Chicken little can be lethal

Teen kills herself ahead of foretold rapture

by Russian Times

A 14-year-old girl from the Republic of Mari El in Central Russia has committed suicide, allegedly because she was afraid of the upcoming doomsday, predicted by the American radio preacher Harold Camping.

Nastya Zachinova believed the news that the world would end on May 21, her family told the tabloid LifeNews. The once lively teenager became angsty and withdrawn. On the Saturday in which the rapture had been predicted to start, she committed suicide after returning home from school.

Her personal diary shows she was terrified of the perils of the apocalypse, which she believed humanity was about to endure.

“We are not righteous; only the righteous will go to heaven, and we’ll stay on earth and face terrible suffering,” one of the entries says.

A farewell text message says she didn’t want to die with everyone else and would take her life in advance.

“She took this date too close to heart,” Nastya’s mother Lyudmila told the tabloid.

Police are currently gathering reports from Nastya’s friends .They believe somebody may have been behind the terror which haunted the girl in her final days.

Harold Camping and his supporters launched a world-wide campaign to inform humanity about the upcoming rapture, the date of which he predicted based on a series of convoluted calculations taken from the bible.  A few ads promoting his message were put on billboards in Russia as well.

After the prediction proved false, Camping recanted his original claim, stating that the end of the world will now come in October.

Some pigs are more equal ...

More ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ from our betters

by MEREDITH JESSUP

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood unveiled new fuel economy labels for cars today, noting how they are “a win for automobile consumers and for the nation’s energy independence.”

As for Mr. LaHood himself, he reportedly arrived to the ceremony in this 12mpg Chevy Suburban SUV:

Liberal control freaks in action

If you want to see the future of American (or Greek) cuisine under ever-encroaching soft totalitarianism, have a look at Denmark, where they have just banned a British delicacy called Marmite:

The strongly flavoured dark brown spread made from brewer's yeast has joined Rice Crispies, Shreddies, Horlicks and Ovaltine prohibited in Denmark under legislation forbidding the sale of food products with added vitamins as threat to public health.

Many well known breakfast cereal and drink brands have already been banned or taken off supermarket shelves after Danish legislation in 2004 restricted foods fortified with extra vitamins or minerals.

But Marmite had escaped notice as an exotic import for a small number of ex-pats until the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration telephoned Abigail's, a Copenhagen shop selling British food, to ban the famous yeast spread.

"I don't eat it myself, I don't like it but Marmite was one of our best selling products. Not a day goes by without someone coming in and asking for it," said Marianne Ørum, the shop owner.

"All the English people here are shaking their heads in disbelief and say that it is insane. I agree but it is the law. It's becoming impossible to run a business in this country. We are not allowed to do anything anymore. It is the way Denmark is going."

As New York's nanny state dictator Michael Bloomberg constantly reminds us with his bizarre jihads against basic food staples like salt, it's the way the whole Western World is going. Once bureaucrats have gotten away with claiming authority over what we eat, they will incrementally ban everything imaginable until we are left gnawing on bark like North Koreans.

This is why it is crucial to never yield a single inch to liberal control freaks.

It's not a joke. Really.

Oil-Rich Venezuela Still Suffers From Energy Shortage

by Dave Blount

As the great counter-moonbat Milton Friedman observed,

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."

What would happen if you put a socialist of similar stripe in charge of Venezuela, a founding member of OPEC that is floating on oil? Naturally, the result would be an energy shortage:

Venezuela will ration power again this year, planning steps similar to those taken in 2010 amid an energy crisis, Electricity Minister Ali Rodriguez said.

"We're going to reapply the measures we applied in Caracas last year nationwide, which punishes the wasting of electricity and encourages energy savings," Rodriguez said in an interview on state television….

The USA also has massive fossil fuel reserves. But unless we overthrow our leftist kakistocracy, this won't do us any good.

