A Voice Crying in the Wilderness Against Chinese Protectionism

James Kostohryz here doesn't say so explicitly, but he's just a little embarrassed by the fact that Americans are so stupid that he needs to write an article explaining how "China's [currency] policies are blatantly and massively protectionist," because it hoards US dollars to prevent equilibration just like 19th century powers hoarded gold against the rules.

Praying for Clean Spirits: That's Not Weird?

Easily as weird as another First Lady who believed in astrology.

"It means all the world to us to know that there are prayer circles out there and people who are keeping the spirits clean around us," First Lady Michelle Obama said on the "Tom Joyner Morning Show" today.

See that here.

Didn't anyone tell her there's an election coming up shortly and to put a sock in it, or at least some more shrimp, crab and lobster to keep that yap occupied until the danger passes? If she keeps this up that Marian Robinson voodoo stuff is going to start sounding plausible!

Serbians Try to Beat Up Marching Poofters in Belgrade

Thomson Reuters has the story here:

"This government [of President Boris Tadic of the Serbian Democratic Party in coalition with the Socialist Party] wants to protect a deviant, wicked and non-Christian minority against the good, law-abiding majority," said Milija, 28, a construction engineer who described himself as a religious nationalist.

Selling Gold? You'll Pay the IRS at 28%, not 15%

Paul Sullivan reminds us here of a little appreciated drawback to investing in gold:

And even if you invest in gold through an E.T.F. — as opposed to buying bullion — it has two significant costs. The first is that it does not pay a dividend, so there will not be a stream of income from it.

Selling it is easy, particularly with an E.T.F., but this leads to the second problem: gold is taxed at a much higher capital-gains rate. The Internal Revenue Service considers it a collectible and taxes gains at a rate of 28 percent, as opposed to the 15 percent capital gains tax for other securities. This means gold has to appreciate more than other securities to make up for a tax rate on gains that is almost double.

Natural Gas Reserves in US Increase 35%, The Most in Forty Years

And supplies in other countries, also from shale fields, are on the increase and are making energy, economic and political independence more certain for many more nations than ever before:

Last year, the “Potential Gas Committee,” a group of specialists linked to the Colorado School of Mines, reported the biggest increase in US natural-gas reserves in its 44-year history, from 1,532 trillion cubic feet (TCF) in 2006 to 2,074 TCF in 2008.

Since the US used approximately 23 TCF in 2008 at a unit cost in excess of $9.00, the vast new reserves point to prices closer to $6.00 going forward and decades of supply. Americans should get serious about committing to compressed natural gas powered automobiles instead of gimmicks like electric and hybrid electric cars in order to bridge the gap to a cleaner energy future.

Read the fascinating details from Peter Foster for The Financial Post here.

Obama: The God That Failed

The Associated Press is reporting today here that unemployment holds high and steady at 9.6%:

Unemployment has now topped 9.5 percent for 14 months in a row, the longest stretch since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Flash back to the beginning of the year when we were in month six of the fourteen:

"And the notion that I would somehow resist doing something that cost half as much but would produce twice as many jobs -- why would I resist that? I wouldn't. I mean, that's my point, is that -- I am not an ideologue. I'm not."

-- BHO, Baltimore Q and A, January 29, 2010

What else but devotion to a failed ideology would work like such a charm and keep unemployment so high for so long?

Obama: 22 Months of Making This Time Different Than All the Rest

"We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys ... We are the hope of the father ... We are the hope of the woman ... We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us ... we cannot remake this world as it should be.

[W]hat began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus ... that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest."

-- BHO, speech in Chicago, February 5, 2008

Obama The Utopian

"Our union can be perfected."

-- BHO, speech in Chicago, IL, November 4, 2008

Remember This Health Insurance Premiums Whopper?

"If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change under my plan is that we will lower premiums."

-- Barack Hussein Obama, speech in Canton, Ohio, Monday October 27, 2008

A new survey of companies by Hewitt Associates here projects an 8.8% overall increase in premiums for 2011, 11% to 22% of which is directly caused by ObamaCare.

Obama: "We Are Going To Have Hand-to-Hand Combat"

The Los Angeles Times has the story here:

"They are fired up. They are mobilized. They see an opportunity to take back the House, maybe take back the Senate," he said. "If they're successful in doing that, they've already said they're going to go back to the same policies that were in place during the Bush administration. That means that we are going to have just hand-to-hand combat up here on Capitol Hill."

Suddenly it's OK to use this kind of speech.

Just seven months ago Democrats were accusing Republicans of trying to foment physical violence over the passage of Obamacare because they used this kind of vivid language of "fighting." Within a week the FBI had raided the Hutaree militia in southeast Michigan and other states, accusing them of planning an armed revolt against the government. Google "Republicans threaten violence over healthcare" and see how many million  results you get. It was an hysterical reaction designed to incite hysteria, and perhaps goad someone into making a mistake which would be very politically valuable to the Democrats.

This is the m/o of leftist extremism.

Nat Hentoff Worries We Are Ignoring Obama's Gutting of the Fourth Amendment

Nat Hentoff is justifiably worried that Tea Partiers have ignored the threat posed by Obama to the Fourth Amendment:

Insofar as the tea partiers will continue to be an influence on the Republicans – having already been instrumental this year in re-electing some – I have not, as I've reported, seen much concern among them about our vanishing privacy (though I admire the tea partiers declared devotion to the Constitution).

Perhaps when the drones start scanning you in your own home you'll wake up, but by then it may be too late.

