The benefits of well educated baristas.

The Wall Street Journal has an article bemoaning the well educated barista economy. Of course they don’t put it quite that way in their article, the subhead if which is: A new study offers an unsettling explanation of why young adults have been hit so hard.

But in the spirit of those who hailed the benefits of losing your job. Not only can you get a chance to do your own thing, but according to Nancy Pelosi, those unemployment benefits you get create more jobs.  And if you lost your job becaue of ObamaCare, it's really not a loss, but an "escape." 

With that view in mind, I want to explain why college educated baristas are a net plus for the American people.

Let’s face it, modern college graduates have just left the greatest brainwashing system since the Communists invented the “re-education centers” to set their enemies right. Do you really want those budding neo-Marxists to get on the first rung of the ladder of success?

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry – to say nothing about the lesser lights of the current regime – are the product of the counter-culture of the 1960s academy. Today it’s no longer the counter-culture but the firmly entrenched establishment – the Ruling Class - who will defenestrate you of you step out of line. “You say you believe marriage is between a man and woman? HOMOPHOBE! No job for you!” Use the wrong term-du-jour for someone with a different skin color … RAAAACIST! Mention that the President seems to spend an inordinate amount of time playing golf: RAAAACIST. Wonder why women need their birth control pills provided by the taxpayer? SEXIST!

You can be sure that the current crop of college graduates firmly believe these things. They have internalized them so that they no longer think about them. Or they have learned to mouth the correct phrases, kept their heads down to stay in college or keep a job. Do you really want these brainwashed robots doing anything but serving coffee until the conditioning wears off?

Hurray for Starbucks!

Unedited Tape of Bundy Emerges, Sheds Light on 'Racist' Remarks

The mainstream media lie, but they lie in a certain way.  They don't misquote you, they just edit out part of what you say to twist your meaning and then lie about what you meant.  Thanks to DRUDGE and the Truth Revolt, we now get a chance to hear what Cliven Bundy really said.

A new, unedited version of comments by Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy has emerged, and it sheds some light on the context of his remarks, universally condemned on Thursday as horrifically racist.

The 67-year-old Bundy, battling the U.S. government after federal agents stormed his ranch to confiscate his cattle in a dispute over grazing fees, said far more than what appeared in the New York Times and most other news accounts. While his grammar is pretty bad -- and his use of "negro" and "colored" considered politically incorrect (although they were both once preferred terms chosen by blacks) -- he actually was making a larger point, not simply deriding blacks.

In a YouTube video, he is filmed already in mid-sentence.

... and so what I've testified to you -- I was in the Watts riot, I seen the beginning fire and I seen that last fire. What I seen is civil disturbance. People are not happy, people are thinking they don't have their freedoms, they didn't have these things, and they didn't have them.

We've progressed quite a bit from that day until now, and we sure don't want to go back. We sure don't want the colored people to go back to that point. We sure don't want these Mexican people to go back to that point. And we can make a difference right now by taking care of some of these bureaucracies, and do it in a peaceful way.

Those comments appear to change the context of the next section, which was quoted in the New York Times. One clear point the rancher made: America has progressed since the 1965 race riots and "we sure don't want to go back."

Here are the heavily quoted comments from Bundy that followed the above section edited out by most news organizations.

Let me tell, talk to you about the Mexicans, and these are just things I know about the negroes. I want to tell you one more thing I know about the negro. When I go, went, go to Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, and I would see these little government houses, and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids -- and there's always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch. They didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

And because they were basically on government subsidy -- so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never, they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered are they were better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things? Or are they better off under government subsidy?

You know they didn’t get more freedom, they got less freedom -- they got less family life, and their happiness -- you could see it in their faces -- they wasn't happy sitting on that concrete sidewalk. Down there they was probably growing their turnips -- so that’s all government, that’s not freedom.

But Bundy went on after saying that -- and again, his comments were edited out of most reports.

Now, let me talk about the Spanish people. You know, I understand that they come over here against our Constitution and cross our borders. But they’re here and they’re people -- and I’ve worked side by side a lot of them.