"Managing the poor. Part II

A Nation of Takers, Not Makers

More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined

By STEPHEN MOORE

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government. It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?
Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida's ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York's.
Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.

"Managing" the poor

Government vs. Production

By Ben Stein

Impose the world's highest corporate income tax rate, and we can expect the result will be too few corporations and too much government.

"The United States may soon wind up with the distinction that makes business leaders cringe -- the highest corporate tax rate in the world," wrote New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski last week.

"Topping out at 35 percent, America's corporate income tax rate trails that of only Japan, at 39.5 percent, which has said it plans to lower its rate," reported Kocieniewski.

Include additional taxes imposed at the state level, and the corporate tax rate in the U.S. jumps to more than 40 percent in 19 states.

Leading the pack are Iowa and Pennsylvania with corporate income taxes, respectively, of 12 percent and 9.99 percent, creating the nation's highest barriers via taxation to new corporate investment and associated new jobs.

Similarly in relation to obstacles to business expansion: Create an education system that produces four times more college graduates in social science and history than in engineering and computer science, and we can expect to see too many American firms unable to compete in the global marketplace and too many academics writing papers on America's lack of competitiveness.

In "We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers" Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal, reported that in the U.S. today, "there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million)."

In short, we got better at expanding bureaucracies than manufacturing cars, better at making rules and regulations than producing clothes or oil.

It wasn't always this way. The world's first automatic transmission was invented in 1904 in Boston. The year before, Orville Wright became the first person in history to be a passenger in a machine that had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight.

In 1960, the aforementioned 2-to-1 ratio between government employees and manufacturing workers in America was weighted precisely in the opposite direction, as Moore reported, with "15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government."

Utopia-land and the negation of economics

Red Ink and Upward Redistribution

By Ralph R. Reiland

After doing nothing during his first two years in office to deal with the debt tsunami that's clearly visible on the horizon and heading our way, President Obama delivered a 2012 budget plan that, asInvestor's Business Daily accurately editorialized, "proposed spending $252 billion more in 2012 than the feds spent in 2010 -- at the height of the stimulus spending spree."

Longer run, worse than doing nothing, Obama's projected budgets over the next decade add enough trillions in red ink to double the size of the incoming tsunami.

The federal government's current $14 trillion debt averages out to approximately $50,000 per American, $200,000 for a family of four. For the half of U.S. households who still pay federal income taxes, that averages out to $400,000 per family for those are getting stuck with the tab.

Add to that the next decade's proposed red ink and each of those taxpaying household ends up, on average, $800,000 in the hole. That could become an unworkable $80,000 a year in interest payments per taxpaying household, on average, if the U.S. credit rating drops and lenders require 10 percent interest payments.

Unfortunately, even this $800,000 per family scenario is based on some very rough and overly optimistic guesswork. Politicians projecting out a decade and more have every incentive to paint a rosy scenario, plus a clear incentive at every election cycle to buy more votes via additional trillions in red ink.

Nothing succeeds, as planned.

The third-world Cuba the Castro revolution saved us from

By Alberto de la Cruz

Here is the third-world country the Castro revolution saved Cubans from. Notice how primitive and uncivilized the capital of Havana was in the 1950s, while today, thanks to the Castro revolution, it is a clean, well-maintained modern mecca.

"Most Californians are undoubtedly feeling dread today"

Jailbreak

by Heather Mac Donald

If the real-world consequences for individuals and communities were not so potentially dire, the mass release of inmates from California prisons just ordered by the Supreme Court would carry considerable interest as a criminological experiment. For decades, academics and advocates have argued that the U.S. is over-incarcerating its criminal population. Driven by irrational fear and political cowardice, the anti-incarceration lobby maintains, we are locking up harmless sad sacks who should never have been sent to prison in the first place. Recently, academics such as Columbia law professor Jeffrey Fagan have gone one step further: Not only are the country’s incarceration policies unnecessary, they’re positively harmful to communities. Sending convicted offenders to prison breaks apart stable families and prevents other families from forming in the first place. High rates of incarceration tied to certain communities are not the result of high rates of crime, in this view; they are, rather, the cause of those high crime rates.

