Clunked

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There will be no Social Security increase in 2016 because there is no inflation, according to the government.  But I notice that prices in the POS market are not slumping:

2004 Saturn L300. 133,000 miles. $2,750 or best offer.

2004 Ford Ranger. 65,500 miles.$9,500 OBO.

2000 Lexus ES300. 141K miles. $3900 or offer.

1997 GMC Safari. $2500 firm.

Lingering effect of the disastrous Cash for Clunkers program?

Joe doakes

The used car market has been utterly brutal since then.

Doakes Sunday: Careful What You Wish For

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In a comment to an earlier thread, Emery wrote:
“The free movement of capital.
The free movement of goods and services.
The free movement of ideas and media.
The free movement of people.
The protection of private property.
I’m not a starry-eyed idealist, but I like to think that there is a liberal ideal that we should keep our eyes on, not necessarily as a realistic objective for today, but as a goal to strive for.”
My response is that all that free movement stuff sounds great in theory but I’m wondering about it in practice.  I just poured myself a cup of coffee and dumped in a packet of sugar.  I haven’t stirred it, yet.  The sugar is  concentrated in a heap of sweetness on the bottom of the cup.  That’s America.  The coffee in the rest of the cup is bitter.  That’s the rest of the world.  If I stir the cup, the sweetness will be distributed everywhere, but that also means it will be diluted everywhere.  No one place will be super-sweet, all will be equally semi-sweet.
Wouldn’t free movement of people and money lead to the same result? If you took all the money in America and distributed it to people across the rest of the globe, they would be enriched but we would be impoverished.  If we fling open the borders to let everybody from everywhere in the world come here, will they add to the sweetness of America by bringing prosperity and stability or subtract from it by welfare and crime?
I can see why people in the bitter lands would want their lives to become sweeter.  I can’t see why people in the super-sweet lands would want their lives to become more bitter.  As I cannot be guaranteed the glorious result would obtain, a conservative would eschew the experiment.
Joe Doakes

Perverse incentives?  I get it.

Perverse wishes?  Not so much.

Doakes Sunday: Fourth Generation Nation

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The American Revolutionaries wore brown clothes and hid behind trees and rocks to shoot at British soldiers wearing red jackets marching in straight lines.  This was a violation of the “rules of war” of that time period. The familiar Geneva Convention “rules of war” were crafted after World War I to protect draftees compelled to fight for nation-states. Modern military theorists talk of 4th Generation Warfare in which large formations of men and machines are useless against small, agile teams of mobile warriors, like trying to kill a swarm of mosquitoes with a sledge hammer.
Iraq War I, with Stormin’ Norman’s giant lines of tanks encircling armies in Kuwait, was 3rd Generation Warfare, as was much of Iraq War II.  Some parts of America’s military have been learning to fight 4th Generation Warfare, notably the SEALs who fought in Afghanistan.  But they’re still America’s warriors, they serve the nation of the United States.
But what is the United States?  A geographical location?  A shared belief?  A place where groups struggle against each other: rich against poor, Black against White?  Barack Obama seems intent on transforming the United States into something different from what it was then Bush The Elder was President.  What if President Obama is ahead of his time?  What if nation-states are obsolete?  What if the United States is obsolete?  Nations arose out of tribes, what comes after nations?  Maybe by transforming the United States into a collection of factions contesting against each other, he’s moving us toward 4th Generation Society.
Question is:  would that be a good thing?
Joe Doakes

Good for whom?

Culture Of Failure

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Sanctions are imposed on outlaws; only legitimate governments enter into international agreements.

The starting point for the Iran Deal was the US had to recognize the Rouhani Regime – the successor of the people who stormed our embassy in 1979 and held our people hostage 444 days – as the legitimate government of Iran.

President Obama is exploring diplomatic relations but we don’t get our embassy back – it’s now a hate-America museum.

With awesome results like these, I want John Kerry negotiating for me on my next used car purchase.  What could go wrong?

You could be driving a Pontiac Aztek, that’s what.

