Category: Guest Authors

Kill PIrates Says Chris Freind

By Chris Freind Kill PIrates Says Chris Freind

Water is wet. The sky is blue. And the West is gutless.

 

While all three are indisputable, only the last can change. But it will take sheer will and enormous courage to turn around two continents in a death spiral, the result of leaders prostrating themselves before the altar of political correctness, and a people too reluctant to challenge them.

A perfect example is the situation on the high seas. Despite brutal acts of piracy occurring off both African coasts — affecting Western shipping, and by extension, Westerners themselves — political and media elites continue to do virtually nothing to address, let alone solve, the problem.

Sure, Hollywood has produced the Tom Hanks’ movie “Captain Phillips,” recounting how Navy SEALS saved a freighter captain and his crew from marauding pirates, but such tales are the exception. The “rule” is continual ship hijackings, outrageous ransom demands (almost always paid), kidnappings, torture, and yes, murder.

Despite Captain Phillips’ box office success, the pirates aren’t fazed and their lucrative ways haven’t changed. Just last week, an oil supply vessel was boarded off Nigeria’s coast, its crew lined up by nationality. All but the two Americans were released.

Our response? Nothing.

Several years ago, then-79-year-old Norwegian shipping magnate Jacob Stolt-Nielsen wrote an op-ed stating that the only realistic way to deal with maritime terrorists was to sink their ships — with the pirates in them — or execute them on the spot.

Since hanging pirates on the high seas had all but eliminated piracy, common sense tells us reinstituting that policy now would be a good plan. Yet Stolt-Nielsen was viciously demonized, as too many thought pirates deserved “rights” and their day in court.

The result since then? Our weakness has allowed the pirates to get even richer (pulling in hundreds of millions), and we foot the bill, as maritime piracy costs the global economy around $7 billion a year.

It’s time for another way.

“You wanna know how to get Capone?” Sean Connery’s character asks Elliot Ness in “The Untouchables.” “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.”

Know what? They got Capone.

Unfortunately, The Chicago Way has been lost on America’s leaders, replaced by softness, complacency and the desire not to offend.

And our enemies have exploited that weakness, as al-Qaeda can proudly attest.

It’s also why we routinely lose to pirates operating from Somalia and, increasingly, in the Gulf of Guinea, through which 30 percent of America’s oil imports flow. (Hello? Can you say “energy independence?”)

And we’re not talking about just pleasure craft or fishing vessels, but huge ships supplying the world with cargo, food, oil — and weapons. Even a supertanker (larger than an aircraft carrier) was hijacked while transporting a staggering $100 million worth of crude oil.

Pirates were even so bold that they executed Americans on a private vessel — despite being closely monitored by four U.S. Navy warships. That level of arrogance tells all we need to know: They don’t fear us.

And no wonder. Our “tough” response would be to haul captured pirates into U.S. courts on the other side of the world, where they will receive first-class, taxpayer-funded defense lawyers and free health care. How nice.

And that’s supposed to deter more attacks?

Manhattan prosecutors don’t make African pirates tremble, a fact not lost on Stolt-Nielsen. As one of the few Europeans who lives in the real world, he stated how to end the unchecked piracy:

“When (piracy) implies a great risk of being caught and hanged, and the cost of losing ships and weapons becomes too big, it will decrease and eventually disappear.”

To that point, he ridiculed the American and European “solution,” stating (We should) “not arrest them and say, ‘naughty, naughty, shame on you,’ and release them again, but sink their boats with all hands.”

Yet, instead of aggressive action, we bury our heads in the sand, listening to those who believe killing pirates would be “barbaric,” a violation of their human rights.

What about the human rights given to murdered Americans and tortured sailors? But, of course, those real victims are always forsaken by bleeding hearts.

You give up your rights upon hijacking a ship. Cross the line and all bets are off. Heavily armed guards and crews should, upon attack, exercise no restraint in vaporizing marauders. The goal should not be to deter, but destroy, for three reasons. First, it’s just as likely pirates will execute the crew once aboard. Second, letting them go will only make another ship’s crew their victim. Third, it will send a clear, unmistakable message that there is a new Law Of The Sea — called The Chicago Way.

