Theo Spark

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Lance Corporal Donald Hogan, Marine Hero

Pelosi: Actually, we don’t have much of a connection to Occupy Wall Street

Audio: Captain refuses to return to sinking Costa Concordia to help passengers evacuate

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confronts foes in rift at heart of Iran

Iran intervenes in Syria: Hizbullah launches first combat rocket salvo

Chris Christie proposes a 10% across-the-board income tax cut for New Jersey

Average age of U.S. vehicles is now 10.8 years

No-kidding red lines

Soros's friend in the Oval Office does him a favor

Leftists Go Wild Over Dana Loesch

Iran to ship model of downed US spy drone to White House

Has al-Qaeda Ceased to Exist?

Sounds of the sea: Listening online to the ocean floor

Strong signs Iran is supplying Syria with weapons, US says

MLK: What’s in the Day?

Gaza Activist Stabbed After Exposing Hamas Use of Human Shields

Ed Henry to White House: What Is The Reason For Obama Not Releasing College Transcripts?

Chinese economy cooling and may cool more

World Bank's crisis warning

James Bond's rides go on display

Poland slaps fine on singer for bashing Bible

Available for rent: The Acropolis, for under $2000 a day

Oops! Radar may have caused space crash

Unplugged: Electric cars losing their lustre

Woman, laid off 3 years ago, pays 50K to have dog cloned

Cross-dressing teen dupes friends for sex

Bra-size name tag 'outrage' headed to court

Oh, Bother: Brits Say Modern Winnie the Pooh Riddled With Americanisms

'NY Housewives' StarThe Merkin Biz is Booming!

Europe can't trade its way to recovery

Why Ron Paul?

Miss America contestant tepid about OWS, loses competition

I’m So Bored With MLK

Star Princess ban from Falkland Islands: health reasons not politics

Hungary faces ruin as EU loses patience

Severed head found under Hollywood sign

Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan go to war in the kitchen

Ethiopia attacks: victims from five European countries

North Korea officials stand by Kim Jong-un

F-word 'becoming vernacular' in Australia

The end of the affair between Hamas and Iran

Housemate 'raped live on Brazilian Big Brother'

New Zealand campaign to make sheep shearing an Olympic event

'Anglo-American Interests' and the Currency War Myth

Cut the MoD, too

Russia warns West against Iran strike, sanctions

Wednesday Wenches...............

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

The U.S. is on a Suicide Watch

By Alan Caruba

In 1991, the Soviet Union, arguably the greatest experiment in Communism, collapsed. After Mao Zedong died in 1976, his successors moved to shift its Communist economy to one that embraced Capitalism while retaining centralized government control.

Following World War Two, the recovering nations of Europe were rescued from Communism by the Marshall Plan, but adopted Communism-Light in the form of Socialism. The U.S. was already headed in that direction, creating programs that we now call “entitlements.” For most of the nation’s history, such “entitlements” did not exist.

What binds together the financial problems of the West is the common thread of infantile behavior and thought. One might call it wishful thinking. Instead of encouraging people to provide for old age and possible illness, politicians decided to turn government into Big Daddy, the eternal source of money for everything.

Need to go to college, start a business, or plan for retirement? Government would be there to help. All this ignored the need to actually pay for these programs. In the case of Social Security Congress began to dip into its funding to pay for other programs! This is what children do.

One can look around the world and see what a failure both Communism and Socialism have been. Governments spending more than their tax and other revenues have suffered grievously from this path to default and that includes the United States of America. It can be argued that, with few exceptions--the Reagan years come to mind—Presidents have been poorly served by their economic advisors.

Politicians make poor economists because, in America, members of the House must think of getting reelected every two years and Senators every six. Moreover, being politicians, they believe that the more federal largess they can bring back to their State and then brag about is the one true path to reelection.

At the very beginning of the nation, Thomas Jefferson said it best. “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

How many commissions and special committees have earnestly produced reports intended to deal with a government grown too large? At the federal level, some two million or more Americans are employed promulgating a deluge of regulations and pushing paper.

Now President Obama says he wants to streamline the federal government.

The real issue is not “streamlining” government agencies by gathering them together under one roof and one administrator, but the failure to end government departments and agencies that no longer serve a useful purpose and whose removal would also remove countless obstacles to economic growth.

In April 2011, Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warned that “the federal government is on track to spend more than $3.5 trillion this year. What most people don’t know is that government actually costs about 50% more than what it spends. That’s because complying with federal regulations costs an additional $1.75 trillion—nearly an eighth of GDP. And almost none of that cost appears on the budget.”

The United States of America, the greatest engine of wealth the world has ever seen, is bankrupt. The national debt exceeds the Gross Domestic Product, the sum total of all revenue generated by goods and services.

The President has asked that the debt ceiling be raised another trillion or so and Congress will comply. That, I submit, is insane.

