Thoughts on Cuba and Other Stuff
Yes, I'm really too busy to blog, and this is not the post I was going to post. But when I'm too busy go toss off thoughts at an unsuspecting (and uncaring)Blogosphere, I use other people's thoughts. First, here are some thoughts on Cuba from
Nat Hentoff, and them some that are more succinct from Michael Ramirez. I love the way he can portray such strong emotion in just two hands. The man can draw!
New Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who has made 10 reporting trips to Cuba, writes (April 14) that the Congressional Black Caucus delegation was either naive or disingenuous "not to notice ... or acknowledge that Cuba is hardly the paradise of racial harmony and equality it pretends to be."
If these Black Caucus members — so lauded by Fidel for being accompanied by King's "aura" — had asked him and Raul for permission to look around Cuba on their own, they would have
heard considerable evidence from Afro-Cubans about their lower status in Michael Moore's paradise. However, adds Eugene Robinson, "maybe they were too busy looking into Fidel's eyes."
And I was going to comment on the fact that Earth Day is on Lenin's birthday. But that's been taken care of at
People's Cube.
Meanwhile, at the Free Press, there are the usual calls for more government intervention to "
help the poor".
Personal finances are not traditionally the purview of public officials. But in these tough times, government certainly has an interest in helping constituents protect their assets and create financially stable households. The life savings of many New Orleans residents were washed away during Hurricane Katrina. In some cities, a cash economy has become a public safety problem, with people becoming "walking ATMs" on days when pay or government checks are issued.
That's why the National League of Cities and the Cities for Financial Empowerment Coalition are working with many of their members, including Detroit, to ensure that consumers are financially literate and that banks offer deposit, payment, credit and electronic products that meet the needs of the unbanked. The league's "Bank on Cities" campaign includes education and outreach efforts that partner with local banks.
Thomas Sowell sees through the sloppy thinking of the Free Press and everyone else who wants more government intervention in order to force check cashing offices out of business while also forcing banks to give loans to people whether or not they can pay them back.
Words are not the only things that enable political rhetoric to magically transform reality. Numbers can be used just as creatively — and many voters are even more gullible about statistics than they are about words, apparently because statistics seem more objective.
The latest congressional crusade is to clamp down on small finance companies that provide “payday loans” and check-cashing services in many low-income neighborhoods, where there are few banks.
A common practice in making small loans of a few hundred dollars for a few weeks is to charge about $15 per hundred dollars lent. Politicians, the media, community activists, and miscellaneous other busybodies are able to transform these numbers into annual percentage charges of several hundred percent, thereby creating moral melodramas and demands that the government “do something” about such “abuses.”
Of course, these loans are seldom borrowed for a year. They are often loans for a couple of weeks or less, to meet some difficulty of the moment, suffered by people who live from payday to payday, whether they are being paid by a job or are receiving checks from Social Security, unemployment compensation, or welfare.
The alternative to getting a payday loan may be having the electricity cut off or not having money to buy some medication. It is worse to borrow from illegal loan sharks, who have their own methods of collecting.
While $15 per hundred dollars may sound like a high rate of interest, it is not all interest. The finance company incurs costs just to process a loan, and these costs are a higher proportion of the total cost for a small loan than for a large loan.
When Oregon imposed a limit of 36 percent annual interest on what a finance company could charge, that meant charging less than $1.50 for a $100 loan for a couple of weeks. A dollar and a half would probably not even cover the cost of processing the loan, much less the risks of default.
Not surprisingly, most of the small finance companies making payday loans in Oregon went out of business. But there are no statistics on how many low-income people turned to loan sharks, or had their electricity cut off, or had to do without their medicine.
This is just one of the many ways in which self-righteous busybodies leave havoc in their wake while going away feeling noble.
Labels: Cuba, Detroit Free Press, economics, Michael Ramirez, Nat Hentoff, The People's Cube, Thomas Sowell
Bailout Madness
We've all engaged in gallows humor recently, asking each other, "Hey, where's my bailout?" as we bemoan the fact that our elected dopes in Congress, who made a major contribution to the current economic mess, are claiming that only their tireless efforts can save us from financial ruin and another even greater depression.
Well, some people are serious. There are always those that, no matter how educated they are, or how smart they think they are,
just don't get it and never will.
This is truly an historic victory for workers in the United States.
But this struggle is just the beginning! As the economic crisis deepens we need to launch a working class fight back. Rallies for a "People's Bailout" will continue today and throughout the rest of the week.
The People's Cube couldn't parody these idiots if they didn't really exist.