Such an initiative would immediately make pirates think twice while relieving pressure on the already-overwhelmed U.S. Navy, which simply isn’t big enough to protect the world’s shipping lanes. Sailors in the merchant marine are highly professional, certainly capable of protecting their cargoes and, more importantly, themselves. And since we already entrust them with ships and cargoes that can exceed a quarter of a billion dollars, it’s a no-brainer that they could, and would, act responsibly in an anti-piracy campaign.

Let’s be very clear about what will happen. When pirate corpses float up on the beaches of Somalia and Nigeria, there will be a shift in how the remaining pirates conduct their business. Translation: They’ll find a different profession, immediately. Bank on it.

There’s a direct correlation between pussyfooting with pirates and the huge spike in piracy. So let’s drop the empty threats, sink some pirate ships and kill the barbarians.

Then they can have their day in court. In Davy Jones’ locker.

 

Kill PIrates Says Chris Freind

Hostage Taking Postponed to ML King Day

The government is open for business again.  How nice.  Too bad it wasn’t open before we, as a nation, made fools of ourselves in front of every other nation in the world.  Or before several people lost money because of not being able to pay for student loans, which kicked their payment percentage all the way up ton 19%, or before billions of dollars of other costs incurred from loses due to programming and research that had to be done time, but was cut short, or ended, because of no funding for the scientists involved.  I even read that some people mortgages were foreclosed on during that short period of time.

I’m sure those farmers who had thousands of cattle freeze to death during the ice storm in South Dakota and who couldn’t call anyone to help with their costs through their federal insurance when their whole economic futures crashed are happy.  They would have been more happy if the Republicans in the House had done their jobs. No one knows what is happening with them now.

We at least know that there will be money until Martin Luther King Day.  On that day they will begin to hold us all hostage again.  Perhaps they will try to get us to stop celebrating Martin Luther King Day.  That would be something that is important.  Think of all of the money spent allowing us a weekend off where we can spend time with our families and loved ones.
We will see what our government will do then, but I have lost total confidence in them.  Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, Conservative, or Liberal, or Libertarian, or a Socialist, I am sure you know a nut when you see one.  It seems, unfortunately, that we have many, many nuts running the government now and woe are we.  The congress is full of people who are more incapable than the least among us.  When that happens in a country it is on the way to the bottom like a sinking ship.

No Doubt I’ll Fit Right In

I’ve been absent from my blog lately because of my focus on the paper I’ll be presenting at an Oxford University Roundtable October 22-23. The task was even more demanding than I had originally imagined. I leave for England this weekend.

The roundtable consists of 13 presenters, 12 of whom (guess who 13 is) are college professors. The topic we’re addressing is “For-Profit Education” and the challenge it presents to contemporary higher education.

For the past nine months I’ve been preoccupied with researching and writing about a topic I had scant knowledge of this time last year. The university wanted an “outside” opinion, and hence my invitation to attend. So I’ll be standing among Oxford Ph. Ds armed with my diplomas (I may take them with me) from LaSalle and Rider colleges.

Hopefully, I’ll be seated close enough to King Arthur at the roundtable to ask him some questions that have obsessed me since my youth:

Excerpted from Good Writers Block

All Should Be Government Workers

I think I’ve finally found a way to solve the problems of high unemployment, and the growing dissatisfaction with Obamacare and the size of federal government: Guarantee the American workforce government jobs.

Let’s face it, the U.S. government is gigantic, and we don’t have a prayer of ever reducing its size. It’s grown steadily since 1965 and seems to have a life of its own.

Let’s shoot the moon and stop arguing over budgets and debt limits. It’s exhausting. And the dramatic gains in employment would make full economic recovery a reality.

Debt and deficits don’t seem to phase most of those in Congress and certainly not President Obama. The president drove the deficit over a trillion dollars for several years before it finally dipped south of a trillion this year. Damned Sequester.

Though the national debt stands at about $17 trillion, the administration is asking to raise the debt limit so it can borrow billions more.

So why not go with the flow and grow government even larger. Would anyone really care or even notice? Well, sure, you can count on Tea Party Republicans to spoil the fun and protest. Political extremism is such a drag.

Good news if you haven’t heard already. The government shutdown ended.

