Thursday, January 28, 2010

WHEN IS CLASS WARFARE JUST PLAIN COMMON SENSE?

CNBC POSTED A POLL on their "Squawk On The Street" module questioning whether one felt better about job security after hearing the President's SOTU speech last night. Here's one comment that struck a chord with me from a commenter called Youknowme:

I don't feel better about job security, but I do have more hope than I did a month ago. At least he's beginning the long road of reform that we need in compensation (because CEOs simply don't deserve 300 times more than they made 20-30 years ago). What are they, supermen? Last time I checked they need their middle managers and working class to run operations. Their so called "leadership" is incredibly inflated. I understand that having a competent CEO is important to the company's success but that doesn't mean that the CEOs now are 300 times better and smarter than the ones 20-30 years ago.

However, gimme a liddwe time here..im finkin...im finkin..and it's urting my widdle bwain...


A valid point, one I have been making for nearly two decades now. As much as I admire our "objectivist" philosopher for her vigorous stand against the pernicious methods and goals of the Communists, Ayn Rand just doesn't account for the perils of excessive greed or pure evil and the snarling matrices of aggressive fascism possible in her worldview, and of course this is due to the same flaw as other grand illusions, the flaw generally known as human nature. Man is simply not always as moral as our idealists would prefer. A quick glance at their own flawed lives should be enough to put the question of perfect morality to rest.

We all know by now it was the banks with grins and government nudging who created this financial mess, yet the individual players are paying few if any reciprocating personal penalties for these mistakes. This disconnect from the cause and effect realities dominating our own lives tends to exacerbate the irrelevancy most of us are feeling with regards to this administration.

The economy is frozen tundra, so it appears that the American people have yet begun to fight.

Labels: , , , , , ,

DEVALUE THE DOLLAR, KICKSTART AMERICA

Dollar Devaluation To Fix The Great Recession
Frank Beck, Forbes Magazine, 12.09.08, 1:00 PM ET

What began as government social tinkering—with implied threats to banks and mortgage companies to extend home loans to even the most marginal of borrowers&@151;led to a greed-blinded mortgage banking business and the meltdown we are experiencing today. Now we are asked by the same congressional leadership to go along with taxpayer-funded bailouts of the very banksters who, while making millions, created the mess..

Despite the trillions of dollars already expended recapitalizing banks, there is very little, if any, progress to show. Will a few trillion more do the trick? That seems to be the consensus among Congress and the banks. "They are simply too big to let fail," or are they really just too big to save? We can go back to "Plan A" and buy the toxic assets. If so, at what price? What if a few trillion does not remove enough toxic waste from the system or doesn't get credit flowing again and the economy bustling?

Some argue that it is time to help Main Street, not Wall Street. So, we should "forgive" some of the mortgages for those who are 90 days or more behind on their payments. Have you quit paying yet?

If we are to save bankers, shouldn't we at least distinguish between those who possess the intelligence to renegotiate their loans to workable terms? If we are to save homeowners, should not we first define the term "homeowner?" Perhaps it is not only someone who agreed to and signed a mortgage and is living in a house. Just perhaps, it should also include the stipulation that this individual paid some amount of a down payment: 20%, 5%, a dollar. I can tell you who is not a homeowner. It is not someone who paid zero down and ridiculously low payments for two years; that, my friend, is a renter.

The problem with all these ideas is the money is only directed at those who created or benefited from the problems. Why not attack the situation in a manner that will benefit most everyone, an approach that has been successful before and, when compared to the current course, has little downside?

Here it is. Stand back. World currencies should be devalued overnight.

It can be done on a country-by-country basis, but a coordinated devaluation would work best. A devaluation of 30% would raise the dollar value of all assets by 43%. A $200,000 home with a $230,000 mortgage would become a $286,000 home with the same mortgage. Presto! The homeowner who was $30,000 upside-down now has $56,000 equity and a good reason to make his payments. Both the homeowner and the bank are immediately better-off.

It would even benefit those who purchased their homes responsibly, as the value of their homes would rise by the same 43%. The current course of throwing trillions of dollars at the culprits is without any benefit to those who acted responsibly.

Admittedly, this is not a solution without the price of inflation, but the inflation would be short-lived. The current course will ultimately cause massive inflation that cannot be accurately estimated, and it may not even solve the problem.