Labels: bailout, Congress, economy, The People's Cube
Fear of Sarah
SPECIAL NOTE: Normally I write my entries using Firefox. The whole blog is done on Firefox. I notice that when I use Internet Explorer to read it, almost none of my sidebar shows up. Due to the fact that I crashed my computer this past Sunday, I'm creating this post on Internet Explorer. I don't know if that will make a difference when one views this post on Firefox. Thanks to a ton of help from my computer guy neighbor, I should be back to normal (well my computer should be) by tomorrow or Monday . . . or Tuesday. Then I'll look at it on Firefox.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog post.
The thing I like best about Sarah Palin is that her entry in the race has caused me to laugh more than I've laughed during any presidential race that I can remember. And it's not just the insane ravings of the Obamatons, who are foaming at the mouth because their savior has been upstaged. Hope and change now seem to be no more than a empty slogans. They've been exchanged for slander, insult, and character assassination, you know, those tactics that we're told are Republican trademarks.
But it's not just the unintenial humor being provided by suddenly panicked leftists. Others are conciously creating clever entertainment by jumping onto the Sarah Palin humor bandwagon. The always dependably sarcastic satirists at
The People's Cube have a bunch of posts.
Iowahawk, brilliant as ever, channels an early role model of mine, Bugs Bunny for his parody,
An Open Letter to Sarah Palin
By Wile E. Reporter
National Political Correspondent, MSNBCNNABS
(Medius Vulgaris)
*Knock Knock Knock*
Good afternoon, madam. Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Wile E. Reporter, investigative correspondent for an international network news gathering organization. No doubt you may have seen my award-winning coverage, assuming your igloo is equipped with a satellite dish. No, I am not selling anything nor am I working my way through college, so let's get down to cases. You are a Republican candidate, and I am going to eat you alive. Now don't try to get away! I am more educated, more cunning, faster, and larger than you are... and I'm a genius. In fact, I have not one, but two diplomas from the Acme Correspondence School of Journalism. And you? Why, you could hardly pass the entrance examinations to kindergarten, let alone the vice presidency of a major western democracy. Rather than suffer the inevitable torture of the vetting I am about to give you, I think you will agree that it's best for both of us that we save time and get this over with quickly. I will give you the customary two minutes to say your prayers, and take the "Eagleton option."
*SLAM*
Sigh. Why do they always want to do it the hard way?
And then there's Get Fuzzy. In a bit of inspired madness, Darby Conley has injected a bit of Monty Python into his Sarah Palin commentary. With all of the lame political strips that my comics page suffers from, it is truly refreshing to get real laughs when Get Fuzzy gets political.
SINCE THE STRIP IS SMALL AND HARD TO READ:
ROB: Why do you keep trying to trash Obama? Are you nervous about your boy McCain's Vice-Presidential pick?
BUCKY: He picked someone? Who? Roof Dog Romney? Tom "Cranial Ridge?
ROB: Palin, the gov-
BUCKY: We got Palin?! Victory!!! You got no answer to that! Even Cleese - No - not even Gervais can save your sorry -
ROB: Not Michael Palin, you idiot, Sarah Palin.
BUCKY: Come again?
SATCHEL: Ha! Ha! And now for something completely unexpected!
ROB: Admit it. You're worried about your guy's V.P. choice.
BUCKY: I stand by Palin.
SATCHEL: III'm a Republican and I'm OK. I work all night and I sleep all day!
ROB: Just say it! You'd rather have someone else! Like Whitman! Or Lieberman!
SATCHEL: I'm afraid we're all out of Lieberman, sir.
ROB: Satchel, stop shouting Michael Palin lines! We're talking politics.
SATCHEL: NO-BODY expects the Alaskan politician!
Of course, you do have to be a Monty Python fan to appreciate these strips.
I only hope that Palin and McCain beat Obama and Biden. Then the hilarity will continue for at least the next four years as the deranged MSM and disgusted progressives rend their garments and wear sackcloth and ashes as they flail away in frustration and impotently threaten once again to move to Canada.
Oh yeah, and let's face it. McCain and Palin would make a much better president and VP. Obama would be a disaster for the country and for the free world.
