Record Corporate Profits and Unemployment

Here is a common little trope.

Record profits.  Never mind that these records are always going to be broken because there are always many more people spending money in each generation and more money to spend.  Never mind that there's always more money.  In the future, when a million dollars buys what $400,000 buys now (i.e., a fixer-upper in So Cal), there will be record number of millionaires. Never mind that those future millionaires will not be "rich."  And never mind that business has always been slow to re-employ following a recession or financial upset.

Anyone who's watched It's A Wonderful Life knows that it's us 99%ers against the rich people who refuse to employ us but just want to make money off of us.  (Who needs school when there are movies? Who needs education when we have public schools?)  With record profits, you would think there was something strange about companies getting more money when there are record numbers of unemployed.  How are there record profits when the 99% can't afford to spend as much money?

Look at the chart below and see if there is any pattern to recessions (the shaded areas) and unemployment.   Unemployment rises fast and goes down much more slowly.  Yet, we are given to believe that business owners discovered GREED (ooooo, the conservative sickness!) during the Reagan-Bush era and it's this misplaced value on money that has gripped American industry unlike past generations where businesses ran on love and compassion.

This should make you wonder... If companies find they can get by with less people (HIGHER PROFIT), why do they eventually rehire the work force over time?   For the same reason they hired these people before the recession:  Hiring productive employees makes the company more productive.  This is the ONLY reason companies hire in the first place.  They don't hire out of compassion and then fire people when they have a sudden epiphany that they are in the business of MAKING MONEY.

The only exception to the rule in this chart is the Reagan recession.  The jobs came back as quickly as they left and resumed the usual march toward 6%, leading to Reagan's easy reelection. Look up Milton Friedman's commentary on why this occurred and how Reagan helped to stop runaway inflation.  Like Thatcher, Reagan was accused of being stone-hearted.  People didn't buy that bit of liberal mud-slinging in 1984.

But let's talk about that red zone at the far right of the chart.  That thing that the spenders (the Democratic Congress that came to power in 2006 conveniently blamed on Bush.  (And you totally bought it, didn't you? Admit it.)

Wow.  After 2009, that sucker continued to skyrocket past the Carter level, into the level reached during the very temporary spike in Reagan's administration.  You can see below that unlike the Reagan spike, the 10% level became the baseline for a slow normal descent.

In the chart below, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that in the times since the Reagan era, unemployment peaks after the end of the recession.  Just something to think about....

But before you get to thinking that this what happened recently is a completely normal unemployment, look below at long-term employment, and wonder whether there are long-term consequences to indefinite unemployment benefits coupled with Obama's business-unfriendly policies.  Or just let your eyes glaze over and duckspeak your Bush-did-it mantra.

Geez, before 2009, no matter how bad things got, the long-term unemployment was never this bad.  Yet, when they weren't blaming this on Bush being uniquely bad (they could've blamed it on the Republican Congress, but that would've drawn attention to the fact that Democrats took over Congress before the deficit got out of control and the economy fell apart) they were claiming that Obama really had turned everything around. Or some version of "Just think how much worse it would've been without my special Obama magic making things better!"

Andrew Sullivan waved his hands at this meltdown and said, "Obama musta kept it from getting even worse!"  Obamamagic!  

If that doesn't scare you, look at this:

Wow.  You still think that this crisis was handled effectively?

Let's end with an example of liberal Michael Scott racism:

Because in the experience of most liberals, there is apparently nothing better than an accusation of racism for evading a real conversation.   Don't blame Obama: He's black.  Cut the rich, never-had-to-do-much-to-get-accolades, promised-the-moon-and-didn't-deliver, lied-through-his-teeth-about-transparency poor black guy a break and don't criticize the way he runs the country.  He is black after all.