Currency devaluation proved effective in ending the Great Depression. In 1930, Australia was the first to leave the gold standard, immediately devaluing the aussie by more than 40%, and the economy quickly recovered. New Zealand and Japan followed suit in 1931, each with the same result. By 1933, at least nine major economies had enacted a devaluation of their currency by removing it from the gold standard, all of whom emerged from depression.

In 1933, through a series of gold-related acts, culminating in the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, America realized a dollar devaluation of 41% when the price of gold was adjusted from $20.67 per ounce of gold to $35 per ounce. America, like the others before, had its economy bottom and recover as a result. Of the larger economies, only the French and Italians continued to adhere to the gold standard, and their economies remained depressed until finally, in 1936, they allowed their currencies to devalue, and their economies then recovered.

I see no reason to believe we would have any different result today. Only debt would remain the same. All other assets would immediately be worth more (in nominal terms), whether it be a home, a stock, an ounce of gold or a used car. Bank balance sheets would immediately improve, as many loans would be moved from non-performing to performing status. Banks would be paid with devalued dollars, but they made millions creating the mess. The current use of government stimulus through the creation of dollars will certainly lead to a similar or worse devaluation, so this is likely a net gain for the banks too.

Businesses would instantly become more profitable, and workers' pay would increase, allowing each to pay their debts more easily, even while sending more tax dollars to Washington, without raising tax rates. As assets are sold, the capital gains would send even more taxes to Washington. States and locales would receive more revenue via sales and property tax, improving the fiscal condition of school districts and local governments. The national debt would effectively be reduced by the same 25%, giving future generations a chance. Combine the move with a congressional pledge to only raise the budget by half the devaluation, and we could be on track for a balanced budget and paying down the debt.

As the old Saturday Night Live skit said, "Think of inflation as your friend. Wouldn't you like to wear $1,000 suits and smoke $100 cigars?" I know I would.

Frank Beck is Chief Investment Manager of Capital Financial Group and ProPlayer Investing in Austin, Texas, an affiliate of Partnervest Securities of Santa Barbara, Calif. Mr. Beck may be reached at Frank@FrankBeck.com.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Monday, January 25, 2010

SHIT IN A BAG

Get your shit in one bag."

Often a military term generally meaning, Stop foolin' around; get only the gear you need, put it in one bag, and let's go. If someone says your shit is in one bag but there is no bag around, you're being complimented.

So if you really want to know HOW to get your shit in one bag, here's the expert.

Someone asked the question concerning the ammunition strategy, "How many magazines is enough?" We thought it was an excellent question. Thanks to Doc for some solid advice.

I calculate the minimum number as 3x whatever my standard carry is for that particular firearm. For example, my daily carry gun is a G30. I (nominally) carry 3 magazines for it—one in the gun and two spares. So, my minimum for that gun is 9 magazines.

In reality, my wife has a G30 as well—so one would stock 18 magazines. And we often carry G21 mags (which fit) as the backup mags, so I have a minimum of 18 G30 mags, and 18 G21 mags.

As it happens, we have 4 G30's...so 36 G30 mags, and 36 G21 mags.

And we have 4 G21's...36 more G21 mags.

And as I said, those are minimum numbers. For my AR platforms, each one has at least 24 magazines. My M14's...21 each.

And so on.

We have a couple of FAL's...I bought 200 FAL magazines back when they were cheap (like a buck each). We also have a couple hundred G3 mags, for our PTR-91's, I got those at around $0.50 each. Since the mag is the most fragile part and crucial part of a weapon, it makes sense to stock up. Especially while we can.


It's clear some of us are serious weapons collectors.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Friday, January 22, 2010

JIHAD IN LITTLE ROCK SHOOTING



As plain as day. But still our military intelligence corps stumbles all over itself trying to downplay the obvious. Such immense self-loathing in the broad and toothy face of an army of jihadists so cocksure of its own righteous endeavors, that every makeshift soldier we capture in vain usually sings chapter and verse like a canary before, during, and after an attack, precisely the reason why they are attacking.

Or they invent one on the spot from the latest headlines, knowing how much we the enemy will grieve over our own successes, knowing gleefully by heart the Qu'ran gives them carte blanche to kill the infidels just as a matter of manifest destiny as the West remains deaf, dumb, and moronic in dealing with its adversaries, like a drunken but broken empire already on its knees...

This fellow apparently was a slow learner.