Labels: comic strips, Get Fuzzy, Iowahawk, Monty Python, Obama, Sarah Palin, The People's Cube
A Couple of Interesting Links
As people living at a certain time in history, we look around at all that is wrong with the world and think to ourselves that it was so much better way-back-when. The problem is that there was no way-back-when. All of the problems we face today have been faced in the past by other societies. The thing to remember is that we must keep our sense of humor. As bad as things may seem at times, you can always find laughter somewhere. The newest source is the website created by those faux commies at
The People's Cube. This one is:
Best Obama Facts. According to the description at the top of the page,
The living heroic legend that is Barack Obama has already broken the pop-culture record of Baghdad Bob and is now approaching that of Chuck Norris and Vladimir Putin. When even Obama's official campaign is forced to launch a fact-checking website to keep his runaway aura under control, you just know that Obama's public persona has developed a life of its own and is resisting efforts to catch it and put it on Ritalin. We thought that the best way to take control of the situation would be by using Obama's own patented method of hopeful approach to reality. So we built a radically different website: it looks like Obama's fact-checking site, only instead of chasing cowardly facts and arguing old truths that are tarnished and tedious, we invent new,sparkling-clean truths that are exciting and heroic. The beauty of this approach is that when new truths become old and tarnished, they can be easily thrown under the bus and replaced with newer and better heroic truths, ensuring Obama's glorious march towards a higher metaphysical plane of unstoppable service to humankind.
There is much more, some of it first seen at The People's Cube, and some brand new; at least I'd never seen it before.
While not nearly as humorous as the previous link (although he can provoke chuckles when he wants to),
Jonah Goldberg's column on capitalism is still worth reading.
We've all witnessed the tendency to take a boon for granted. Being accustomed to a provision naturally leads the human heart to consider that provision an entitlement. Hence the not-infrequent lawsuits from prison inmates cruelly denied their rights to cable TV or apple brown betty for desert.
And so it goes, I think, with capitalism generally.
Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.
People ask, "Why is there poverty in the world?" It's a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.
The interesting question isn't "Why is there poverty?" It's "Why is there wealth?" Or: "Why is there prosperity here but not there?"
At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.
So go get some laughs and go be better informed. The world's troubles will remain, or they will be traded for new ones. We can still care about them, but if you don't laugh sometimes you will go nuts.
Labels: Best Obama Facts, capitalism, Jonah Goldberg, Obama, The People's Cube
Alternative History of The United States
Forget Howard Zinn and the other revisionist historians. He and they are absolute and total morons, complete dopes, utter fools, ultramaroons. The real secret (shhhhh) history of The United States is over at
The People's Cube, the site I swiped this picture from, and the funniest satirical site on the Web.
Happy Independence Day! And yes, I have to go for a laugh today.
Labels: The People's Cube
If Time Magazine Was on Our Side
Red Square, proprietor of
The People's Cube, briefly stepped out of character to post the following editorial/photoshop,
I suppose this merely exposes the jingoistic war monger in me. Or maybe I just think the United States needs to win this war and it's the responsibility of the MSM and the Democrats in Congress to help.
Labels: General Petraeus, The People's Cube
Israel Dismantles; World's Problems End
The
headline is from what might be the funniest site on the web,
The People's Cube.
Persistent rhetoric coming from concerned progressive critics worldwide has finally convinced Israeli officials that the state of Israel has no moral right to exist. "That's it," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained at a press conference. "We are dismantling the Nation of Israel. I'm leaving for Poland next week."
"My cabinet and I had long discussions about world troubles, and we concluded that our critics are right - all the troubles can be traced back to us. So, in order to resolve these issues, we felt it would be best to extend our withdrawal beyond Gaza to include the West Bank and Israel proper," Sharon said. "The Gaza pullout was only a test, and the ensuing waves of peace and brotherhood it had triggered in Palestine and beyond, encouraged us to disband altogether. Without us here, people of the world will finally be able, once again, to live in permanent harmony and understanding - just like they all did before Israel's founding nearly sixty years ago."
Palestinian President Abu Mazen: "We believe that our future is in limited government. We will bring to fruition all the programs started in refugee camps, such as our breakthroughs in medicine, education, applied and theoretical sciences, nanotechnology, and space exploration."
From Russia to Morocco to Yemen to France, countries are anticipating the arrival of Israelis. In Moscow, an enormous banner was erected that read "Welcome Home, Jews." and erstwhile presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky exclaimed, "I'm going to bake a huge batch of cookies for this homecoming!" And in cities throughout Germany, joyous "Judenfests" were ubiquitous, as local citizens were arranging festivals to celebrate the Jewish arrival. German foreign minister Joschka Fischer indicated that, "For some reason, the Jewish presence in Germany is low by historical standards; many of our citizens under the age of 70 have never even met a Jew. In addition to curing the world's problems, the dismantling of Israel will give our people the opportunity to achieve their main wish in life - to live with Jews."
Similarly, the new Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has kicked off a popular "Iran-loves-Jews" campaign that will include a sensitive re-writing of the laws to accommodate religions other than Islam.
It's worth reading the whole thing. Great satire is always worth reading.
Labels: Israel, The People's Cube
War's legitimate object is more perfect peace. Flavius Vegitius Renatus
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CHALLAH AKBAR