Think of it. Working for the federal workers would eliminate the contentious debate over the Obamacare. Thanks to U.S. taxpayers, federal workers have excellent affordable health care coverage and are exempt from those onerous Obamacare mandates.

Read more at Delco Conservative

Raising Debt Ceiling Failed Solution

After last month’s boardwalk fire in Seaside Heights, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, self-proclaimed fiscal hawk, immediately allocated $15 million in taxpayer money to business owners.

Sorry, Guv, but that’s why God made insurance. Government had absolutely no reason to get involved. Yet it did.

That decision is symbolic of how the United States became so paralyzed by its monstrous debt. A little here, a lot there, often for things that tug at the heart but have no relevance to government, multiplied countless times over decades. The result is municipalities and entire governments, such as Detroit and Puerto Rico, on the verge of collapse.

Now the Piper is calling the granddaddy of them all: The United States government and its incomprehensible $17 trillion debt, and no bailouts or bankruptcies can save that behemoth. Short of a complete reversal of business-as-usual in Washington — cutting debt rather than adding it — things are about to get uglier than ever before.

The airwaves are filled with “experts” admonishing Congress to raise America’s debt ceiling (the amount of debt the U.S. can legally incur) so as to avoid the “catastrophic” consequences of “default” if it doesn’t.

I’m not sure what’s worse: The deliberately disingenuous politicians and media outlets pushing that misinformation, or the ones who, without thinking, actually swallow that pap.

They want you to think this a complicated issue. It’s not. In fact, it’s remarkably straightforward: Aggressively rein in spending with a commonsense approach, or risk an eventual currency collapse that will turn America into a second-world nation in record time. It’s that simple.

So let’s cut through the white noise and look at the facts:

1. Without question, there will be pain if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, but there will be no default. By law, payment on the national debt comes first, and there’s plenty of money to pay our interest obligation ($220 billion) since revenue is more than 10 times that amount ($2.6 trillion). Granted, that’s a ticking time bomb since the principle isn’t being touched, but it’s clear we don’t have to incur more debt to “pay off” existing debt. So let’s not do it.

2. Most everyone concedes the astronomical debt poses a significant problem, yet every time the ceiling is reached, Congress raises it even further — and the shopping spree continues. This of course leads to more deficits and more debt, creating a vicious cycle. (Quick primer: The deficit is the amount we overspend each year; the debt is the total amount we owe). Enough is enough. Keep the ceiling where it is, and force the government to tighten its belt and live within its means, just as solvent businesses and stable families do. Identifying a problem yet looking the other way is impotence. Enabling its growth is cowardice.

3. All the economists, politicians and Wall Streeters who say that not raising the debt ceiling would be the height of irresponsibility need to look in the mirror. How is raising it any saner? Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result — in this case, thinking that increasing debt will prove beneficial — is lunacy. If they’re the best and brightest, I shudder to think of the dumb ones.

4. Prioritize the budget. Force Congress to finally do its job, making them fight like cats and dogs to fund what is most needed. You’d be amazed at how quickly they figure out what’s important — and what isn’t. Pass a law requiring across-the-board cuts. No exceptions, even the sacred cows of entitlements and defense. While it won’t be pretty, people will be much more accepting if they know everyone feels the pain. Most important, get the ball rolling on a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced budget, as almost all states have that requirement.

5. Magically creating money to pay our bills is insane, but the Fed has been doing just that, inventing $85 billion per month with a keystroke (they don’t even print it anymore. Ain’t technology great?), which then gets pumped into the “economy” via Wall Streeters’ pockets. That’s why, despite the stagnant economy, the stock market remains so robust, artificially propped up by an entitlement program for the super-wealthy. Wall Street has become so addicted to the Fed’s drug that the mere mention of cutting back sends the market tanking, so the funny money keeps rolling. This must end now, on our terms, before the big meltdown occurs, since what goes up must come crashing down.

6. While unfathomable a generation ago, the world now views America as an increasingly bad credit risk. That’s why there has been such a drop-off in the purchasing of Treasuries, and why the Fed itself is buying a trillion dollars’ worth each year.

