Wasting Time With Alex
Friday, December 18, 2009
It IS a patronage bill…
If you have any doubt that the stimulus patronage bill was nothing but more corruption and graft, take a look at this:
A new analysis of the $157 billion distributed by the American Reinvestment and Recovery act, popularly known as the stimulus bill, shows that the funds were distributed without regard for what states were most in need of jobs. “You would think that if the stimulus money was actually spent to create jobs, there would be more stimulus money spent in high unemployment states,” said Veronique de Rugy, a scholar at the Mercatus Center who produced the analysis. “But we don’t find any correlation.” The Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia is one of the nation’s most respected economic and regulatory think tanks and has a Nobel prize-winning economist on staff. The econometric analysis was done using data provided by Recovery.gov—the government website devoted to tracking the stimulus data—as well as a host of other government databases.
Additionally, Mercatus found that stimulus funds were not disbursed geographically with any special regard for low-income Americans. “We find no correlation between economic indicators and stimulus funding. Preliminary results find no statistically significant effect of unemployment, median income or mean income on stimulus funds allocation,” said the report. The Mercatus Center analysis also found that Democratic congressional districts received on average almost double the funding of Republican congressional districts. Republican congressional districts received on average $232 million in stimulus funds while Democratic districts received $439 million on average.
So the stimulus bill that was supposed to create jobs, had the bulk of the money to democratic enclaves and not even the ones that needed job creation? No way! How could the geniuses over at the WH and Congress, the anti-Bushes, have gotten this wrong? One would almost be inclined to think this was nothing but the fleecing of tax payers to line the pockets of friends, activists, lobbyists, and campaign coffers by democrats! All kidding aside, it gets even better:
Finally, the Mercatus analysis shows that a majority of the funds allocated went to public rather than private entities—nearly $88 billion to $69 billion. While some of the money given to public entities may eventually filter down to the private sector, it’s much less transparent how money given to public entities is spurring economic growth and job creation.
So big government just told us we were in a crisis that required us to allow them to spend close to a trillion dollars without actually seeing how, then they used the bulk of those funds to increase the size of government, line their own and their friends pockets, and enrich their campaign coffers. Why no cry from the MSM? Remember the good old days of the “culture of corruption” talk? This is real graft on a scale that dwarfs the other crap, and yet we hear nothing. I am sure the usual idiots that want to pretend there isn’t any media bias will tell me this isn’t a story because there isn’t enough blood. The American tax payers, the American people, are all being bled and strangled, and yet, this isn’t a story. Go figure. And we are being told we need to let them do more of this, straddle us with crappy healthcare and punitive energy costs, all because they mean well. F them all.
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Geekyness turns women off from big money careers. Blame the geeks!
Get ready to have mandatory thresholds for how many women must be in any computer [science] department and a massive campaign to force computer geeks to change, because according to this SeeBS article, computer geeks and their style are responsible for keeping too many women out of the field.
In the geeky environment, women were significantly less interested than men in computer science, while there was no gender difference for the non-stereotypical classroom. Female students in the stereotypical environment said they felt less similar to computer-science majors than did those in the classroom that wasn’t geeked out.
Don’t expect anyone to point out that in this case it is these idiot women that have allowed stereotypes and what should be meaningless and irrational emotions affect their decision and choices, in a very negative way I should add, because the culprits are always the guys. In this case even the geeky guys. If anything, the lesson here should have been that women are just as prone, if not even more so, to real dumb decisions as guys are. I bet these yentas flock to environments where such idiotic ideas as all the reality shows crowding our TV bandwidth these days flourish though. Once reality smacks them in the face they can always opt to work for a pimp.
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Thursday, December 17, 2009
News potpourri
Our president has received and signed a 1.1 trillion spending bill, and I am sure most people have not heard anything about the bill. Here are some details:
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama has signed into law a $1.1 trillion bill that increases the budgets in many areas of the government by about 10 percent, including health, law enforcement and veterans’ programs. Obama signed the bill privately at the White House on Wednesday after receiving the bill from Congress on Sunday. The bill lumps together six of the 12 annual appropriations bills for the 2010 budget year that began Oct. 1.
