California Scheming

Well, it’s been several days since my last post. What a hectic little time it was.

In the meantime, California leads the nation in decline as its government continues the most blatant, brutish, and crass fiscal assault on its populace, in recent memory. In a nutshell, the Golden State has decided not to meet it’s contractual obligations to the numerous vendors with whom it does, or did, business. Instead, it has issued a series of worthless IOU’s to which it cavalierly assigned monetary value much the way an 8 year old assigns the power of flight to his refrigerator box fighter plane. The current promise is a full repayment in October, roughly six months on average, after the debt was due. Naturally this leaves many small and medium-sized businesses, already under-capitalized in this economic malaise, struggling to keep the lights on.

But that’s not the worst of it. In fact, that’s old news. The real insult is that CA has the audacity to claim that taxes are owed on the receipt of this IOU “income.” Yes, even though these IOU’s often have little to no value outside of an extremely speculative secondary market, even though Banks frequently won’t take them as deposits, even through CA itself, recognizes the true value of the IOU’s in it’s refusal to accept them as payment for taxes due, the small business person must pay good money after bad just to stay on the right side of the state’s revenue services. Of course, they have the option of returning the IOU’s in payment of taxes if they forgo the “change” and accept that “they will not be able to refund the difference immediately, given the state’s cash-starved status.” In other words, if you just give us back our IOU and let us keep the difference for a while, you won’t have to pay any taxes (right away) on the income you gave back.

Good grief!

Tales of American Decline indeed. California has always been on the cusp of the “new.” Trends that start there, invariably work their way across the country and if one wants to, heck, if one “dares” to lick their thumb and stick it to the wind, they’ll find, no doubt, that as goes CA, so goes the rest of the nation. From repressive, nanny-state liberalism, and quality domestic wine production, to obnoxious valley speak and thin crust pizza, if CA has it, does it, or is it, it’s only a matter of time till it shows up in Chicago, Memphis and Boston.

I can wait.

-N

There will never be concentration camps in America...

...they'll be called something else.

Generally, I make a concerted effort not to simply re-hash LRC content here. Nonetheless, this tickled me. If that's the appropriate term for it?

More lies from the forked tongue of Washington

"I can make a firm pledge, Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

"you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime."

President Obama: Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12.

I guess that was just more campaign speak from the great communicator. The truth, as usual, is tucked neatly into the financial pages where the vast majority of his constituency will never see it.

By that he apparently meant they wouldn't go up by a "thin dime" but rather a fat roll of bills. More lies from Mordor on the Potomac.

-N

The two yutes

Last night I was engaged in a wandering debate about the generational division on issues such as health care, taxation, and what extent, if any, perception subjugates fact therein. To summarize: Are kids really dumber these days? Certainly the news abounds with stories of rising test scores. Many traditional metrics seem to suggest an increase in academic performance, paired with a decrease in academic standards. So, without raising the ghost of Ebonics, is it fair to question the accuracy of such measurement?

I’m not sure I believe that the youth of today are any less intelligent than the youth of any given time period. They simply have the means to broadcast their silliness to a greater extent than previous generations did. In the past, the world did not often hear from genuinely dumb people. Publishers weren’t putting out books of dumbisms and the great unwashed weren’t massing to hear the latest thoughts of “Average Tom” from around the way. You had to be, or come across as, intelligent, fascinating or at least dangerous, to get any serious attention.

These days, even the dimmest bulb can access and be heard in a wide range of formats. This is the “You Tube phenomenon” My point is, perhaps they’re not dumber than any previous generation, just louder? On the other hand, I can’t remember hearing of a past generation of young people that the preceding generation truly approved of.

-N

Gatesgate: A missed opportunity

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. comes off as a self-important blowhard who’s cobbled together a comfortable living predicated almost entirely on the history of racial prejudice, fear, and guilt in America. Sergeant James Crowley appears to be another officious, thin-skinned Only One* of the sort so common in today’s “Law-Enforcement” machine. Finally, President Obama, completely unhindered by situational ignorance, trumped both the aforementioned by sticking his “judgment” where it clearly didn’t belong. But I’m not here simply to insult these Yo-Yos over a moment in time, nor have I come to re-hash the sodden ground of this overblown ego implosion. Clearly all three men acted “stupidly” But I’d like to suggest the issue at hand is not America’s latent racism, nor is it the professor’s infantile tirade, or even our President’s colossal stupidity in commenting on that about which he knew next to nothing.

No.

The issues in play are power and freedom. Power, of the sort we delegate to various costumed officials who, in turn, circumscribe our lives; and Freedom the ever-shrinking foundation of our Republic. A more thoughtful man than Gates might have used this incident to launch a discussion on Freedom in contemporary America, on the right to be secure from an often capricious and always fallible State, no matter your color, creed, and composition. But Gates appears to have a predominate lens through which he views the world and that is race. Naturally his interpretation of the situation is constricted accordingly.



Crowley, on the other hand, was clearly looking for a level of verbal respect denied by Gates. As a professional, entrusted with the freedom of the public and revered by his supervisors, I would have expected a significant attempt to defuse the situation. That never happened.

We can go as deep or stay as shallow as we wish in the subsequent analysis, but it’s clear that whether or not Gates actually said anything about Crowley’s mother, he arrested simply for mouthing off to a cop.

Are we ok with that?

Are we, as a people, so spineless, so distracted and so conditioned to this sort of treatment (from our employees, no less) that we are ok with the idea that one can be arrested on one's property (no less) for being rude to an appendage of state power?

The answer is generally “yes” if you’re just joining us.

EX. Jack Dunphy, an anonymous, thus supposed, LA cop penned this response to the recent Gates imbroglio. His position: ”As long as you show the proper subservience to an officer, recognize their elevated status, and accept their right to shoot you, even by mistake, you should have no problems with Law Enforcement. The insidious part of this paradigm is the underlying assertion that those who tangle with Law Enforcement in such a manner “deserve it.” I’m here to tell you this is crap. Our forefathers would be aghast at the notion.

An acquaintance of mine was fond of saying, “What you tolerate, you validate. What you accept, you deserve” or something close to that.

The bottom line is that this too will fade and in fact, I may be the last to chime in on it. But frankly it took me a few days to realize what a lost opportunity for discussion this event truly was. Oh, I know, it was beaten to death in the MSM but the larger discussion about freedom in a proto-fascist America could use to be had.

-N



* The “Only Ones.” I’ve borrowed this concept from writer David Codrea who applies it to the Law Enforcement Community in an effort to showcase the inane double standards around public safety that exist in today’s society. To wit:

“The purpose of this feature has never been to bash cops. The only reason I do this is to amass a credible body of evidence to present when those who would deny our right to keep and bear arms use the argument that only government enforcers are professional and trained enough to do so safely and responsibly. And it's also used to illustrate when those of official status, rank or privilege, both in law enforcement and in some other government position, get special breaks not available to we commoners, particularly (but not exclusively) when they're involved in gun-related incidents.”

-David Codrea

Good Morning America

I'm quite a fan of the entire Bill of Rights. Ipso facto, I see no reason to interpret any one of them in anything but the most expansive terms. We are talking about fundamental rights here. More is always better.