Don’t tell me they don’t work, and don’t tell me they don’t pay taxes. And don’t tell me they don’t have better family structures than most of us white people. When you see those Mexican families, they’re together, they picnic together, they’re spending their time together, and I’ll tell you in my way of thinking they’re awful nice people. And we need to have those people join us and be with us not, not come to our party.

So, Bundy thinks Hispanics are hard-working family people, and laments the current plight of American blacks under the federal welfare system while saying there has been much progress and that "we sure don't want to go back." As always, there's more to the story than what the New York Times says.

And there's this from Real Clear Politics:
Black Bundy Bodyguard: He's Not A Racist; "I'd Take A Bullet For That Man"

CNN REPORTER: You're protecting this man and he's wondering whether African-Americans would be better off as slaves. How does that strike you?

JASON BULLOCK, BODYGUARD FOR CLIVEN BUNDY: It doesn't strike me any kind of way. This is still the same old Mr. Bundy I met from the first day of all this happening.

CNN REPORTER: But aren't those offensive comments to you

BULLOCK: Not at all.

CNN REPORTER: Not offensive?

BULLOCK: Because Mr. Bundy is not a racist. Ever since I've been here he's treated me with nothing but hospitality. He's pretty much treated me like his own family.

###

BULLOCK: I would take a bullet for that man, if need be. I look up to him just like I do my own grandfather.

CNN REPORTER: Why?

BULLOCK: Because I believe in his cause and after having met Mr. Bundy a few times, I have a really good feel about him and I'm a pretty good judge of character.

Obama and the Deus ex Machina

Richard Fernandez discusses the Obama plan for the world; but "plan" is too strong a word.  It's more of a faith that - left to itself - the world will turn out the way Obama imagines it. 

The administration appears to believe there is some kind of natural international legal order which will enforce itself. Hillary Clinton, asked to comment on Russia’s dismemberment of the Ukraine ventured that Moscow would be punished by a kind of Karma. “I think the outcome for him and Russia will not be good, which is deeply unfortunate,” she said. “Russia should be a much more dynamic and much more successful country and could be if Putin weren't trying to turn the clock back to the Soviet Union days.”

Senior administration officials make all these curious reference to the “clock” or the “21st century behavior”. Obama once reviled Romney by saying the “80′s wanted their foreign policy back” as if the decades could be reified. When he wants to be more precise Obama invokes the hand of “international community” to explain whose chastisement will descend on the international malefactor.

But it is always some unspecified mystical force — never Washington itself — who will square the account. For example, you have the administration’s assurances that Putin will be punished for invading the Ukraine by some ineffable force, just as long as you remember that force won’t be the administration.

For a town that doesn't believe much in God, Washington is more full of ghostly invocations than a whiskey preacher; as if the god of history were a palpable presence, standing at their right hand, waiting to clean up after them. They say this even though in Ukraine, for instance, Moscow said “that it would immediately start military maneuvers along the border with Ukraine”. That sounds like a threat to which Kerry could only retort by saying “the window to change course is closing.”

So now it’s the window what’s going to punish Putin.

For spokesmen for this administration, that airy, hard to pin down. mystical force, a Deus ex Machina who put things right.  Team Obama's role will be to cheer that force on, to hold its coat while the inevitable "march of history" does the job.

You wonder where they get these ideas. The faith of religious snake handlers can’t compare to the firm belief of the Obama cultists that the world will magically come to the same conclusions they have.

I doubt if Obama believes in the God of the Bible, but he appears to believe that there is some kind of historical force - perhaps gained from reading the Marxist theory of historical evolution - that will result in the end that he imagines.  It could explain his administration's use of these strange clock or date references.

And if it doesn't, that's his successor's problem.  He'll be a wealthy divorcee after he leaves office.

Who got the $300 million from Oregon's Obama Care website flop?

Oregon pissed away $300 million on a website to enroll people in ObamaCare that has - to date - signed up ZERO people. That's right, not one person has actually been able to sign up for health insurance using this system.