Many are concerned with the substantial U.S. debt owned by the Chinese, but that’s yesterday’s news. Not only aren’t the Chinese buying Treasuries like they once were, but they (and the Japanese) have been dumping significant U.S. debt while buying gold and silver at a record pace. Think they know something?

The game is up, and everyone knows it — except those in Washington.

A wise man once said there’s what people want to hear, there’s what people want to believe, there’s everything else — and then there’s the truth. And the hard truth is that all of the easy answers are behind us.

To think America can’t fall is arrogance at best, stupidity at worst. It can, and will, unless drastic action is immediately taken, starting with the current debt ceiling being kept intact. Doing so would send an unmistakable message that America is serious about making a comeback. But raising it as a “solution” would be akin to rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic.

Anyone remember how that turned out?

 

Obamacare Republic

Stop blaming President Obama for sabotaging the nation’s health care system. After all, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act wasn’t all his doing. He had plenty of help from congressional Democrats.

House and Senate Democrats were instrumental in coercing their colleagues to vote for the legislation, which offended about half the voting public at the time it was enacted, and while the lawmakers may not have been aware of all the ill effects their actions would have three years later, apparently those same Democrats support the disastrous law to this day.

Whether intentionally or not, these Democrats were complicit with Obama in the many misleading statements — or outright lies — he told us about how terrific the health care reform law would be.

A stunning 17-minute YouTube video compiles the many claims the president made publicly while pitching his so-called health care reform legislation:

http://youtu.be/KxWMbqxgMDo

The president told Americans not to worry, they would be able to keep their current physicians after his massive health care system overhaul passed Congress; that insurance premiums would fall by $2,500 annually.

However, people are now finding out their premiums are rising significantly, and are unsure whether they’ll always be able to keep their doctors if forced into a new government-approved health plan.

Obamacare Republic is excerpted from Delco Conservative

Anything To Stop Healthcare

According to Democracy Now,
Republicans in the House are quite upset because the Senate Leader
refuses to call a session to vote on the idea put forward by
Republicans, that threatens to shut down the government if
Obama-care, a health care system that would give the opportunity to
those who were cut out because of pre-existing conditions, the poor,
the lower middle class and working class and millions of working
poor, to purchase insurance, and would make it almost impossible for
bankruptcy to result from large hospital bills.

I must say, during my lifetime, I have
never before seen one part of the government resort to extortion and
holding the citizens hostage, or using them as human shields, to
overturn an initiative voted for and passed by the House and Senate
and signed into law by the President of the United States. This
great turn around, in fact, is after most of the Republican
Representatives and Senators signed onto the bill on the condition
that it would slowly fade in beginning 2014.

Now the U.S. has become the laughing
stock of most of the world. Everything that we stood for in the past
has been turned upside down. We work to export democracy and the
democratic process throughout the world as those who tout democracy,
and who claim to be Christians, do whatever they want to against the
will of the people to keep people poor and destitute without the type
of healthcare that almost every industrial nation (I can’t think of
any that doesn’t), has.

We are being pushed backward and the
heritage of the United States…the True Heritage, is being stolen by
the ones who have pledged to preserve it. This heritage can be seen
in the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United
States, the Gettysburg Address, and on the plaque on the Statue of
Liberty. The belief and application of these values are the only
thing that ever made us exceptional. They are the only things that
differentiated us from most of the western world. They will soon be
gone.

I just pray for our children and their
children as this country erodes into Neo-feudalism and all of those
who wasted their time and energy fighting against true exceptionalism
by trying to push us back to a time of Pre-civil War mentality and
block others from partaking of the opportunities afforded us by this
great nation. For this is what will ultimately bring about the
destruction of this nation and will garner curses and hatred from our
descendents because we didn’t stand up when it was the time and
protect the heritage of our own. Who are our own. Every citizen is
our own.

Wonderfully Wasted

The Environmental Protection Agency’s recently announced decision to, in effect, ban the construction of traditional coal-fired power plants in the United States is a non-solution to a hypothetical problem, enacted upon a legal basis that is shaky and an economic basis that is nonexistent. The cost-benefit analysis is almost entirely one-sided: The costs will be very high, and the benefits the EPA hopes to secure will remain out of reach.