So this is signed in secret, increases government spending on itself by 10%, at a time when the economy is in chaos, the people are hurting bad, unemployment is again going up, government has to do things like borrow close to $300 billion more because we already are over the limit on our spending for next year. And to top this all off, the collectivist crooks are trying real hard to make up their own version of reality with the ludicrous, ridiculous, and odorous claim that their government takeover of the healthcare decision making process and finances plan that under the best of circumstances will add a minimum of $2 trillion dollars to our already astronomically expanding debt, is actually needed to prevent healthcare costs from breaking the bank! Seriously, do they have no shame? In the mean time we find out that these idiots till think government spending is the solution to unemployment. Tax cuts? Never! That crap is evil. Of course we know tax cuts actually spurred growth, and had the government spending not gone up faster than that growth, things would have been good, while this collectivist government spending stuff has never worked to do anything but drag out recessions. Maybe these losers get their ideas from eating stuff from this place? Americans are wising up to the scam run by these bastards though.
In the mean time the cultists gathering in Copenhagen is providing a platform for the worst of the worse. The clergy continues to pretend their house of cards isn’t coming down and on flames, even as more proof comes out that the game is rigged. And the worlds biggest polluter tells the gang of nuts to take a long walk off a short pier. Don’t the peasants know that Waterworld is coming if we do not bow down to Gaia and let the church of AGW run amok with their grand scheme? the Pope of the church of AGW has predicted it! Don’t worry though. If this thing blows up as spectacularly as Pinatubo did back when, it will spew so much junk into the atmosphere - comparable to decades of man doing its worst possible - that we will again see a 1 degree temperature drop world wide.
If this stuff didn’t hurt so much, it would all be funny.
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Friday, December 04, 2009
Snow job.
I about shit my pants and did a double take when I read the joyous media announcement that things have to be getting better because unemployment has dropped from 10.2% to 10%! No seriously, take a look at this:
WASHINGTON (AP)—A surprising drop in the unemployment rate and far fewer job losses last month cheered investors Friday and raised hopes for a sustained economic recovery. The rate unexpectedly fell to 10 percent, from 10.2 percent in October, as employers cut the fewest number of jobs since the recession began. The government also said 159,000 fewer jobs were lost in September and October than first reported.
Maybe it is the engineer in me that caused this, but the math simply could not add up for me. Read that bolded section carefully. We did not have a reversal where jobs were added that dropped the unemployment number. Employers still shed people, just at a slower rate, and some 160K fewer jobs are now being counted as part of the total unemployed. And the biggest reason for the drop isn’t even mentioned: people that no loner qualify as or are counted in the ranks of the unemployed, because they have given up looking for a job! But then we get a much more accurate number of how many people really are hurting, and hurting bad:
If part-time workers who want full time jobs and laid-off workers who have given up looking for jobs are included, the so-called underemployment rate also fell, to 17.2 percent from 17.5 percent in October.
Wow 17% unemployment. That’s like nuts. Remember the days when the low 4% numbers were still an indication of a troubled economy? And again, the real reason for the drop in the total number of unemployed dipping those 0.2% points is because the bulk of that came from people that are neither employed nor under employed, and simply not counted anymore. Want to know what this means for us according to the MSM:
The better-than-expected figures provided a rare dose of good news for a labor market that’s lost 7.2 million jobs in two years. The unemployment rate hadn’t fallen since July. Still, the respite may be temporary.
Holy crap! I would laugh if this wasn’t so tragic. good news? Is that the equivalent logic likely to be showcased after we get the Obama healthcare takeover where someone that has terminal cancer will be given the good news that the death panel has decided to just give em a morphine overdose and end their misery? WTF? Remember that not to long ago these same cretins told us low 4% unemployment was a sign of disaster and that we should get rid of those responsible for that. Anyway, at least they are honest when they warn people not to get their hopes up too high as this all is likely temporary (more like an unsustainable illusion or mirage).
Job creation is expected to remain far too weak in coming months to absorb the 15.4 million unemployed people who are seeking work—and the 11.5 million others who are underemployed. As more people begin seeking work, the jobless rate is likely to resume rising. The report offered evidence of how hard it remains to find a job: The number of people unemployed for at least six months rose last month to 5.9 million. And the average length of unemployment has risen to more than 28 weeks, the longest on records dating to 1948.
What, no mention of why?
JOBS ARE HARD TO FIND BECAUSE THESE COLLECTIVIST CRETINS IN CHARGE ARE HOSTILE TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR, WHICH IS WHERE JOBS GET CREATED!
Sorry about the yelling, but I just can’t believe more people are not waking up to the fact that we are still hurting precisely because of what these geniuses now running the country are doing. And as long as their strategy is to expand government and government power, and rape the private sector and the citizens to do it, the numbers will keep sliding south despite the resilience of our economic system.