Read Nat Hentoff at The Village Voice here, or The Richmond-Times Dispatch here, or at World Net Daily. His latest on the Fourth Amendment for the latter appeared here.

The Scope of Democrat Gridlock Continues to Grow

The Democrat Party has controlled both the US House and Senate since the 2006 midterm elections, but 420 bills passed by the current House elected in 2008 continue to languish unactioned by the Senate, which the Democrats presently control with an effective majority of 59 seats (which includes two independents) vs. 41 seats held by Republicans.

In February the number of unactioned bills had stood at 290. During the summer it climbed to 372.

Isn't there a pill for impotence?

TheHill.com has the story here.

Daniel Gross: "To Spend Money We Don't Have is Vital"

Ah, no, but for some Americans there is no choice.

Daniel Gross for The New York Times here protests that he's witnessed a "frugality" kick twice in America and has lived to see us shake it off both times. He points to signs which he thinks show that Americans may be doing that once again because total debt is up, and boy is he happy about it.

What he won't say honestly, however, is that total debt continues its inexorable rise because while consumers have in fact cut back, government has stepped into the breach to make up for it. A good little Keynesian that Daniel Gross.

Unfortunately, it's the poorest Americans who are spending more, and it's because they must.

Sara Murray for The Wall Street Journal here points out that for the poorest quintile, spending rose 5.6% in 2009 from 2007 while experiencing at the same time a 5.5% drop in their after-tax income. Food spending alone for this group went up 15.4% in 2009 from 2007, because of rising prices. To make ends meet, they are using up what little savings they have left, and . . . tapping credit!

Meanwhile the middle quintile's spending in 2009 is down 3.5% from 2008, and 3.1% from 2007. Overall, Americans are spending 2.8% less in 2009 than in 2008, including the rich.

Many of these statistics are "firsts". And if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire, another first will be inflicted on the poorest Americans by benevolent, compassionate liberalism: a 50% tax increase when the 10% bracket disappears and reverts to 15%.

In Everlasting Debt

The recent decline was almost completely the result of defaults written off by banks and credit card companies, not of consumers paying down their debts:

Kenneth Rogoff on Gold

Kenneth Rogoff for Project-Syndicate.org here weighs in on the increased interest in gold, adding the not often heard warning that rising interest rates could cause the price to fall as investors invest elsewhere seeking return in the form of cash flows which an American Gold Eagle in your safe simply cannot provide.

He also notes that the long-term inflation adjusted price lags current gold prices:

At $1,300, today’s price is probably more than double very long-term, inflation-adjusted, average gold prices.

Adjusting the price of gold for inflation from its price in 1913 to 2009 would put gold at $462 the ounce last year, so at $1,300 an ounce the price is 2.8 times that already, and climbing.

Are ya feeling lucky? Well are ya?

On Suffering Women's Suffrage

In a dull stream, which moving slow,
You hardly see the current flow;
When a small breeze obstructs the course,
It whirls about for want of force,
And in its narrow circle gathers
Nothing but chaff, and straws, and feathers:

The current of a female mind stops thus,
and turns with ev'ry wind;
Thus whirling round, together draws
Fools, fops, and rakes, for chaff and straws.

-- Jonathan Swift, 1713

Making Afghanistan Safe For Pedophilia

I don't know how I overlooked this story from the end of August, but the effeminate church I narrowly escaped this morning set me to surfing when I got home, and Voila! Our forces as presently constituted find the pedophilia revolting, which must be why the Obama regime is working so hard to repeal DADT. Fag forces will be positively begging for deployments to the theatre:

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it.

"Having a boy has become a custom for us," Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. "Whoever wants to show off should have a boy."

Baghlan province is in the northeast, but Afghans say pedophilia is most prevalent among Pashtun men in the south. The Pashtun are Afghanistan's most important tribe. For centuries, the nation's leaders have been Pashtun.

You'll find the rest of "Afghanistan's Dirty Little Secret" here at The San Francisco Chronicle, where  it must have found considerable local interest. In it you'll also learn that there are more pedophiles per capita in Afghanistan than in any other place in the world, even Rome!

I found the way Muslims are said to explain this away as not being homosexuality, which they forbid,  poignantly reminiscent of the kind of text-trimming you will meet with in just about any church or synagogue in America: It's not homosexuality because they don't love the boys.

And the Taliban? I'm sure they're more than ready to blame it all on Alexander the Great.

Priceless.

Govern Your Self

"It is the proper business of every man, who is governed by laws, to study into the nature of those laws; and wherever he finds an error, point it out, in order for amendment."

-- A Countryman, 1765

Q2 GDP 2010 Revised Up To 1.7% From 1.6%

The story was reported here.

A second and final revision will follow.

Z Backscatter Vans Caused Snarled Truck Traffic in Atlanta This Week

According to this source, vehicles equipped with the same scanners now being deployed in airports to provide full body scans were tested by Homeland Security and the TSA in Atlanta this week at a weigh station on I-20.

More than 500 Z Backscatter Vans have been produced so far for use abroad by the military and at home by the regime, according to the report.

This story from September 28th did not identify the scanners as backscatter vans, nor does the photo provided in the story show a van which looks like the rolling surveillance unit depicted in this post.

Do you feel secure in your person, house, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search and seizure? Where is the probable cause, and where is the warrant issued by a judge, describing the particular place to be searched, and the particular person and the particular thing? Your Fourth Amendment rights are being shredded before your eyes.