MEMPHIS — A Tennessee man accused of killing a soldier outside a Little Rock, Ark., military recruiting station last year has asked a judge to change his plea to guilty, claiming for the first time that he is affiliated with a Yemen-based affiliate of Al Qaeda.

In a letter to the judge presiding over his case, the accused killer, Abdulhakim Muhammad, calls himself a soldier in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and calls the shooting “a Jihadi Attack” in retribution for the killing of Muslims by American troops.

“I wasn’t insane or post traumatic nor was I forced to do this Act,” Mr. Muhammad said in a two-page, hand-printed note in pencil. The attack, which he said did not go as planned, was “justified according to Islamic Laws and the Islamic Religion. Jihad — to fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims.”

It remains unclear whether Mr. Muhammad really has ties to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which President Obama has said is behind the attempted Christmas Day bombing of an American plane by a Nigerian man.

But if evidence emerges that his claim is true, it will give the June 1, 2009, shooting in Little Rock new significance at a time when Yemen is being more closely scrutinized as a source of terrorist plots against the United States.

Mr. Muhammad, 24, a Muslim convert from Memphis, spent about 16 months in Yemen starting in the fall of 2007, ostensibly teaching English and learning Arabic. During that time, he married a woman from south Yemen. But he was also imprisoned for several months because he overstayed his visa and was holding a fraudulent Somali passport, the Yemen government said.

Under pressure from the United States government, Yemen deported Mr. Muhammad in late January 2009. But just four months after his return, Mr. Muhammad used a semiautomatic rifle to gun down two soldiers — Pvt. William A. Long and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula — while they were standing outside a military recruiting station in Little Rock, killing Private Long and wounding Private Ezeagwula.

Read it all.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

STRAIGHT FROM LUDWIG VON MISES



FOR A WELL-REASONED and well-written treatise on the virtues of property ownership as the salve for what curses us as a people in constitutional crises, check out this essay...

Labels: , , , , ,

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

WORLD PEACE AT A GLANCE

HAPPY 2010 WISHES to all our silent readers, and yes, we have them as our Live Feed attests, but thankfully few are the ones who actually waste theirs or our precious time begging to differ, or in announcing themselves in any number of other less tedious ways...

But in a slow kickoff of the new year of Two-Fisted Quorum (despite the plethora of pungent events of late of which the national media has covered in various degrees of detail), here are a few skewered bits that may have missed your perusal:

  • Congressional Democrats scheme to push universal voting rights...
  • China announces new restrictions on its own band of merry Muslims...
  • Top dozen "media scares" of the past ten years. And you say the conspiracy isn't real?
  • Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch, inspired by a hard-hitting piece by Charles Krauthammer threw a crush punch at the Obama administration's mishandling of the recent terror attacks on US soil at Fort Hood and Detroit air space. One question Koch, a Democrat who supported Bush in '04 and Obama in '08, raised is why aren't we honoring those who brave men and women who stopped these two catastropes in their tracks? Where indeed?
  • So, let's piece together the few narrative threads we are offered by the mainstream media. Any Muslim who snaps and shows his true colors is merely an isolated case of an otherwise gentle soul getting his "buttons pushed" while those unfortunate enough to be caught red-handed with "terrorist ties" are part of some Tiny Minority of Extremists™ and surely not representative of mainstream Islam. So no matter how much regurgitated Qu'ran-speak is spewed out by Muslims, it is never representative of the whole. Must be a riot to have the mainstream media and western governments in one's hip pocket.
  • Ever wondered why you sometimes confuse "inalienable rights" with "unalienable rights" when pondering our Declaration of Independence? Read this for personal resolve. Note Jefferson's choice.

    Labels: , , , , ,

  • Sunday, January 03, 2010

    THE JIHAD DECADE COMETH

    Seems as if the gloves are off as we barrel toward Campaign 2010. From the American Thinker:

    AS WE LOOK BACK on the past ten years, it is clear that we are now entering a post-American decade. How did it all go so wrong so quickly?

    The year 2000 kicked off with the Democrat ruse of a "stolen election"—this from the racketeering party of ACORN—but thankfully, it was not stolen after all. George W. Bush took the reins, but soon thereafter came the culmination of all the Islamic attacks on the U.S. during the Clinton years. Islam's fatwa on the West during the Clinton administration came home to New York and Washington on September 11th.

