Nom de plume: Rivrdog

It's over

The First American Republic is in the books. When those books are written up by better writers than myself, it will be noted that the Founders had a seriously Utopian vision of Individualism, and they incorporated a Nation with that idea.

To the everlasting credit of those who followed the Founders for the first 170 years or so, our citizens attempted to follow that pattern of individual effort, leading to the strength of the group. In fact, history will show that most citizens of that first 170 years thought that the individual's responsibility for his/her thread of the fabric of the Nation would last forever.

It didn't, and ordinary base emotion is responsible for the Nation's demise. That would be the base emotion of sloth, or laziness.

My mother told me, many times during my youth, that anything worth having was worth working for. I have attempted to follow that creed, as did most of my generation (technically, I came just before the "boom", by about 2 years). Those who followed (the "boomers" and their offspring, two generations of them now), have NOT followed that creed.

It's quite obvious that those generations after mine prefer to be handed life on a silver platter, whether or not they earned it, or even inherited it. My generation was called on to begin to pay for that sloth, then the next generation, and finally the present generation of teens-to-twentysomethings have their turn to pay.

There's a little problem of math here, though. Math is that science which the gimme-gimme people love to ignore, but math is the basic truth in anything. The math here says that the cost of the sloth exceeds the ability of the non-slothful to pay for it, and THAT math is caused by the increase in those following the creed of sloth, and the concomitant decline of those following the creed of thrift, the opposite of sloth.

With the re-election of a man firmly dedicated (if you thought Obama wasn't dedicated - you were wrong) to spreading the creed of sloth, we can now see the end of this experiment which will likely be known as the First American Republic. It lasted longer than most Utopian societal experiments.

Will a Second Republic follow?

It's hard to say, because the Republican form of Government involves granting some power to citizens, and specifically, it does NOT reserve all the power to the Government.

The Second Government (history will decide what to call it) will either be firmly totalitarian, or factions within it will try to restore the First Republic with it's democratic principles, and lack of sloth. The second choice means a protracted conflict, probably a bloody conflict, and unless I miss my guess, most of the First Republic people with the attitude to actually fight are too old to do so.

So, it ends here. There will be an interregnum until the Second Government is finally, formally declared,  but it ends here.

To be continued.

Post-defeat analysis, continued

The drumfire of post-election-defeat blather continues apace. Today, Charles Krauthammer, noted righty pontificator, expounds on his "solution" for the GOP: Immigration Reform. Read his essay.

Okay, I read it.

First impression: Ivory-tower wishful thinking.

The Krauthammer Solution operates on two faulty propositions: that a proper, effective Border Fence CAN be built (all types tried so far have not worked), and that a total basis of trust with immigrants is the way to go.

The Fence issue is easy: we don't really need such a Hadrian's Wall. We need our military guarding our borders with all of their tools, and no "fence" will ever work without the military patrolling it.

The Trust issue is more problematic. It's all wrapped up in PeeCee, and that wrapping must be peeled away before real Trust can begin. Here are the real issues beneath that phony wrapper:

• Most Latino immigrants are here for one big reason, economic opportunity, and that's a fine motivator, but then they turn around and send their under-the-table wages out of the country, using up public resources (welfare) to replace them, so our Nation derives a negative benefit from their presence, not a positive one. We're missing the tax revenue from most of those wages, also.
• The political players (now including Krauthammer) see them mostly as votes/cheap labor, as did President Bush the Younger, not as citizens contributing to the good of our society. We need them as part of our bedrock of society, which they could easily become.
• The sad fact is that the Latinos have been morphed into a giant subset of the Gimme-Gimme class, and are, as a result, a cultural AND fiscal drag on our Nation. This factor has to change. Just a few years ago, the Latinos avoided political contact, fearing deportation, but when deportation for merely having entered the country illegally was ended under Obama, the Obama Community Organizers began to heavily recruit the Latinos.

Okay then, what to do?

First of all, there is NO way in Hell that the (D)onks are going to trade Amnesty for a Fence, and, as I said above, we don't need a fence anyway, we just need the military on the border. Now having seen a weakness, the (D)onks are going to go for the jugular, and try for Amnesty without the "Fence".