That leads many people to shake their heads in wonder, but leads us to ask "who got the money?"

Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber promised to lead the nation on ObamaCare and he did—from behind. The worst-in-America launch collapsed even harder than Healthcare.gov. The exchange website known as Cover Oregon still hasn't enrolled one person, and the state has spent about $7 million signing up merely 69,000 people manually using paper applications.

.... Investigators at the KATU news station uncovered evidence suggesting that Cover Oregon officials created a fake website to create the illusion of progress for the feds, who made ObamaCare grants that totalled $303 million.

"Created a fake website?"  This is not simply colossal, stupendous and world-class incompetence, but it appears to involved a criminal conspiracy involving hundreds of millions of dollars.

Is Team Obama interested in where the money went and who got rich as a result?  You have to be kidding me. Quoting Obama: 'This thing is working," and the press got the message. Attorney General Eric Holder is ignoring this and the race-baiting members of the Liberal media are crowing how great ObamaCare is. Because Obama said so.  Period.

GE: We Bring Bad Karma to Life

It turns out that GE, in bed with Obama from before the beginning of his disastrous administration, is suffering from the policies of the administration it cheered on.

General Electric is telling its investors that Obamacare is to blame for recent losses in the company’s health care division, The Daily Caller has learned.

It's noted that it's the stupid inconsistency of Team Obama that is leading to the current economic malaise, much as it did during FDR's "Great Depression."

The second under-discussed issue is what scholar Robert Higgs has called “regime uncertainty.” Roosevelt’s victory in 1936 had been so convincing that people believed he might do anything. FDR reinforced this suspicion with an inaugural address so aggressive that modern presidential advisers would never allow it on the teleprompter. Roosevelt told the nation he sought in government “an instrument of unimagined power.” That scared markets and small businesses.

Roosevelt relished hunting down big firms through regulatory action and blaming new sectors, such as utilities, for slowdowns — on some days. Other days, he invited business leaders into the Oval Office and talked about partnership and a “breathing spell.”

This inconsistency itself posed a problem. The diary of an Ohio lawyer named Daniel Roth, which was recently republished, captures the pervasive anxiety of the period. “We are having a bad steel strike in Youngstown and the mills have closed,” Roth wrote on June 22, 1937. “The state and federal governments seem to support the labor unions and there has been a complete breakdown of law and order. Business is very quiet.”

From the U.K., John Maynard Keynes wrote to FDR that it was all right

to nationalize utilities or to leave them alone — but what, Keynes asked, was “the object of chasing the utilities around the lot every other week?””

Oregon county puts stop to incinerating aborted babies for electricity

The Marion County Board of Commissioners announced late Wednesday that they are putting a stop to a waste-to-energy facility’s program that was incinerating aborted babies to produce electricity....This news came one month after the remains of more than 15,000 aborted babies were found to have been incinerated, along with other “medical waste,” to heat and generate power for British hospitals.

‘Fire Harry Reid’ becomes GOP rallying cry heading into 2014 elections

On Wednesday, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus described Mr. Reid as “dirty” and “unethical.”

The coming Obama divorce

According to Kazuyuki Hamadam a member of Japan's parliament: 'It is an open secret that the pair are already negotiating their divorce, and that they are waiting for his term in office to be over, and then they'll separate.'  The National Inquirer, who broke the story of John Edwards affairs, agrees.

Obama 'ate only half' the sushi course

But a report Thursday said instead of making small talk and savouring Japanese delicacies at Sukiyabashi Jiro -- dubbed the world's best sushi restaurant and the subject of the 2011 documentary "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" -- Obama jumped straight into discussions about trade.

The owner of a yakitori (grilled chicken) restaurant that sits in the same basement as the exclusive diner told Tokyo Broadcasting System that Obama had put his chopsticks down at the halfway point.

The man said a sushi chef from the restaurant told him the leaders' chat was quite formal, the broadcaster said.