What liberals can use as their poster now:

UNPRECEDENTED DEFICITS
UNLIMITED DRONE WARS

MASS CIVILIAN CASUALTIES OF WAR
PRIVATE INTERPRETATION OF PATRIOT ACT
KILL LISTS WITH NO CONSISTENT JUSTIFICATION

VAST COUNTER-ESPIONAGE POWERS

MASSIVE GRAFT AND PATRONAGE
SOARING, SOARING, SOARING DEBT

WIDESPREAD GOVERNMENT COVER-UPS
GUNRUNNING TO JIHADISTS AND MEXICAN GANGS
HARASSMENT OF DOMESTIC POLITICAL OPPONENTS

SUPPRESSION OF WHISTLEBLOWERS

TOTAL MOCKERY OF TRANSPARENCY

WE DON'T MIND AS LONG AS A LIBERAL DOES IT 

Ragnarök: Sodom and Syndrome of the Collapse of Civilization

In thinking of the perennial appeal to youth for a government powerful enough to free us from the consequences of our actions, from natural authority, from societal restrictions... the way it plays on the adolescent feelings of rebellion against parental authority.

John the Baptist was a prophet whose mission was to inspire contrition in a hard-hearted nation. specifically, "to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just,” which alludes  to a prophecy from Malachi that in order to prevent a curse from plaguing the country, someone would "restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers."   A disconnect between fathers and children make way for chaos.

Christianity is not the only tradition that links the erosion of natural family bonds to social ruin.  Norse myth describes Ragnarök in this way:

Brothers will fight
and kill each other,
sisters' children
will defile kinship.
It is harsh in the world,
whoredom rife
—an axe age, a sword age
—shields are riven—
a wind age, a wolf age—
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have
mercy on another. [Wiki] 

Social collapse, erosion of social norms and familial affection, brutality, an economic collapse (an era of vulnerability to wind and wolf).

Various attempts by New Testament authors to describe a similar breakdown in the final days.

Remember that the end times will be perilous. There will arise people who value themselves over all others, value money over all else, lacking humility and full of hubris, abusive and malicious, rejecting parental authority, ungrateful, sacrilegious and profane, loveless and unforgiving, slanderous and immoderate, admiring force and brutality, haters of those who are good, full of betrayal, impulsive, conceited, worshiping pleasure, having a facade of morality without the Spirit that empowers virtue.  Avoid these people.  Out of this group come the creeps that worm their way into homes and gain control over weak-willed women, manipulating them into all sorts of self-serving gratifications until they are burdened with sin. Caught in this enchantment, people amass all kinds of knowledge while living in denial of truth.  The reprobates will stand against truth assuredly as Egypt's necromancers withstood Moses,  entertaining depravity in their minds and living in exile from truth.  But they will only do so much harm before the errors of their ways be exposed. [2 Timothy 3]

And also the infamous passage (outlawed in Sweden) deemed hate speech per the New Normal:

From Heaven the judgment of God is made manifest against all manner of perversion and wrongdoing, because that which can be known of God's will is still accessible to everyone, as it has been made evident throughout creation, so that a lack of divine revelation is not an excuse.  For in spite of the truth they had, people turned away from respect and gratitude to the Creator in preference of idle speculations, dimming the lights in their follied hearts.  Claiming these speculations made them wise, they made fools of themselves, and grounded their truth in the material things, basing their idea of perfection on the corrupted natural world (and basing human morality on animal nature) rather that the One that authored it for a purpose.  And so God let them pursue the folly of their desires to its consequence, to the dishonoring of their bodies.  They preferred a delusion to truth, and preferred the creature to the Creator . . . So God left them to the degradation of their passions, so that women's desires were out of accord with the natural function of their bodies, and the men as well, burning in their desire for other men and receiving in their own persons the natural consequence of their error.   And even as this folly led them to deny the role of the Creator more and more, they were given over to a mindset of general depravity, becoming more envious, greedy, deceptive, lacking in understanding, slanderous, contentious, insolent, antitheistic, rejecting parental authority, imaginatively wicked, arrogant, etc.  And even knowing that with the greatest disapprobations in the Torah against these errors, they not only embrace them but applaud those who embody them. [Romans 1]