 

Coming Soon To A Poetry Slam Near You

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama wants to save the world.
It’s in danger from Global Warming.
Global Warming is caused by US carbon emissions.
Gasoline emits carbon so we need to reduce gasoline usage.
Driving gas prices to $5 per gallon would reduce gasoline usage.
Obama tried to drive gas prices higher by blocking the Keystone pipeline.
But higher pump prices made it affordable to increase oil production in North Dakota.
North Dakota oil brought down the world price of crude oil, hurting Saudi Arabia’s profits as an oil exporter.
Saudi Arabia cut its crude prices below cost to crush North Dakota oil; it partly worked – they’ve cut back.
Now Obama lifted sanctions on Iran so it can sell oil which will drive down the world price of crude.
Which should bring down gasoline prices at the pump.
So Americans can afford to drive more.
And create more carbon emissions.
To cause Global Warming.
And destroy the world.
Obama wants to save.
Damn that
Bush!

Heh.

Imports

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A pair of graduate students from the U of M came to the office to learn about Minnesota’s system of land title records.  Seems they’re hoping to institute a new system in Kenya where land records are not reliable, making investment risky which discourages entrepreneurship and that leaves people in poverty, dependent on government hand-outs.  The students propose a computerized system (which will reveal changes and who made them) based on GPS coordinates (that can be re-established in the field by any hand-held GPS receiver).

The students are cargo cultists.  They propose a technological solution to a cultural problem.  I’m skeptical.

Kenya left the British Empire in 1963 and for the last half-century: “the use of land as an object of patronage to engender support and consolidate power has been exacerbated by corruption, forced eviction, government backtracking, and lack of redress for those who have lost land through violence.”

Suppose the computer gives me absolute iron-clad proof that the land records clerk altered the records to give my land to President Uhuru Kenyatta’s friend.  Suppose when I show up in court, the President’s friend arrives with a thick envelope of “last-minute evidence” for the judge, then glances meaningfully at his Reece Squad escorts and says “So, judge, how are the wife and kids?  Be a shame if anything happened to them.”  What are my chances of getting my land back?

Technology can’t solve that problem.  It takes a culture of incorruptibility, of self-less devotion to the Rule of Law, and that culture takes hundreds of years to grow.  Kenya threw that away when it kicked out the British.  Americans are letting our own Kenyan throw it away today.

Joe Doakes

Barack Obama’s worst facet?  He’s bringing the worst facets of Third World/Chicago governance to a national stage.

I’m going to say that before the IRS shuts me down.

 

Disqualifying

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama wants to ban people who can’t manage their budget from possessing firearms. So we can add every Democrat politician to the list?
Joe Doakes

He might propose disarming Greece, Portugal and Italy…

… but then, soon enough, he’ll have to disarm the United States.

Wait…

A Thousand Words

If there’s one thing I cordially detest about social media today, it’s the photo-memeification of all political debate.  On Facebook and Twitter, thousands of people can pass along a graphic, often wrong, frequently giggly/snarky photo in lieu of understanding an issue or being able to state a coherent case.

But sometimes they’re right:

I’ve been harping on the workforce participation numbers since 2011 – and they’ve just gotten worse.

And the fact is, if we’re ever going to reduce that debt figure (which doesn’t, by the way, count all the other unfunded entitlements that are floating about in the ether in numbers that look like they should be expressing Zimbabwean currency), it’s going to take actual productivity – which you’re not going to get when a huge percentage of your most-nominally-productive population are sitting idle, having given up hope that the economy will find a place for them.

(“But Mitch”, someone will no doubt say, “the workforce number reflects the number of baby-boomers that are retiring!”.  Sure, some of it.  But the percentage of Americans over 65 who are at work has actually risen – alone among the age groups – since the recession started.  And people drop off the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ figures after 70, so any retiring boomers will be out of the statistical picture momentarily, here…).

Schrimpe Auf Dem Grill

A long-time friend of this blog emails:

President Obama specifically said that the Charleston type killings did not happen in other Western countries.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/at-least-two-killed-in-austria-after-man-drives-into-crowd-before-stabbing-passersby-in-graz-10333891.html

Perhaps it was lost in translation because we know he can’t speak Austrian.

Your friend,
[Redacted]

On the one hand, I’m inclined to cut people breaks when it comes to languages – and Austrian does have a different accent, vocabulary and style than German.

On the other hand, there’s no way that the president who went Queen Elizabeth the Blueray collection of Eastenders for a Golden Jubilee present [1] knows that.

I’m pretty sure Obama once told a “Crocodile Dundee” joke when speaking to the Austrian ambassador.

[1] Or whatever it was.

Never Let A Crisis Go To Waste

Call me a cynic…

chanting_points_200px

…no.  Call Barack Obama a Cynic.

Our Ghoulish President:  The bodies were literally not cold from the Charleston shooting when the President started trying to politicize the incident:

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,” he continued. “Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. … We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

Tell it to Charlie Hebdo.