The EPA is demanding that new U.S. plants that will use coal to generate electricity must meet standards that today are met by no commercial coal-fired plant operating anywhere in the world. There are, however, two plants coming on line — one in Saskatchewan, one in Mississippi — that incorporate new technology designed to capture enough carbon dioxide to satisfy the EPA demands. Whether that new technology will be effective in practice remains to be seen; whether it will be both effective and cost-effective is a much more important and complex question, one that the EPA has no genuine interest in contemplating.

That is a problem, inasmuch as the Clean Air Act requires that the EPA perform a cost-benefit analysis of new rules. EPA administrator Gina McCarthy not only says that the agency has conducted such an analysis but goes on to characterize it as “wonderful,” and we are indeed filled with a sense of wonder at her proclamation, though perhaps not in the way she intended.

The costs remain a mystery. The industry expects them to be high, but how high is anybody’s guess: The CO2-capture technology that the EPA expects to become standard as a result of its new mandate is, as noted, not currently in commercial use. There is no demand in the market for it, and its costs can therefore be estimated on a wild-guess basis at best.

It is easier to estimate the benefits: They will be nonexistent. Even if we assume that the general thrust of the case for anthropogenic global warming is accurate (an assumption that requires setting aside the recent failure of climate-change models and the less confident scientific consensus as to the meaning of recent data), the fact remains that global warming is, if it is anything at all, global. Local controls on U.S. power plants, even if they are draconian, will have little impact on the overall atmospheric composition of the planet and its effect on global temperatures.

Carbon dioxide is only one greenhouse gas among many, and the United States is not the world’s largest producer of it. The United States, in fact, produces about 15 percent of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions, and U.S. power plants are responsible only for about 33 percent of that 15 percent. And the new rule applies only to newly constructed plants, though the EPA has signaled that it intends to demand the retrofitting of existing plants in the future.

What all this means is that even if the EPA were wildly successful in its implementation of the new standards, it still would not achieve any substantial reduction in global greenhouse-gas emissions. It is equally likely, if not more, that it will achieve an increase instead: Being a fungible commodity, the coal not consumed by U.S. generators will find its way to China, India, and the rest of the developing world, where it will be consumed in high-pollution plants that make those in the United States look as pure as vestal virgins by comparison.

So: Costs unknown, benefits negligible. “Wonderful,” indeed.

No doubt surviving members of the 88th Congress, which passed the Clean Air Act, are filled with a similar sense of wonder that their law is being used to police carbon dioxide emissions, an outcome the legislators did not intend. The legal basis for declaring carbon dioxide a “pollutant” under the act is questionable at best, as is the EPA’s rationale for picking and choosing what sorts of emitters will be subject to its new rules. If you would like a preview of what medicine is going to look like under Obamacare, consider the high-handed, letter-of-the-law-be-damned approach of the EPA and the courts that have enabled it.

The new rule may prove wonderful for the manufacturers of the capture technology that will effectively be mandated. As with the case of Solyndra et al., this maneuver is not about producing environmental benefits but about creating markets for politically favored firms and industries. But even those cronies may fare less well than they expect to.

The Obama administration, despite its obvious desire, has not yet been successful in strangling the natural-gas renaissance that is changing the face of the American energy industry. Though coal remains the largest single source of electricity, it already has been falling out of favor with those building new generating capacity, because natural gas is cheaper and plentiful. It is also less damaging to the environment, contra the  ill-informed hysteria about the gas-extraction technique known as fracking. But the United States has a complex economy, and there is no single “right” source for fuel. Left to its own devices, the industry probably will move toward natural gas and away from coal, but coal will remain an important part of the picture for the foreseeable future.

In 2012, Barack Obama became the first major-party presidential candidate since statehood to fail to win in a single county of West Virginia. He lost the statewide vote by a substantial margin, with two out of three against him . The people of West Virginia rightly appreciated that their best-known commodity is the target of a regulatory jihad by the White House that has no environmental or economic justification.

The real motive here is the administration’s messianic pretentions, its belief that its bureaucrats and managers are more humane and more intelligent than the producers and consumers over whom they reign, and that they have been chosen to lead the United States into a future that is relatively free of such relics of the Industrial Revolution as coal-fired power plants and petroleum products. Unhappily for them, there is a wide gulf between social engineering and real engineering, and the most impressive products the green-energy revolution has delivered so far are a couple of nifty electric motorcycles — which are recharged by a power grid that gets 40 percent of its juice from coal.