What a curious syndrome description for a disorder of man's perceived relation to the natural world.  Is there a philosophy (or Weltanschauung) that favors the speculative over the real, is known for its intellectual hubris, preaches envy as economics, is a natural hotbed for antitheism, encourages adolescent narcissism, entertains notions of humans equality to animals while inconsistently defining humans as socially constructed creatures, justifies human behavior based on what is in the animal world, and believes that in order to tolerate an alternative lifestyle you must promote it and celebrate it?

These tendencies have obviously been around for a long time.

Of course, you can't bring any of this up without Sodom and Gomorrah somehow coming into the discussion.  It is a sensitive subject because when it comes up it is often touted as a case of divine judgment upon homosexuality.  But in the account it is only said that the city is in trouble because of complaints raised against it.  There was an "outcry" against these towns.  The truth is that for all the warning it may intend to give us, the Genesis narrative doesn't tell us how these cities became as depraved as they did, or explain the particulars of the culture.

We have only two examples of the culture.  One is that the men of the city show up to give a prison welcome to Lot's guests.  ("No man will have mercy on another.")  It isn't clear whether Lot recognizes these guests as divine emissaries at this point or has simply been trying to protect strangers from certain atrocity.  The narrative up to the point where the guests show that they have divine power is very similar to the circumstances leading up to the Benjamite War (Judges 19), even the warning about spending the night in the town square. The main difference is that the Benjamites settle for a woman (when it was the Levite they really wanted) and the Sodomites would not.  The other tribes of Israel were so outraged by the Benjamites refusal to extradite the attackers that they decimated the tribe of Benjamin.

The second example of Sodomite culture is indirect.  Following the death of their fiances in Sodom, Lot's daughters rape him so that they will not be childless.  Shades of Ragnarök: "sisters' children will defile kinship . . . whoredom rife."

In a town where all the locals know to avoid the town square at night, you wonder what else challenged natural affection.  But Sodom and Gomorrah probably fell apart as their commercial success encouraged decadence, and then the decadence took on a force of its own.  But what philosophies prevailed in this Semitic town that the incest and rape are part of the culture?  What we are told in Genesis is that the God of Abraham has heard an outcry against the horrors of Sodom, presumably in the form of desperate prayers and curses against the townsfolk.

Paul the Apostle probably would have argued that the Sodomites' descent into madness started with presumptious speculations of not being beholden to any absolutes but redefining man's relationship to the divine world and to the natural world, redefining humanity itself.

Immigration: The Hostile Takeover

Imagine the little town of Maple.  Small town folk.  Population has gotten smaller but the town has stable revenue.  Some people in the surrounding region have settled there.  People are involved in the community.  They meet in the town hall to decide on municipal taxes and how the revenue will be spent.  Not a lot of graft or patronage because everybody knows each other more or less and people take pride in their town.

Let's say someone from the city decides it's a lovely place and decides to sway the laws to make it easier for people he knows in the city to settle there and to have the municipal funds benefit them disproportionately.

Now let's imagine that our city slicker arranges for a horde of his affiliates in the city to show up and vote for the people and policies that will benefit them even though only citizens of the town are supposed to cast a ballot.

Now there are all sorts of reasons why it would be hard to get away with this in a small town, though no one would doubt that there was something sleazy about it whether they got away with it or not.  But it's a lot easier to pull off at a national level.  All you need is to a bribe a group of illegal incomers with bounty from the community chest, and they will vote for you if you make it so they can tip the democratic process in their favor by giving you the power.  And it's easy to do with a group of people that had no investment in the town and no reason to care for it, other than that it's a mere opportunity.