With regards to California in particular, anti-prison advocates argue that the state enforces draconian policies with parole and probation violators: it sends them back to prison far too frequently. Missing a parole appointment, or being found in gang territory in violation of your conditions, the advocates say, shouldn’t be treated as such a big deal. Anyone can slip up.
In fact, we have already lived through this coming experiment. During the 1960s and much of the 1970s, America had a very low rate of incarceration, even though crime was blasting through the roof. In 1967, James Q. Wilson wryly observed in The Public Interest: “Other than drunks, the average criminal or delinquent will so rarely be sent to jail that the large numbers of inmates can be explained only by assuming that they were born there or wandered in by mistake.” It was precisely because our lax incarceration policies seemed to be contributing to, rather than lessening, America’s crime problem that states gradually began decreasing judicial discretion in sentencing offenders to probation or issuing lax sentences. Starting in the late 1970s, states began imposing mandatory sentences and three-strikes felony laws and requiring that offenders serve most of their sentences. The prison population unquestionably grew: the per-capita rate of imprisonment tripled from 1973 to 2000; the number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2007, from 300,000 to 1.59 million. During the 1980s, national crime rates were variable even as the prison population inexorably rose. But in the 1990s, as the incapacitative potential of prison reached its maximum “throw weight,” in UC Berkeley criminologist Frank Zimring’s phrasing, crime nationally began a long, unprecedented drop, when the greatest number of criminals was off the streets. Coincidence? California may find out.

Three chairs for Detroit!

TRUCE AND CONSEQUENCES

by Mark Steyn

Mitch Daniels has wrapped up his "To be or not to be" routine, and, according to Paul Rahe, left the GOP looking like a hamlet without a prince. Paul is upset. I'm less so. As I said on the radio some months back, one should never underestimate the Republican Party's ability to screw up its presidential nomination. The GOP had a grand night last November only because the entire party establishment was more or less absent from the 2010 election dynamic. It would be unreasonable to expect that luck to hold, and a presidential year requires a single frontman for the party that makes election season less friendly to decentralized insurgency Tea Party-style.

And in any case doesn't last November seem an awful long time ago? A transformative Tuesday night, followed by an entirely untransformed Wednesday morning after. There is the Paul Ryan plan, but last year's hero Scott Brown has come out against it. And he won't be the last if NY-26 goes south. And the Ryan plan itself is, in the grand scheme of the looming abyss, extremely minimal and cautious.

Governor Daniels' long tease over the Presidential race will be remembered mainly for one thing - the "truce" he called for over so-called "social issues". This was depressing on two fronts: First because Republicans spend too much time pre-emptively conceding and agreeing to play on the left's turf - and, if ever there were an electoral cycle when that should be unnecessary, it's this one. And secondly because the social issues are not separate from the debt crisis. The collapse of the American family is a fiscal issue: Unwed women are one of the most reliable voting groups for big government.

Steven Hayward suggests Daniels proposed the wrong truce, and that the one implicit in the Ryan plan is closer to what's needed: Both Republicans and Democrats accept the current obligations of the welfare state, and figure out a way to make them work. I'm inclined to agree with Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute - that the GOP would get suckered:

There is no evidence that if conservatives agree not to try to roll back the welfare state, liberals will agree to restrain its growth. More likely, conservatives will simply become involved in a bidding war, in which they will inevitably look like the less caring party.

You don't need to hypothesize about that. In essence, it's the "truce" accepted by so-called "right-of-center" parties (Jacques Chirac) in post-war Europe. And all it means is that the troika of permanent bureaucracy, government unions, and a vast dependency class gets to carry on bankrupting the nation even under nominally "conservative" government.