Sure it happens in other countries.  A sickening amount of it.  The US doesn’t even top the list on most categories of “rampage killing”. Not even the “religious or hate crimes” category, where the US isn’t even in the top five (Roof is tied for seventh).  And who’da thunk it; car-crazy Americans barely make the top ten in vehicular spree-killings.   [1]

The US is not uniquely violent – indeed, the left’s constant claim that we’re the most violent country in the world is  wishful thinking.  While the rate is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago, it is higher than European countries – whose populations tend to be small, homogenous and very orderly.  Among large, populous, heterogenous industrial states, Russia and Argentina and Brazil, among others, all have much higher murder rates.

The President is not talking fact.

Continue reading

A Blast

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama’s decision to ban local police from using IED-resistant vehicles comes just two weeks after he learned ISIS has 71 warriors in-country, ready to target five American cities for terrorist attacks.

 

Another amazing coincidence, no doubt.

 

Joe Doakes

I suspect it is – but it made me think.

Remember when the left assumed Ronald Reagan was a doddering idiot?  There was even a great SNL bit on the subject, back when SNL still did great bits.

Now, we conservatives merely assume that Obama is a blundering idiot, a community organizer in a President costume, over his head like Klamydia Khardashian at an Oxford Union debate.

But what if the whole “Dumb Reagan” scenario has completely flipped?

 

Who Could Have Predicted?

The economy under wan, feeble socialist Obama has grown at an anemic rate compared to the rates under the healthy, happy free-marketeer Reagan.

Ronald Reagan’s economic plan saw GDP surge at a 3.5% clip – 4.9% after the recession. That’s a 32% bump.

During the Obama years, thanks to his big government policies, the US economy has stalled. Today the quarterly GDP was announced. The GDP for the first quarter of 2015 braked more sharply than expected at only a .2% pace. The US economy has grown an anemic 9.6% during the Obama years (excluding today’s dismal number).

Who woulda thunk it?

Everyone who didnt’ skip Econ 101 to go to a Noam Chomsky speech, that’s who.

Revenue Streamski

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Russians hacked the White House, got sensitive Obama data.

I wonder if that “sensitive data” included his college transcript?  Birth certificate before it was Photo-Shopped?  Original manuscript of his book?

The Russians could make a fortune selling the data.  Or being paid NOT to sell it.

Joe Doakes

They could replace all the money they’re not getting from oil.

More Like Guidelines

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

May 1st is Law Day. It was the idea of Charles Rhyne, President of the American Bar Association in 1958. He thought Americans should have a day to reflect on the Rule of Law in the foundation of the country and recognize its importance for society. He chose May 1st specifically because it was the day Communists celebrated their totalitarian rise to power.

The notion that we are a nation of laws, that no public official is above the law, that Congress makes the laws and the President upholds and faithfully executes them . . . are obsolete remnants of racist patriarchal oppression. The Obama Administration honors Law Day only in the breach.

Joe Doakes

Breach is the new Integrity.

Devalued

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Obama Administration’s Middle East policy is a puzzle, probably because there is no plan, only reaction to crises. Which is a good thing, according to some.

“But amid the confusion, some experts said that there cannot be an overarching American policy in the Middle East at the moment. The best the White House can do, they said, is tailor policies according to individual crises as they flare up. “I would be more concerned if we had some sort of overly rigid policy,” said Barbara Bodine, another former American ambassador to Yemen who is now the director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. “It is messy. It is contradictory. That’s foreign policy.”

Can you imagine being the next guy:

“Hello, Mr. Prime Minister? Hi, I’m the new President of the United States. I’m calling to invite your country to be allies with mine. What’s that you say — lied to and back-stabbed last time? Well, things will be different under my leadership. How long? The next two years for sure. After that, of course, I’ll have to start campaigning for re-election so certain compromises might have to be made, but . . . hello? Hello?”

Joe Doakes

We’re going to be paying for this presidency for generations.

Priorities

David “Iowahawk” Burge writes a rare, “not funny” tweet:

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And he’s spent more time and effort fighting domestic dissent in the US – via the IRS’ gundecking conservative groups’ free speech via tax and campaign law and attacking dissenters, via “net neutrality”, and via his eternal campaign’s patrolling masses of droogs (in and out of the media), than he spent bringing free speech to the people of Iran, Venezuela, Cuba or anyplace else.