A functioning modern society requires reliable electricity. A modern industrial economy requires affordable electricity. To impose incalculable costs on electricity generation in exchange for ideological satisfaction with no real-world environmental benefit is the sign of an agency that has put its own political agenda ahead of the national interest, playing fast and loose with the law in the process. The EPA is a menace, and Congress should put it on a leash.

Hat tip Paul Olivett

Wonderfully Wasted

The Politic of Black Mail

By Dr. John Gilmore

What do you do when the government begins to hate their opposition so much they begin to black mail them by holding the citizens hostage? This is something that has been happening regularly nowadays with the GOP and the debt ceiling. I find it amazing that such a thing would ever happen in the United States. Some people say that this comes as a result of the type of greed that destroyed the Athenian Empire and the Roman Empire. Both of those empires were powerful. They fell because of the corruption inside, not because of outside forces.

We find our system beginning to get
more corrupt as tons of money is being poured in by large
international corporations with no real allegiance to the United
States or any other country, just to themselves. The question is
“What do we do about it?” Cutting the food stamp program doesn’t
seem to help. Union busting, which ultimately lowers everyone’s
wages and causes less money to go back into the economy doesn’t seem
to be helping. Fighting about abortion and marriage equality doesn’t
seem to help. What do we do during these trying times?

I think we need to create jobs with a
living wage. The idea of Green Energy Jobs was a good one. Building
wind turbines and solar panels is working for Germany. They have
reduced their dependency on Nuclear Power-plants in less than two
years by converting to 1/3 solar energy, just by giving the citizens
incentives to put solar panels on their homes and then feeding the
energy back into the grid. Only 1/3 of their energy needs are
petroleum based, while the other 1/3 is bio-diesel. These are the
types of policies we need, instead of grid lock. On top of it all,
they have had national healthcare for years and are one of the
strongest economies in the world.

I think it is time for our government
to stop playing politics, stop trying to turn one religion against
the other, one race against the other, one gender against the other,
the old against the young…to create any type of division they can
so they can become more progressive and really govern in line with
the ideals put forward by Abraham Lincoln when he spoke of this
country of the people, by the people, and for the people. Instead we
have a country for 1% of the people and division among others.
Officials are being paid to make decisions based on the health and
welfare of the highest bidders. It is time to unite and work to
rebuild this American Dream for all of the people and stop the
divisiveness. I hope that U.S. Citizens can do this, or there just
may not be a country that is worth having very soon. .

Will Iran’s Charm Offensive Fool Obama?

By Keith Phucas

The real moment of truth for the Obama administration may come next week when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani flies to the U.S. in hopes of cutting a favorable deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Will the U.S. continue to support punitive measures against Iran for its nuclear development or soften its position?

Numerous economic sanctions have been imposed on Iran since 2006 for continuing with its nuclear development and not allowing inspectors to verify all of the country’s nuclear activities. The regime insists its program is strictly for its energy needs.

The sanctions, imposed by United Nations Security Council resolutions, have significantly cut Iran’s oil exports and isolated the country from international banking systems, and the country is seeking relief from the crippling measures.

Yet, Iran continues enriching uranium in “clear contravention” of U.N. resolutions, according to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiyo Amano. And, if the regime is able eventually to produce highly-enriched uranium, that fissile material would be ideal for nuclear warheads.

Given Tehran’s hostility toward Israel and Iran’s insistence on forging ahead with its nuclear plans, Israel signaled several years back that it might attack Iran’s nuclear sites.

Recently it was revealed Rouhani and President Obama have exchanged letters that the new Iranian leader described as “positive and constructive.”

The U.N. Security Council meets next week. And after witnessing the U.S. president’s Syria Shuffle — first threatening to attack Syria for using chemical weapons, then backing down — the Iranian leadership sensed a fresh opportunity to negotiate with the U.S. over Iran’s nuclear program and launched a so-called “charm offensive.”

Read more about Iran’s Charm Offensive at Keith Phucas’ Delco Conservative