Out there in Insolvistan life goes on. Detroit, a city that has the functioning literacy rate of a West African basket case, has just renovated its library with designer chairs from Allermuir costing $1,000 apiece. Any books to go with the chairs? Who cares? "How about the young mother with several children that looks forward to a weekly trek through the snow/sleet to improve their reading skills and are hopeful that a spot near the fireplaces will be open, because the warmth provided is greater than what they experience at home?" argues Allermuir sales rep Paul Gingell in a Dickensian vignette that warms the heart of my bottom almost as much as his chairs do. God forbid any Detroiter should be required to "improve their reading skills" without a thousand-dollar seat to sink their illiterate posteriors into. What matters is to keep spending at all costs. Three chairs for Detroit!

The battle cry of the Elite

"Do You Know Who I Am?"

by  John Hayward

Fox News is running an exclusive with new details about the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, gleaned from “law enforcement sources close to the investigation.”  The former IMF chief is charged with perpetrating a violent sexual assault against a maid.

One interesting detail is that Strauss-Kahn was apparently lurking in his hotel suite long after checkout time, and evaded detection by at least one room service employee, suggesting he might have been lying in wait for the maid.  Even $3000 suites have check-out times.  You’ve got to make room for the next high-rolling socialist overlord who needs the junior presidential suite.

The most striking bit of information contained in the Fox report is the one I just knew would surface eventually.  According to the maid, when she begged DSK to let her go and wailed that she could lose her job, he replied, “Don’t worry, you’re not going to lose your job.  Please, baby, don’t worry.  Don’t you know who I am?”

Ah, the battle cry of the privileged elitist.  It translates readily into every language.  They belt it out whenever their desires are thwarted by law, custom, or the rights of an insignificant citizen.  To name one example that comes readily to mind, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Junior angrily bellowed the question at the cop who arrested him for acting suspiciously outside his own home. 

It’s the punch line to many a tale of ordinary people running afoul of Massachusetts senator John Kerry. In a 2004 essay, Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr said most such stories “have a common theme: our junior senator pulling rank on one of his constituents, breaking in line, demanding to pay less (or nothing), or ducking out before the bill arrives.  The tales often have one other common thread: most end with Senator Kerry inquiring of the lesser mortal, do you know who I am?”

It’s funny how so many of the elitists are loudly obsessed with the plight of the “common man.”  The irony of a top-ranking “socialist” blowing thousands of dollars on a fabulously plush hotel suite is lost on the Left… because to them, it’s not ironic. 

Of course the all-wise, all-knowing masters of destiny live elaborate lifestyles.  It’s only logical, once you accept the premise that society should be ordered and structured by a permanent elite ruling class. Such structure requires a great deal of power to create and enforce.  The powerful do not live the same way as the powerless.  Their sense of entitlement is only deepened by the moralistic language deployed against their political adversaries by fellow leftists.  If they are opposed only by monsters, then they must be gods. 

Many observers have expressed amazement that Dominique Strauss-Kahn would risk a position of fabulous wealth and power – to be almost certainly succeeded by the presidency of France – in order to assault a hotel maid.  Indeed, this is cited by some of his more arrogant defenders as evidence that the maid is lying, or serving as part of some nefarious plot by his political enemies to destroy him. 

 It’s not really hard to understand in the context of the boorish behavior displayed by DSK on numerous occasions… which, according to the New York Post, culminated in him barking “What a nice ass!” to a flight attendant on the Air France plane where he was arrested.  His career ended in that New York hotel room because he forgot who he was.  Fortunately, the NYPD was able to remind him, before the plane took off.

Game over

In Europe, Rifts Widen Over Greece

By LANDON THOMAS Jr.

Fissures among Europe’s currency partners are becoming even deeper and more widespread than was previously evident, raising new doubts about whether the group can resolve the regional debt crisis that has simmered for more than a year.

Gloomy investors on Monday drove down Europe’s stock indexes by about 2 percent, while the euro fell nearly 1 percent against the dollar, touching a two-month low.