Second, the Amnesty has to be strengthened with pre-conditions. Here are those pre-conditions:

• The (D)onks drop their resistance to English as our Official Language, and stop forcing all this bi-lingualism on the Nation. The immigrants MUST be fully integrated into the society, not just integrated enough to pull a (D)onk voting lever.
• The (D)onks drop their opposition to using the military to guard the border.
• The (D)onks drop the "anchor baby" doctrine. If the parents aren't legal residents, neither are their offspring. Yes, that means the end of the "Dream Act". When the parents become naturalized citizens, so then do the babies, but not before.
• The (D)onks drop their fawning support of the LaRaza-type outfits, and revert to the time-tested "Melting Pot" doctrine. It's time for all to realize that the great social experiment of internal cultural segregation has failed, that the Melting Pot worked for generations, and can still work. "Celebrate Diversity" started out as a push for the "Melting Pot", but has been morphed into a divide-and-conquer strategy to kill off the Melting Pot doctrine which brought us such a strong and vibrant Nation for the first two hundred years.
• Technically, something has to be done to end the gimme-gimme status of immigrants. The easiest way to accomplish that is that immigrants must promise to keep all their wages in this Nation for their period of naturalization processing/probation, and that period should last 5 years. That gives immigrants plenty of time to learn English, to learn to live within their means and learn to support America, not leech off of her.
• It goes without saying that the full efforts of all Governments involved will coalesce to keep foreign crime cartels out of the USA, and by full efforts, that includes use of the military, not only to interdict drug shipments, but to take the offensive against the cartels on their side of the border, with the help of the Mexican Government, of course. Our Special Forces could end the hegemony of the cartels in a month of operations. If that Mexican Government is unwilling to let us remove the cartels from the border areas, we end support for that Government.

"Amnesty", as Charles Krauthammer uses the word, can work, but only if all of it's failure-elements are engineered out before it is implemented.

Most Latino immigrants I have come across are hard workers, and to my lights, it's worth bringing them into the culture just for that, and bringing them into the citizenry just for that, because the culture is going the wrong way on work ethic just now. I welcome them, once all the exploitation of their presence is removed, and so should all citizens interested in a strong and vibrant USA.

Thursday Thuds - Post-election special edition

Thud the First: Goes to FEMA. With the Nor-Easter "Athena" hammering the Northeast Coast of the US just a week after Hybrid Storm Sandy paid her call, and the recovery and re-constitution effort from Sandy just getting started there, guess what? FEMA took a "snow day" yesterday! Yep, the EEE-mergency filk our Government is so in love with took the day off to stay warm and dry as about 4 to 6 inches of wet snow pelted down in the damaged area. That rates a resounding F.A.I..L. If you are the nuts of a recovery and reconstitution effort (I have managed in that regard in the military AND in my work as a Deputy Sheriff), you DO NOT take a day off. You stay at your post until the clean-up is done and all affected residents have services restored with which they can carry on basic life. My orders? First Sergeant, put FEMA on the list of agencies which will NOT be brought back in the Second Republic. That is all.

Thud the Second: Goes to the Grand Old Party. Yep, the Republicans, the dear "Rs". I think that it can be safely said that you good 'ol boys fairly well farged this election up, and did it by the numbers! Because I might want to do something else today besides hammer on your sorry asses, here's a bullet-point list of how this failure of yours went down:

• You were too "fair", way back two years ago when the campaign started. You let the nomination process drag on for an eternity, and that overly-long process sapped the patience and reserve of everyone who has adopted your political philosophy. How many "front-runners" did we have? Five or so, one after the other? I don't know about you hosers, but I was bored silly after the first two, eh?
• You failed to set your standard. You never gave any guidance to your nomination prospects as to what was an acceptable version of your politics, and as a result, we had political philosophies ranging from Ghengis Kahn to Karl Marx trying for the brass ring. Especially, we had the religious fundies who are guaranteed losers on a national stage (read the farging polls, idiots).
• You failed to see the threat. When Romney finally DID lock it all up, the opposition had been gifted with a full year to get his number, and they nailed their opposition down: concentrate on his work as a hedge-fund CEO, which requires the closing of some underperforming businesses. Make him look like the evil capitalist, and ignore the fact that he ran several other major entities very successfully, including the Democratik People's Republik of Taxachusetts and the Winter Olympics. You failed to predict these attacks on your man, and you also failed to steer him towards any effective response to the attacks.
• Romney's fail. You, big guy, kept your excellent executive personna hidden until the first debate. Didn't you read anything about Ronald Reagan? After years of economic malaise, Reagan got out his cheerleader suit and successfully raised everyone's hopes for recovery, while painting Carter as a guy who would never lead the USA to recovery. You should have just copied that act, but you remained Mister Starched Collar CEO Guy, and inspired no one, at least until the first debate, by which time it was too late.
• Truth Squad. Where was the GOP Truth Squad? If there was one, it was a shadow of what it should have been. Obama got away with the most outrageous lies. At least when Kerry's Swift Boat lies were exposed, and Dan Rather was exposed for leading that liar's brigade, Bush's folks managed to get it out to the voting public effectively. Not one of Axelrod's or Plouffe's lies was ever successfully refuted, or even exposed as to origin, except in the blogs, and you filk completely failed to use THAT resource.
• Voting strategy. Obama won with barely a one-percent bulge in the popular vote, but with a 10% overage of Electoral College votes. How did THAT happen? Why couldn't you see THAT coming? Instead of concentrating on trying to marginally boost your statewide take in seven states, why didn't you concentrate on taking Obama out of the race in his strongholds, such as Cuyahoga County, OH or Fairfax County, VA? You were scrambling for pebbles in the riverbed while the entire mountain was sliding down to bury you (yeah, yeah, hindsight is always 20-20).
• The abortion nuts. Mitt, you did a masterful job of keeping your controversial Mormon religion out of the spotlight, but some of the idiots carying your banner were not so masterful as to THEIR controversial religion. Akin and Mourdock come to mind with their bonehead ideas on abortion. Look, let's put it this way: the Christian religion is morally flexible enough to forgive the major sin of murder when a life is taken in a just war, or a criminal's life is taken when he is committing serious crime, so why is it wrong to abort a fetus which is only there as a result of the sin of rape? If and when you GOP wallahs take the field of political battle again, you'd better strike the Abortion streamer from your battle colors. Far too few of your followers will stay in the battle with that streamer on your battle-standard.

Okay then, those are the high points of Romney's fail. Personally, I would add to it an aggravating financial team, dunning me for dollars every time I turned around to read my emails, and trying to phone me at all hours of the day and into the night with annoying robo-dialing machines (I was TOTALLY successful, and intercepted every one of these hundreds of calls without answering any of them). This fail of 2012 was epic. A President who had a record of non-performance as bad as Obama's, and a record of dictatorial over-reach as bad as Obama's should have been an easy target. Your failure to end his predation on our society is doubly regrettable, as history is likely now to write your failure down as the last gasp of a constitutional, principled society in the battle to save itself from Socialist mediocracy. America dies, not with a stilled battle-cry on it's lips, but a whine of defeat.

I'm ready for the Second Republic now. Perhaps we'd better see what can now be done to bring the formal end of this First Republic and properly start the Second Republic.

How bad will the Wall Street "correction" be?

I watched CNBC at various intervals last night, from just after when the election was called for Obama, all night, to this morning's opening of the NYSE. The overnight futures just kept falling more and more all night.

As of 0940 EST, the Dow is off 170, about 1.5%, oil is off 3%, gold is up almost 2%. Those three taken together show a very nervous and worried trading floor. If it gets much worse, Tsar Bernanke will say something about more Quantative Easing (printing money), but THIS time, facing financial collapse, the markets won't be mollified by QE talk. This time they will just slide over the cliff.