Infringed - What Congress Cannot Do

Suppose that section 8 of our Constitution had, after enumerating the various sorts of laws Congress was empowered by We the People to enact, it followed with disclaimers.  "No laws enacted for the aforementioned purposes will be lawful if they do any of the following:"

And now let's suppose that one of the deal-breakers was that a federal law couldn't infringe on the arming of the populace against the government.  Which would mean that any federal law that limits or undermines the ability of the citizenry to resist a regime they consider despotic is null and void.

The funny thing is that the Bill of Rights are simply Amendments that add things to the Constitution that the People desired (particularly those swayed by the Anti-Federalists).  The Bill of Rights should be interpreted this way.  Does the bill infringe in any way on the ability of the states and their communities to resist a government gone wrong?  The 2nd Amendment (along with the other Amendments in the Bil of Rights) amends section 8 of the Constitution by following "Congress can only do this" with "but only if their laws don't do any of these."

This cartoon is uncommonly right on the money:

Just in case the first 8 Amendments were to be interpreted as an enumeration of our rights (which they often are -- instead of amending our constitution to recognize another right, federal courts are employed to read things into the existing Amendments), the state legislatures had a disclaimer added that an enumeration of basic restrictions on Congress (a restraining order against tyranny) would in no wise imply that the federal government was entitled to infringe on other natural rights (e.g., the natural rights of parents to raise their children, the natural right of a person to defend his person and his home, etc.).

And then there's the 10th Amendment.  Congress is not allowed to make a law that asserts federal power over the power of a State, unless the Constitution explicitly empowers Congress in that way or explicitly forbids the States to assume such power.  Any federal laws that transgress this line are null and void.

As President, George Washington dated his executive statements from the signing of the Declaration, e.g. "in the 11th year of the United States, and yet the Declaration summed up the origination of the U.S.:  "that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States."  It didn't say they (plural) ought to be reborn as "a new nation, conceived in Liberty," not reborn as a single new State.  Both the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers discuss at length how the Constitution (or how it might not) protect the People from their own federal government.

The Constitution was written to allow the free and independent States to protect their freedom and independence as States by wielding their combined  power while restricting the federal government of that unification for the very same purpose.

Four Pinocchios for Obama on Benghazi: Subjunctive Outrage

Washington Post has awarded Obama (finally) with four Pinocchios for his equivocations on Benghazi:

For instance, on Sept. 12, immediately after the Rose Garden statement the day after the attack, Obama sat down with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes and acknowledged he purposely avoided the using the word “terrorism:”
KROFT: “Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word ‘terrorism’ in connection with the Libya attack.”
OBAMA: “Right.”
KROFT: “Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?”
OBAMA: “Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans. And we are going to be working with the Libyan government to make sure that we bring these folks to justice, one way or the other.”

With the mounting evidence that the IRS injunction against conservative groups came from Mount Olympus, President O-ghaza has come up with various weasel words (as A Conservative Teacher has enumerated nicely under "UPDATE") about the alleged abuses.  These words come out to saying "Acts of political intimidation will not be tolerated."

Yes, my fellow citizens, Candy Crowley will vouch that the Evader-in-Chief recognized this political witch hunt as an unseemly act, "if in fact it did occur," so qualified after the IRS admitted to it and apologized for it.    Only just now has the Washington Post finally caught up and recognized that in the Rose Garden speech, Obama could have added "if in fact this was an act of terror" without contradiction.  His Rose Garden speech was essentially another example of his "subjective outrage."

Suppose after the Tsarnaev bombing, before we had any of the revelations we've had about what the Tsarnaev brothers' motivations were, that Obama would have got on the air and said that we had every reason to think that this was an unpremeditated reaction by some Chechen Christian boys in response to some sacrilegious depiction of Jesus, and followed with a little blurb about the unbroken America spirit warning that "No acts of terror" would weaken it if in fact there were attempts to weaken... If it turned out to not be a what we generally think of as a terrorist attack (rather than a terror-inducing attack like the Columbine rampage, which is not thought of as a terrorist attack per se even though it was truly an act of terror), wouldn't he have been able to backpedal and say that he never actually claimed it had to be the work of terrorists?  It doesn't change the truth that no acts of terror would weaken our resolve.