    And while the Bush Doctrine (you are either with us or against us) was the right approach, the well dressed jihadists that Islamists like Grover Norquist ushered into the White House after 9/11 managed to sabotage the best strategy to fight Islamic jihad. The cowboy swagger set against the whole fantasy about the hijacking of Islam and the "religion of peace" nonsense was irreconcilable. It confused people. And it led to the marginalization and even dismissals of brave men and women who evaluated and exposed the jihadist ideology in our government agencies.

    Who can forget the case of counter-jihad expert Steve Coughlin, the Pentagon's most knowledgeable specialist on Islamic Law and jihad terrorism? The Pentagon ended the career of its most effective analyst at the behest of a Muslim aide, Hesham Islam, within the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. Islam scholar Andrew Bostom observed that Couglin's firing was symptomatic "of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global jihadism."

    In February 2009, former Bush administration official Douglas Feith told me that that kind of rot is systemic. He recalled that an Office of Strategic Influence was created within his Pentagon office to fight the ideological war—but then "somebody leaked—well, leaked, no. No, somebody lied to the New York Times and gave a report saying that this Office of Strategic Influence was intending to lie to foreign journalists. And the New York Times ran a front-page story saying that. It caused a big imbroglio that resulted in the shutting down of this office. I don't think the U.S. government has recovered to this day from that fiasco, because every time anyone suggested creating an office to really deal with jihadist ideology in a systematic or strategic way at the Pentagon, people would say, oh, no, we are not going to have another Office of Strategic Influence problem."

    And so the drip, drip, drip of jihad continued through the last decade. We became more paralyzed, impotent, and deceived. Meanwhile, the Leftist/Islamic alliance, a deadly marriage between the Democratic Party and their propaganda handmaidens in the mainstream media, engaged in daily beatings of Bush and his administration.

    Removing Saddam Hussein was good. There is no way around that powerful truth. But why stop there? Removing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well would have been even better. But Bush lost his mojo in 2006. The relentless pounding by the Left, Israel's halfhearted performance in the war with Hezb'allah in the summer of 2006, and the loss of the House and the Senate in November 2006 all contributed to the rout.

    But what really led to the downfall of Bush's leadership was the falsity of his premise. He wanted to believe, like Condi and Powell and the soft diplomacy crowd, that Islam would negotiate with the West. Islam cannot negotiate. Yet still the West continues its pursuit of the impossible, despite great risk. This is a function of the Western mind. These people think it inconceivable that talk can't solve anything and everything, that war is an indelible part of the human condition. But it is. War is as much in the makeup of man as sex, food, art, love, all of it.

    And wars must be fought. They will not disappear, but we will.

    Of course, we know this. But the Left, our in-house enemy, demonizes any war that America chooses to fight. The egregious, horrible crimes of Mao, Stalin, bin Laden, Che, Lenin, Pol Pot, Ahmadinejad, et al, which are so heinous and so enormous, are in their terrible minds a historical footnote. They become cultural icons for the "radical chic." Cold-blooded monsters have co-opted our country.

    And so successful was the Left at infiltrating our government, schools, and institutions that eight years after the most heinous attack on American soil, we elected an icon of our mortal enemy. A Kenyan, Indonesian, third-worldish boulevardier with as much understanding of the American experience as any foreign national. Don't call me a racist for calling him what he is—I am not interested in the color of his skin, but in the content of his character. His lack of experience in all relevant areas to the office of the president is breathtaking. And his bowing to Islam and our enemies worldwide is disastrous.

    Bush's premise was false, but Bush was a patriot. Bush loved America, and he protected America, even if he refused to see the enemy for who and what it was. It was no accident that America was safe for eight years post-9/11. Eight years of safety is cracking apart now under a weak and pro-Islamic president. The jihadi attacks on America in 2009 were staggering. And it has only just begun. Dismantling the Bush protections against jihad and launching attacks on Americans, bloggers, tea partiers, town hallers, patriots, and vets is incomprehensible—and if I hadn't lived through it, I wouldn't believe it possible.

    I pray that America examines the Left decade and takes stock. It was the appeasement of the Left that destroyed the foundations of this country. We must rebuild them. The advancement of Islam would never have been possible—could never have happened—without our surrender to the Left. The real war is against the Leftist/Islamic alliance.

    This is a fighting year.

    Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and is former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author (with Robert Spencer) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America (Simon and Schuster).

    Labels: , , , , , ,