CORRECTION: As of 1010 EST, a half-hour later, the Dow is off 220, almost 2%

Correction #2: as of 1120 EST, the Dow is off over 300 points. Apple stock has fallen 20%

Sure, the day-traders will inject their funny-money in for a few hours when their computers tell them that this or that equities are great values, having fallen to their proper P/E ratios, but they can't fool everyone, and when their meddling doesn't drive prices back up, they will flee to gold. Now that the Won has Four More, and more runaway Fed printing presses appear to be in our future, real worry sets in. Worry equals a falling Dow, and when it falls far enough, Obama will never be able to impose a single higher tax, and he'll have to look at postponing the more expensive parts of Obamacare. That's a win. An economic contraction is a win. The talking bean-counter heads are worried, and the market reflects their worry.

The danger, of course, is thatthis time, it won't STOP falling, and Great Depression Two will be in our Christmas stockings (but without a lump of coal, coal is outlawed).

Watch the Dow all day. Put a ticker-widget on your phone (take your charger with you, those widgets will kill your battery twice as fast).

If the Dow falls 200+ today, and similar tomorrow, and doesn't rebound on Friday, the bottom will drop out on Monday, and the inter-session trading will probably kill the world's economy over the weekend, anyway.

I do need some more beans. Got plenty o' bullets.

The Left won again

Let's make that win the final time.

Analyzing the win, the left won because they got their Socialist message of  "come git yo FREE shit" out better than the Romnoids got out their message of  "capitalism works, let's give it a try". This "free Shit" is the forever way that Socialism has been foisted off on nations, for the past 100 years.

The Left was better organized at the polls. As I went to bed in my Scotch fog last night, Obama had just over a 1.1 million popular vote margin, but he had over 300 electoral votes. He gamed the system and won. He got Ohio way back, three and a half years ago, by bailing out the auto industry. Free shit, he gave out government-backed auto-industry jobs for free, smiled at those auto workers and said, "remember me on November Sixth, 2012." They remembered. Romney never had a chance in Ohio.

So it went. I'm not going to sit here and moan about it. Now we have to live with the Obama agenda for the next four years.

Or do we?

Can we fight back?

Can we put some awful hurt on the Left, enough hurt to chase them back to their holes in four years?

I think we can.

Over at Say Uncle, the short but powerful post on Obama's win brought out at least one thinker, a commenter named Nevyan (at Comment #12). Nevyan proposes local action to take down the left, and he proposes how to do it legally and properly, so close those gun safes and let's follow Nevyan's system here.

After we pick a local target to "wage lawfare" on, and start gathering our information, both on suspected violations AND on the intracacies of the laws we will use, we can do one other thing.

Let's wage war on on the Left's pet system, the Green Agenda.

Instead of fighting the Green Agenda only as the left brings up new parts of it, like most of us have done, let's go offensive instead of staying defensive.

Take longer showers. Keep your lawn green in the summer, if the law allows it. Use all the water you can.

Burn all the lights in your house while you are awake on these long winter nights. Use that electricity that is there, on demand, in your wires.

We're going to deny the Left their present advantage of claiming that their conservation system works, that less is better, that composting can take the place of garbage service, etc. We're going to require them to build out the electric grid, because we are going to overload it. Rationing? Brownouts? The occasional blackout? Yep, we will have those, but who will get the blame for that? You won't. The Left will because they are in charge. Yes, it will cost you money not to conserve, but how else can you wage this kind of assymetrical war for so little money and still keep your freedom?

When the Left starts to soak up more and more of the blame for the collapsing utility infrastructure, the Government WILL be changed out, legally, properly, at the polls.

No one of us can do this alone, but in our millions, we CAN make it happen (oooooh, collectivism against the collectivists, yessss!). The Government will either yield, or they will have to become overly restrictive, and when those draconian restrictions on utility use happen, they will hurt EVERYONE, and then the Greens get blamed and get removed. At the very least, it pits the Greens against the suburban soccer moms, who also voted for the Won last night.

Take the Greens out of the fight, and conservatives have an even chance on the electoral battlefield.

The White House can be ours in 2016, but only if we wage a consistent and persistent fight. We can't win with bullets, I agree. We can win with "lawfare" (a Green tactic, BTW), and we CAN and WILL win with resistance to the Green Agenda of doing with less.

Consume your way to victory, my friends.