It's all weasel words.  It's have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too words.

Obama's administration is now saying that the video was blamed because it was too early to tell the cause (CIA official testimony to the contrary), even though Obama "clearly" identified it as a terrorist attack from the beginning.  Oh well, fog of war, blah blah blah.  The fog of war makes it so that you know it's terrorist attack even though you don't know whether the terrorist attack that you were warned would happen on the 9/11 anniversary was actually a video-inspired riot that got out of hand.   Why were we told it had to do with a video, when, as Madame Secretary implied, it really didn't make any difference?

What perhaps does make a difference was that the people responsible actually be caught.  And as the administration promised the father of the slain Navy SEAL, they got the man that blasphemed the Prophet of Islam, the man responsible.

Well, at least the Washington Post has caught on.  But what were most of these major media outlets doing when it appeared some sort of subterfuge was apparent.  Perhaps they were too busy playing Galaga to notice.

That man is playing Galaga!
Thought we wouldn't notice.  But we did.

Maybe this is why CBS didn't get around to releasing the footage in which Obama is asked about whether he is purposely skating around the term "terrorism" and Obama continues to skate.  They were busy playing Galaga.  Which is why they missed noticing and reporting Obama's penchant for "subjunctive outrage," if in fact it was outrage.

Movies: Conservative(?) Donnie Darko vs. Liberal Adventureland: Those Greedy 80s

Donnie on  a date with a girl and Frank the Bunny

Hollywood seems to have been nursing the cliche of the Greedy 80s.

The 80s were greedy.  Know how you can tell?  Prosperity generally went up, unemployment generally went down (paving the way for Bush I's victory and for the bizarre 2010 attempts to compare Obama to Reagan).    Yes, people's situations improved, particularly black people's, but something was still not right... Lot of people got filthy rich at the same time.  Those jerks.

1988 Pres. Debates in Donnie Darko "You tell 'im, George!"

Anyway, several 80s period pieces have been made and here I want to compare two. . .

Can't We All Just Coexist?

A couple years ago I happened to see this little gem on the back of a Prius:

As you've probably noticed, they're everywhere now. Given the religious symbols, it wasn't too hard to figure out what the hippie was preaching: "All you backwards religious folk need to coexist peacefully."

Wow. What would we do without the insightful wisdom of hippies? It's so clear now! Gee, why didn't we think of this before?

I'll bet these same hippies could solve the problems of poor broke Greece: Get more money! Is your country having a famine? Dude, you should get some food. Drought? Get more water.

Who would have guessed that Captain Obvious is in fact a stoned, smug, know-it-all hippie?

Just about everyone with a brain has already spluttered about the absurdity of Christians and Jews trying to "coexist" with the people vowing to exterminate them so I feel no need to cover any of that ground. But I did happen to notice an ad in the back of a comic book for a "Coexist Liberal Bullshit Decoder Ring." Turned out to be a better investment than green energy. Here's what I found out:

That last line is really what motivates the sticker to begin with. Christianity poses no threat to other religions but it DOES pose a major impediment to liberalism. See, those pesky Christian religious nuts keep saying it's wrong of Democrats to use abortion to genocide blacks.  That it's better for a child to be raised by two married parents. That it's wrong to steal. That teenaged girls are not obligated to be promiscuous.  Or, more generally, Christians believe that there is such a thing as right and wrong. And liberals simply cannot abide by such an opinion.

"Coexist." A bigger lie the liberals have never told for the fact is that the penultimate goal of hippies everywhere is a communist regime. And one thing that all communist regimes have in common is the ruthless suppression of any form of religion. So what they're really saying with that sticker is "um, yeah, if all you religious cranks could stand single file over there so we can kill you all with the same bullet, that'd be great."

Sorry, Lumberg, we are unwilling to oblige.