Unlike Obama, Abe munched the whole way through the offerings from 88-year-old legend Jiro Ono, who serves around 20 pieces of sushi one by one at the customer's pace, it said.

Obama's more of a Kobe beef guy.

Andrew Klavan: International Men's Day

God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

If I wanted America to fail

H/T Vander Leun

Removing the privileges of privileged member of society

Like the racist whites who wanted to keep their racial privileges conferred by Jim Crow laws, Justice Sonya Sotomayor attempted to stand in the schoolhouse door to prevent all the people of the country from equal treatment under the law. As Antonin Scalia said, it was “shameful.”

Just as the movement for racial equality took time in the old South, it will take a generation before the vestiges of the racial spoils system instituted by the Left are eradicated. But that time will come. 

Isn't this what is properly known as a frank and honest discussion on race?  Or is it too early for frankness and honesty?

Medicare is as useful as Linus's security blanket.

SCIENCE!

It turns out that the latest study of the effectiveness of Medicare on patient health is non-existent.  Here's the summary from the New England Journal of Medicine:

CONCLUSIONS
This randomized, controlled study showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years, but it did increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain.

Like a child's security blanket, it made people who had it feel better for having it.

Obama's Greatest Achievement - Re-Establishing the Soviet Union

People who see the world through the lens of domestic politics label ObamaCare as Barack Obama’s signature achievement. They are wrong. Obama has had a much greater, and more ominous achievement in the geopolitical arena.  What did Obama really have in mind when he told Medvedev that after his re-election he would have greater flexibility?  

As he assumed office, the world was uni-polar and the US was the sole superpower. Five years into his Presidency, Iraq is reverting to sectarian warfare and becoming an Iranian client state. Afghanistan is slipping away as fast as American troops are leaving. Egypt was taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood and is now a military dictatorship making eyes at Moscow. Libya is a movie set in which it’s dictator is overthrown, Americans are murdered, armed al Qaida bands rule the streets and there is no a functioning government. Iran is developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Al Qaida has a mass meeting in Yemen and has to release a video to let the CIA know. Israel, having decided that American guarantees under Obama are worse than worthless, has decided to go its own way, exhibiting a healthy example of clear-sightedness.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is as busy as a boy with Legos, reassembling the Soviet Union to the cheers of his fellow countrymen who felt humiliated by the dissolution of the Evil Empire under Reagan and Bush.

From the Financial Times:

But Moscow’s annexation of Crimea has set off rapid and drastic changes that threaten to submerge such outposts of dissent. In a speech marking the consummation of Russia’s union with the Black Sea peninsula on March 18, Mr Putin lashed out against a “fifth column” of “national traitors” enlisted by the west to subvert Russia. He vowed to respond forcefully.

His warning – especially his choice of phrases widely used by nationalist dictatorships as well as Russia’s own former Communist regime – has resonated strongly with Russians. They have been taken as a rallying cry among those aggrieved by Russia’s diminished power to build a prouder, stronger and more authoritarian state. For Mr Putin’s liberal critics, it is a worrying sign that the rest of the country’s imperfect democratic institutions are under severe threat.

In a column that set the tone for both commentaries and blogposts, the conservative journalist Ulyana Skoibeda raved two weeks ago that after the return of Crimea “I no longer live in a conquered country”. In a long lament that reflects the feelings frequently expressed by ordinary Russians, she described the past 23 years as humiliating. Ms Skoibeda said her life had been dominated by western norms, and she had had to suffer through the chaos and deprivation unleashed by the democratic and economic experiments of the 1990s.

Standing proudly against the entire world had revived the essence of the Soviet Union, she wrote. “It is not Crimea that has returned. We have returned. Home. To the USSR.”

Since the Crimea annexation, there have been frequent moves that symbolise a Soviet revival.

The American health care system can be fixed and improved as soon as the ideologues who demand that the government run everything are removed from office. The real problem, one that may have mass death and war as one of its possible outcomes, is the deliberate destruction of the Pax Americana that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whether that is by accident or design is uncertain, but the fact is indisputable.

That is Obama’s real legacy.