Also be careful with that claim investors are happy about the good news. The only real reasons I can give for the current climb in the stock market are the drastic loss of value of the dollar and a suspicion that the usual players – especially in the banking and financial industries that got big bailouts - are artificially inflating everything to make money for themselves, another bubble that can burst at any time when they decide to reap those profits, or so they can pay off their government loans.
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If they wanted to create jobs, wean us off oil, and help the planet…
We would be drilling like mad for this stuff:
Just a few years ago, the industry didn’t have the technology to unlock these reserves. But thanks to advances in horizontal drilling and methods of fracturing rock with high-pressure blasts of water, sand and chemicals, vast gas reserves in the United States are suddenly within reach. As a result, said BP chief executive Tony Hayward, “the picture has changed dramatically.” “The United States is sitting on over 100 years of gas supply at the current rates of consumption,” he said. Because natural gas emits half the greenhouse gases of coal, he added, that “provides the United States with a unique opportunity to address concerns about energy security and climate change.”
Recoverable U.S. gas reserves could now be bigger than the immense gas reserves of Russia, some experts say. The Marcellus shale formation, stretching across swaths of Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia, has enough gas to meet the entire nation’s needs for at least 14 years, according to an estimate by two Pennsylvania State University experts. Just in Broome County, N.Y., where Fitzsimmons lives, shale gas development could create $15 billion in economic activity, according to consultants hired by the county.
Of course Gore and the donkeys are not going to get rich shilling for this stuff, so I doubt there will be much enthusiasm from the usual suspects for this, just like their isn’t any for drilling for our own oil. But the even better argument to be made for why we should do this is:
With new supplies, the country will be less vulnerable to disruptions from Gulf Coast hurricanes and need to rely less on imports. Already, deliveries of liquefied natural gas from places such as Qatar, Nigeria and Trinidad are down 58 percent in 2008, idling costly U.S. terminals.
Not to mention that we can get much less oil imported if we switch to using gas. Maybe all of what we get from such hell holes as Venezuela or exporters in the ME. Of course the Luddites also had comments to add:
But the prospect of widespread shale gas drilling is also driving wedges in the environmental community. Many environmentalists have sounded alarms about the chemicals that drillers use to fracture the rock and the danger of natural gas or other substances contaminating water supplies.
So what then? Nuclear energy? Because practically everything else they push as alternative sources is junk and unable to produce the energy we need now, let alone in the future. Or is the agenda to make all of us - because they certainly are not going to give up their perks or energy usage from the easy to glean facts - live like people did in the 1800s? It isn’t like the bloated government bureaucracy hasn’t put strict rules in place for these operations that would prevent or drastically reduce any environmental kind of impact. They trust the government to run healthcare but not to supervise this? Heh.
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START to expire.
It looks like despite the fact that the START treaty is about to expire at midnight tonight without a replacement agreement, that the Russians and the Obama admin have a tentative agreement to stick to it. While this is no loner a big deal these days - the Russians win big getting rid of all their older and crappy missiles that from what reports were leaked by our people would be just as likely to blow up right at launch time if not launc at all with this deal anyway - it is nice to see that Obama and his crew are not getting snowed on this issue as they have on practically everything else. At least not yet, or obviously.
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Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Obama’s bum speech
There was literally nothing I was interested in watching or new on TV last night so I ended up watching Obama’s speech. I think he tried hard but came up woefully short. The speech TOTUS showed him tried to just do too many things, many of them contradictory, all at once. First he took time to rightfully point out how important and necessary our involvement in Afghanistan was, so he gets kudos for that. He of course took a dig at Iraq though, showing how he either lacks the understanding of why the that strategic shift from Afghanistan to Iraq was made, or simply showing the craven political motivations of a group of people that always talks a big talk but never do anything.
By now even the dumbest people should have realized that shifting the GWoT from Afghanistan to Iraq gave us a much better chance to defeat al Qaeda and other radicalized Islamic death cults, dealing their operations arm a massive blow by crushing them militarily, but even more importantly, by turning public opinion against them and what they stand for, as well as reshape one of the regions most dangerous and despotic nations. Not to mention that it gave us a major ally right next to Iran which is hell bent on destabilizing the Middle East for their own gain and getting support from others that also stand to profit from $300 dollars per barrel oil. Fighting in Afghanistan on the other hand comes with a completely different set of dynamics, at a much greater cost all things being equal, and with much less geopolitical and other kinds of benefits to the US or the world. Even Obama has gotten this I think, which makes his dig about Iraq seem petty if not outright shamefully stupid. But he had to throw a bone out to the BDS infected idiots that comprise his base, and making a dig about Bush or Iraq, even when the left was proven wrong, works.