I also submit that, since Barack Obama was sworn into office on January 20, 2009, the nation has been witness to the economic insanity personified in the man and in the Democrat-controlled Congress that was his partner until 2010 when the control of the House of Representatives was wrested away by the Tea Party movement and its support for Republican candidates.

The only constant in life is change. America’s demography has changed. We have, thanks to medical care and other advantages, a much older segment of the population than ever before, but the nation from the 1930s to the 1960s had committed itself to ensure they would have Medicare and Medicaid at a time when people more often than not died in their 50’s and 60’s. We now have an average life expectancy of 78 years. My parents lived into their 90s.

Politics, not economics, continues to make it impossible to revise and restructure both Medicare and Social Security to reflect this reality. Instead, we had Obamacare foisted upon us which took trillions from Medicare and imposes rules that will let elderly heart attack or stroke victims die rather than pay for a level of care to which they contributed during their working years.

If the Supreme Court declares Obamacare unconstitutional it will go away. If we elect a Republican Senate, the repeal already passed in the House will be passed and it will go away.

But America’s economic problems will not go away until Americans insist that the shackles of Big Government be cut loose to enable the growth of an energy industry that can not only make the nation energy independent, but produce billions in revenue as far as the eye can see into the future.

The tax system with its thousands of pages must be revised to a simpler, fairer program. It makes no sense that forty percent of Americans pay no taxes at all.

It’s not that we don’t know what must be done. Conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, The Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and others have spelled out programs that can and will save America, but the nation must be led by a president who understands that Capitalism involves budgeting, planning, hard work, and—yes—risk.

The federal government is running on “continuing resolutions.” It has not had a formal budget since Obama arrived. This is no way to run the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. America is on a suicide watch and we are just an election away from saving it.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Bedtime Totty..........

Late News............

Canada's big green fight

Dead People and Other Voters

Information Dissemination: Boondoggle

Scott’s last pictures of harsh Antarctic revealed and saved for the nation (and the explorer didn’t even get to see them before he died)

Ron Paul in Left Field

Valerie Jarrett Blasts Republicans from the Pulpit

Abu Qatada cannot be deported to Jordan, European judges rule

Al-Qaeda flexes African muscles by kidnapping Algerian governor

Iran rejects French charge it is sending arms to Syria

Indonesian rail authorities use concrete balls to deter train surfing

Kim Jong-un's brother says North Korea heading for collapse

Iraq: ex-SAS soldier faces inquiry over 'Saddam Hussein statue's buttocks'

Israeli hackers bring down Saudi, UAE monetary sites

Holder's hysterical claim that voting rights are at risk due to voter ID laws

Obesity epidemic in USA shows signs of leveling off

Cyberspat Erupts As Baku-Tehran Relations Become Increasingly Strained

Santorum Not Releasing Father's Naturalization Papers: WND Probe Romney's NBC Status

My kind of help file...........

H/T Old Dude

Like modern art............from Rico

Much like some modern art, it's better to stand back and take a long view and not get lost in the minute details of the day where precious metals are concerned.
- And there is a LOT of babbling, chatter, and noise on a regular basis as the talking heads of FTV scare the schools of fish....er, retail investors back and forth, churning the waters and herding them for our shark bankster gangsters to financially chum. Buy! Sell! Panic!
- Looking, then, at the proverbial BIG picture please note these two 10-year trend charts for both Gold and Silver.

Last year our crooked banking cartel (with the complicity of so-called regulators like the CFTC) executed a masterful price-suppression scheme against Gold and Silver.
- Remember the raised margins on Silver five times in nine days? Throughout 2011 raised initial and maintenance margins on Gold and Silver served to repeatedly collapse open interest in the marketplace.
- And, I'm not sure that MF Global wasn't collapsed "accidently-on-purpose" to collapse Gold and Silver prices and force involuntary client liquidations of Gold and Silver futures at the end of the year. The smashing of PM prices certainly reduced the potential losses our 'concentrated perma-short positioned' banksters faced at their end-of-year mark-to-market accounting drill.

Incessant meddling in the paper bullion markets may have helped the cartel in the near term, but it also may have killed the proverbial golden-egg-laying goose as fund flows move into physical metals in the coming couple years and away from the paper ponzi schemes like GLD and SLV.

H/T Paul B

Palestinians Still "Humiliated" at Israel Checkpoints...............by Dan Friedman

It’s been some time since we’ve heard about Arabs being humiliated at Israeli checkpoints. That meme seems to have run out of steam. Yet the devilish Israelis are still at it. If you need to see proof, the story below should provide it. Now put yourself in an Arab terrorist’s shoes. You’re stopped and frisked at an Israeli checkpoint, then caught flagrante delicto and arrested when explosives and weapons are found in your backpack. For a Palestinian jihadist trained and tasked to kill as many Jews as possible, can you think of anything more humiliating than that?

Palestinians caught with 10 pipe bombs near checkpoint

Dan Friedman
NYC