Ryan couldn't even pull Wisconsin; Tubby tosses it for Obama

...and that was a case of WI Guv'ner Scott Walker sowing the wind, and reaping the whirlwind. His campaign against the public employee unions attracted so much support for the (D)s, and so much money to WI, that the formerly sleepy Democratic Party of Wisconsin was totally re-energized, and Romney/Ryan losing there was the result.

What is it with these GOP clowns who dump all over the public employee unions? Scott Walker in WI, Tubby the One-Note Tuba in New Jersey...Tubby may have given Obama the winning lift he needed with his post-Sandy "man-love-hug" just in time to put him over the top.

It'll take a hell of a lot of tar and feathers to cover that liberal windbag, but I'll chip in for my share. Better make that rail some real 110-code, "high iron" railroad rail, though, and we'll need two SD-70 locomotives to suspend Tubby from, to run him out of town.

Damn, this is a lost opportunity, just DAMN! Now I'm going to pass my final years in a socialist Hell.

I give up, no shopping or reloading, it's time for a bottle and one glass.

White Guilt lives on

...and I had too much faith that the common sense of voters would rise up to smite PeeCee and it's champion, Obama.

Bah!

I see the end a-comin', it's comin' round the bend. It's beyond the Won and his Four More to save this country from financial Armageddon, and unless I miss another guess, that slide might very well start tomorrow. There sure as Hell isn't any basis for improvement, and several Wall Street pundits have said we could see a 90% "correction", which reads out as far worse than the Great Depression.

I'm ready for it, but one can't be TOO ready, so off I go to buy 40# more of rice and 20# more of beans.

Then I'll come back and start reloading.

Virginia breaks the poll rules

Two hours after poll closing and they're still voting in Fairfax County, VA.

That's BeeEss. The law says the polls were supposed to close at 1900 EST, and here it is 2115, and they are still voting.

Guess who most of those rule-ignoring voters probably are? If you said Democrats, you'd probably be right.

People, this isn't a football game or a rock concert: a place in line doesn't mean a farging thing when the law commands CLOSED polls at a time certain. If you can't get your slugly ass to the polls on time, you should have voted absentee last week.

Standby to standby

All the pundits who won't speak their hearts are calling for almost a tie in the POTUS election.

I speak my heart, so I think the election will devolve to emotion, not all the political arguments which have been made over the past two years or so.

Emotion: You have a deep emotional attachment to Obama, so you will vote to re-elect him.

Emotion: You have a deep distrust of Obama, so you will vote for Mittens.

Okay, that much is fairly clear, and even has been discussed, ad nauseam.

Sub-rosa emotion: Your distrust of Obama is caused by your chagrin at getting carried away with "white guilt" in 2008 and helping vote him in. This emotion also translates as "fool me once..."

Bottom line: I spent 25 years copping on the mean streets (and mean rivers). My livlihood and indeed, survival, depended on being able to read emotions before taking police actions, because those actions are always determined by the level of emotion to be dealt with. My reading of the street-emotions is that there are sufficient voters who are in the "fool me once..." category, voters that pollsters and Obama pundits have already counted into Obama's projected victory and "four more", that the results are not going to reflect conventional political thinking. This will NOT be the Year of the Pollster.

I still think Obama is going to lose, and lose badly, and I'm not the only one who feels this way.

In four hours or so, we'll see. If Mittens has this sub-rosa emotion on his side (no, I don't call it racism, I call it a crisis of failed expectations), his victory will show up by 1900 PST, or 2200 EST. In other words, with the first returns will come a trend that it isn't going the pollsters' way, and it will all go gunnysack for Obama after that.

I could be wrong, but my guesses on street emotions have been good to me so far. Give me four hours, and we'll see...

Gun Sales, pre-election

Joe blogged it here.

Last night, I gabbed with a good friend down in Foat Wuth, TX. He had just been to a big gun show there, and found several interesting situations. First, he said that there were MANY more ARs for sale than usual, and even with all the competition, no one was lowering their price, cheapo rifles started at $800. Second, there were almost zero AKs for sale, very unusual because there are usually a lot of them at this show.

Yep, it's been Obama Gun Fest Two, just as I blogged several months ago.

I admit I have been a participant, heh!