For now he is bucking the radical idiots that think if you walk away from a war others have declared on you they will also walk away too, and actually going to up the ante somewhat. He is committing 30K troops and doing so to help get the Afghani military, police, and other security forces up to speed to do their won work, just like Bush did in Iraq (hey! Bush must be a genius if Obama is doing the same). The problem is how he ended that sentence about committing the troops to a fight he himself has said is critical and of vital interest to the Us, with national security implications across the region and the globe:
Barack Obama is to set an ambitious timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, with the first troops pulling out by July 2011. The announcement is aimed at countering US public fears that the country is being sucked into a Vietnam-style morass.
My response was WTF? You tell the enemy and your allies when you plan to bail? Why would the Afghani people take a risk, volunteer to join the military or police force, only to have the US abandon them in 18 months or so whether they are ready or not? And what do you think was al Qaeda or the Taliban’s reaction to this? You think they said “oh shit, we have to deal with 18 more months of these people beating us up”, or “Woo-hoo, the cowards are going to bail and all we have to do is hold out for a measly 18 months”? No wonder all these people with anti-US agendas pined for Obama to win the election. And the implications of this dumb move has consequences that extend way beyond just Afghanistan. Nobody should take US commitments seriously after something like this. Why should any NATO member contribute anything to this effort if we plan to leave anyway in 18 months? And the other Middle Easter countries were just put on alert that they have a better chance that Israel will do the hard work for them than the US. Iran take our demands seriously? Get real!
Now I am sure the leftists will come out of the woodwork and defend this idiotic idea of a deadline with the concept that the Afghanis have wasted 8 years already and are not taking us seriously without this kind of commitment, and I am inclined to call bullshit and point out this is just an exit strategy excuse used by those that thing we should just leave. The reason things are taking longer in Afghanistan is precisely why we moved the focus of the GWoT from there to Iraq in the first place. But if we leave Afghanistan unfinished we will be back there sooner than later, at a much higher cost – another 9-11 style attack, or even worse, one with WMDs – to us than staying the course would be. Then again, with a weak ass loser like the current presidents calling the shots, it might behoove us to incur this cost anyway just to avoid the unnecessary deaths of our troops that will be followed by a cut and runs strategy anyway. Then again, since the left considers the military to be the enemy anyway, I understand why they don’t mind wasting their efforts.
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Tuesday, December 01, 2009
“Climate Cult” destroys science
The whole ClimateGate fiasco is getting more and more interesting. It seems that the politically motivated cultists passing their crap off as science followed through on their threat to make sure nobody got their hands on the tampered and cherry picked original data they based their lies on, and have deleted it:
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation. The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.
First off, let’s not insult real scientists by claiming these charlatans are scientists. No true scientist would delete their raw data or refuse to show it and their analysis if they were for real. In fact the only place the left tolerates this shit is when it comes to climate cult. Can you imagine the uproar if some private business - let’s say a pharma company doing research on some new and expensive drug or some business unit that then went on to give huge bonuses to their top execs - did this shit from the lefty hoi-piloi? And it doesn’t stop there! Analysis of the computer model software used by these cultists, which was obtained as part of the hacked data which included the e-mails promising to delete the data rather than let it fall in the hands of the enemy, by a software expert with experience in computer modeling, according to an article at the American Thinker, clearly shows the computer software models used are also rigged and crap.
The cultists are all lining up to defend the indefensible. Stupid and incredible claims that the deleted data isn’t really deleted because we still have the data they compiled from it showing global warming or that this happens all the time but isn’t of importance abound. The crooks, acting more as a bunch of religious fanatics, are still denying that they have been found out and continuing with their plans to rip us all off. It’s about the one-world collectivist government to police population and engage wealth redistribution, not any facts, science, or truth, after all. But the real problem is that these bastards are dealing a death blow to science. Real science and scientists should be frightened by these crooks and cultists. They are telling us we should take it on faith that they are right, not question them at all, and label anyone unwilling to go along as heretics. That’s the trappings of a religious movement, not science of any kind. There is even an inquisition in the making!
Those that still argue this whole AGW movement isn’t political, about money and population control by our elite, totally lacking in science and scientific rigor, and harmful to humanity as a whole, are doing real science and the belief in logic and reason irreparable damage. It is time to end the hoax. The elite, the cult’s priesthood, getting ready to fly their private jets to Copenhagen to sell our lives away for a quick buck and power, deserve nothing more than our scorn and derision. And those that continue to defend them and their false religion should be ashamed. And they say that it is the deniers that are motivated by greed.
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