Meanwhile, yields rose on 10-year Spanish and Italian bonds, reflecting a market perception that the risks are rising that those two indebted nations might be following the downward spiral of Greece. Greek 10-year bonds reached a record 16.8 percent as investors demanded a high premium for holding them.

On Wall Street, major stock indexes were also down more than 1 percent, in part over the uncertainties in Europe.

The markets seem to reflect the growing discord within the 17-member euro zone currency union, barely a year after European governments came together with a 750 billion euro ($1 trillion) safety net for debtor-nation members. Tensions also remain over whether to restructure Greece’s debt and force bondholders to take losses.

It is clear that the bailout package and the austerity terms imposed on Greece have deepened its recession and added to its already substantial debt burden. The debate now is whether making more cuts and recharging a program to privatize many formerly government-run agencies and social services in Greece will be enough to persuade a reluctant Europe to lend the country another 60 billion euros.

“It looks like a real unraveling — everyone is taking their own position and as a result cooperation has become an impossibility,” said Paul De Grauwe, an economist in Brussels who advises the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso.

The discord has become increasingly apparent since Greece’s financial decision makers were summoned to secret talks at a Luxembourg castle by their currency partners this month.

The Greeks probably knew that a tongue-lashing over the country’s stumbling financial overhaul effort was coming. What they probably did not expect was that beleaguered Spain and Italy, as opposed to economically robust Germany, would take the lead in upbraiding them.

The meeting, on May 6, showed that the disagreements in the euro zone were not just between richer northern countries like Germany and the less wealthy south.

"A Republic, if you can keep it"

The Conquest of the US by Spain

By Ralph Raico

The year 1898 was a landmark in American history. It was the year America went to war with Spain — our first engagement with a foreign enemy in the dawning age of modern warfare. Aside from a few scant periods of retrenchment, we have been embroiled in foreign politics ever since.

Starting in the 1880s, a group of Cubans agitated for independence from Spain. Like many revolutionaries before and after, they had little real support among the mass of the population. Thus they resorted to terrorist tactics — devastating the countryside, dynamiting railroads, and killing those who stood in their way. The Spanish authorities responded with harsh countermeasures.

Some American investors in Cuba grew restive, but the real forces pushing America toward intervention were not a handful of sugarcane planters. The slogans the rebels used — "freedom" and "independence" — resonated with many Americans, who knew nothing of the real circumstances in Cuba. Also playing a part was the "black legend" — the stereotype of the Spaniards as bloodthirsty despots that Americans had inherited from their English forebears. It was easy for Americans to believe the stories peddled by the insurgents, especially when the "yellow" press discovered that whipping up hysteria over largely concocted Spanish "atrocities" — while keeping quiet about those committed by the rebels — sold papers.

Politicians on the lookout for publicity and popular favor saw a gold mine in the Cuban issue. Soon the American government was directing notes to Spain expressing its "concern" over "events" in Cuba. In fact, the "events" were merely the tactics colonial powers typically used in fighting a guerrilla war. As bad or worse was being done by Britain, France, Germany, and others all over the globe in that age of imperialism. Spain, aware of the immense superiority of American forces, responded to the interference from Washington by attempts at appeasement, while trying to preserve the shreds of its dignity as an ancient imperial power.

When William McKinley became president in 1897, he was already planning to expand America's role in the world. Spain's Cuban troubles provided the perfect opportunity. Publicly, McKinley declared, "We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression." But within the US government, the influential cabal that was seeking war and expansion knew they had found their man. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, now at the Navy Department, "Unless I am profoundly mistaken, the Administration is now committed to the large policy we both desire." This "large policy," also supported by Secretary of State John Hay and other key figures, aimed at breaking decisively with our tradition of nonintervention and neutrality in foreign affairs. The United States would at last assume its "global responsibilities," and join the other great powers in the scramble for territory around the world.