also political opponents, prisoners of war, homosexuals, and Roma—were killed in gas chambers or by systematic starvation, forced labor, disease, or medical experiments.” (The Atlantic.)

Viktor E. Frankl came out of Auschwitz to found the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist said this of his experience in Auschwitz: “In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

To plagiarize myself, “You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl [my family included, whether they know it or not]. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Dr. Frankl, who lost his wife in Auschwitz, but told so poignantly of finding her again in a little chirping bird that followed him—found free will and agency in … Auschwitz too.

The Congressional Budget Oafs SOP

Debt, Economy, Healthcare

“Obamacare’s A Marketplace In The Same Way The Knockout Game Is A Game” offered this assessment of the modus operandi of the CBOafs (The Congressional Budget Oafs):

[Like] the pundits who bestow them with the “non-partisan” adjectival, the CBOafs (The Congressional Budget Oafs), protect the status-quo. This federal agency is as “independent” as the country’s columnists, who might as well register as lobbyists for the RNC or DNC respectively.
Typically, the CBO will first confirm government predictions of the great savings that will accrue due to this or the other wastrel, welfare program. Later, when it’s safer, they adjust their statistical sleight of hand.
Yes, getting reliable data out of the CBO is like frisking a wet seal.

Zero Care will impose $1 trillion in tax increases and $2 trillion in subsidies. Yet, the CBOafs initially scored the program positively. Only a day ago, not untypically, the CBOafs were touting the increasing (alleged) affordability of the Affordable Care Act (not for me). Right away, the CBOafs then pivot to warn of the “Heightening Risk of Fiscal Crisis.” Via Breitbart.com:

CBO Director Douglas Elmdorf testified that debt will exceed 100% of GDP within 25 years and continue to rise, a “trend that could not be sustained” and would eventually heighten “the risk of a fiscal crisis” before the House Budget Committee on Tuesday.

“Although the deficits in our baseline projections remain roughly stable as a percentage of GDP through 2018, as I noted, they rise after that. The deficit in 2025 is projected to be $1.1 trillion, or 4% of GDP, and cumulative deficits over the 2016 to 2025 period are projected to total $7.6 trillion. We expect that federal debt held by the public will amount to 74% of GDP at the end of this fiscal year, more than twice what it was at the end of 2007, and higher than in any year since 1950. By 2025, in our baseline projections, federal debt rises to nearly 79% of GDP. When CBO last issued long-term budget projections in the summer, we projected that, under current law, debt would exceed 100 percent of GDP 25 years from now, and would continue on an upward trajectory thereafter. That trend that could not be sustained. Such large and growing federal debt would have serious negative consequences, including increasing federal spending for interest payments, restraining economic growth in the long term, giving policymakers less flexibility to respond to unexpected challenges, and eventually heightening the risk of a fiscal crisis” he stated.

According to a copy of his prepared remarks released by the CBO, the revised economic projections “do not materially change” predictions that debt will exceed 100% of GDP in 25 years and “CBO’s current projection of debt as a percentage of GDP in 2024 is quite close to that used as the starting point for the projections in The 2014 Long-Term Budget Outlook [where the CBO also predicted that debt will be 100% of GDP in 25 years.]”

Not The Latino Look Again

Aesthetics

Judging by the winner of the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, the Latino look is not going away anytime soon. I wish it would. The winner, Paulina Vega, pales compared to the exotic Miss Jamaica, Kaci Fennell. An irate viewer puts down the choice of Miss Colombia over the sublimely exquisite Miss Jamaica to a competition held in “a Latino place” coupled with a “jury that was Latino.” The common Latino look has dominates for some time, no matter where the competition.

Miss Jamaica: