Global Warming Hits Fort Worth, Texas.

We've been snowed in since Thursday night, and there's a good chance that we want get out until Monday.  This is the view from my front door. 

We have 36 months before we reach the earth's "Tipping Point" when it will be too late to stop irreversible global warming. 

According to Secretary Of State John Kerry, we have less then 30 days before the Arctic is ice-free. 

Seriously.  Who are you going to believe?  Al Gore and John Kerry?  Or your lying eyes?

 

But Obama graduated from Harvard! With honors!

One of the barroom arguments that I most often encounter goes something like this.... "If Barack Obama is a totally incompetent idiot, how did he manage to graduate with honors from Harvard?"

As it turns out, graduating with honors from Harvard isn't particularly difficult. 

Here's something from CNN:

In case anyone had a shadow of a doubt that most Harvard students are precocious, smart, if not learned, we hear from the lips of Harvard's Dean of Undergraduate Education, Jay M. Harris, that nearly all the students at Harvard are indeed above average -- so much so that the median grade given is an A- and the most frequent grade awarded is an A!

This is enough to put Barack into Lake Wobegon territory - "where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average". 

But that doesn't mean it's easy to graduate with freakin' honors, does it?  Surely they don't hand out summa, magna, magma, omega and beta cum laude degrees as if they were Obamacare Exemptions? 

They do.  They do.  And it's been going on for a long time.  Here's something from The Boston Globe via SFGate (San Francisco):

Last June, a record 91 percent of Harvard students graduated summa, magna, or cum laude, far more than at Yale (51 percent), Princeton (44 percent) and other elite universities, a Globe study has found.
While the world regards these students as the best of the best of America's 13 million undergraduates, Harvard honors has actually become the laughingstock of the Ivy League.

That was written in 2001, BTW. 

Everything else about Barry's education is old news.  We don't know how he did at Occidental or at Columbia because he won't release his grades.  (You can go here if you want to learn about the academic performance of John Kerry, Joe Biden, The Goracle or George W. Bush.) 

Here's one thing we do know about grades and getting into Harvard.
I graduated from Delta State University with a 3.33.  
That wasn't good enough to get me into Harvard, but it was pretty damn good. 
If my undergrad record was good enough to justify admission to the Ivy League, you would read about it on this website once a week. 
I would scan my transcript and post it.  Look at my grades, dammit! 

Barack Obama's grades weren't good enough to get him into Harvard.  I know this, you know this, and he knows this.  He was an Affirmative Action student.  That's why he hasn't released the records.

Barack Obama's accomplishments weren't enough to get him elected president.  He was the recipient of Affirmative Action votes. 

Barack Obama's record as president has been horrible.  He's been blessed with an Affirmative Action media who believe their job is to shower his path with rose petals. 

It's the only treatment he's ever known. 

But he graduated from Harvard!  With honors! 

The worst thing you'll see today - The horror....The horror....

Henry Farrish, my friend since high school, does home repair and maintenance. 

He knows that I love the "What's The Weirdest Thing You've Seen At Work?" conversation starter. 

I've been asking that question for twenty years. 

It might be time to retire the trophy. 

A few days ago, Henry got a call at 1:30 a.m. Somebody's toilet was flooding.  The guy sounded drunk. 

Henry got to the guy's house and checked out the situation. 

(The next few sentences are pure speculation.)

The man was incredibly drunk. 

From the looks of the bathroom and the toilet, the old guy had been puking.  Throwing his guts up.  And something else.  Maybe he passed out. 

When he got sober enough to clean up the place, the toilet overflowed. 

(End of speculation.) 

Henry shut off the water and disassembled the crapper. 

What he found in the toilet will haunt him the rest of his life. 

Click here to see. 




 

Nelson Mandela - R.I.P.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

  - William Ernest Henley

Often recited by Nelson Mandela to other prisoners on Robben Island in South Africa. 

 

Why ObamaCare is doomed

Now that things are becoming clearer....

Don't get distracted by the problems with Obama's Facebook Page Healthcare website.  Here is why Obamacare is doomed.  I've been preaching this same sermon for about two years.  Hit the Healthcare and Obamacare links to your right for more rants repeating the same tiresome thing, some longer, some shorter. 

Insurance guards you against the bad thing that hasn't happened yet.  If you pay a set amount of money to an insurance company every month or every quarter, they will make good your losses should the bad thing happen.  (Your house burns, you get a rare disease, or you wreck you car.)

We would never expect an insurance company to insure, and then pay for, a house that has already burned, or a car that has already been wrecked.  If that car that Paul Walker recently died it wasn't insured, no one is going to insure it now that it has been wadded into a heap of aluminum and burned.  But because the American Electorate has the collective intelligence of a pack of lemmings, we now expect insurance companies to blindly pay for a lifetime of medical treatment for anyone with one month's premiums in hand. 

If a homeowner's insurance company can't take a pass on someone whose home has already burned, they are no longer in the insurance business.  They are overseeing a wealth transfer. 

Obamacare declares that insurance companies can't turn away anyone with a pre-existing condition.  You can sign up for insurance in the freakin' ambulance. 

Therefore, insurance is now unnecessary.  No 25-year-old is going to sign up for it with his own money.  The fine costs less than a tenth of most insurance.   

I repeat....  Insurance is now unnecessary.  The kids aren't going to buy it.   

Second, things are more expensive when they are scarce, and they're less expensive when they are common.  Obamacare creates 16,000 new IRS agents, but no new doctors, nurses, or pill-producers. 

This is going to be a disaster of Biblical proportions. 

Hide and watch. 

 

Since Chinese loans are paying for ObamaCare anyway....

I have a good friend who is working deep, deep in the bowels of the Obamacare website.  What he describes isn't pretty.  The project is so segmented that no one knows where responsibilities begin and end, and there appears to have been little or no coordination of the big picture. 

We ridicule him constantly, of course. 

I got this message from him a few days ago:

So I have a new story to share as part of the continuing saga of building out the Affordable Care Act (sic). 

So, I am on call this week and received a phone call for assistance at 9:00 p.m. 

It was weird because we were working with our west coast subsidiary called (deleted company name). They had a lot of people with heavy accents that I have never met before on the phone.

So I am discussing this with my Senior Director this morning.

(Big Computer Outfit), our parent company has outsourced the programming of the application development of the ACA to Chinese contractors.

So....we have outsourced the framework and database access that holds PHI (Personal Health Information) of all Americans to China.

Yes we can!

This prompted another buddy of mine to respond as follows:

So another country has access to our most intimate healthcare information while the FDA has ordered 23 and Me to halt sales of genetic testing kits to individuals who want to know about their own genetic make-up.  Chinese officials can know I got the crabs in 2009 but I can't find out if my own body is genetically predisposed to getting prostate cancer.  Sounds reasonable. 

 

I really don't know what else to say.  Hell, the Chinese are the ones paying for our government spending orgy anyway, so we're kinda obligated to give them the user names and passwords, right? 

Pictures. Posters. Memes. Facebook Statuses. Post-Thanksgiving edition

It's been a long holiday weekend, and I've taken a break from getting pissed off from reading accounts of the Obamacare debacle, the looming doctor shortage, the unemployment rate and all the other things that make up my media diet. 

So here are some funny and pithy pics that I've been saving for the last month or so. 

 

 

Look this one up for the full-size version at HiddenSecretsOfMoney.com 

The clown in the White House is now advocating raising the minimum wage to ten bucks an hour, BTW....

 

On missing church for three years

With the exception of Christmases and the occasional Easter and a couple of Messiahsings, I haven't attended a church service in about three years. 

For the first 21 years of my life, church filled me.  It consumed me.  I not only believed that the entire church message was true, I believed that it was worthwhile.  Part of this was because almost everyone I knew believed the same basic narrative - God created the earth, people were sinful, God experimented with a system of animal sacrifices to appease himself, and then became human to offer himself as a sacrifice.  But he didn't die.  He was resurrected after three days. 

If you believed that story, you would be "saved".  If not, you'd be tortured forever. 

I started having doubts about the story sometime during my college years.  After that, I briefly attended seminary.  I didn't get any answers, but learned quite a bit about church history, theology, and how to properly ask a theological question. 

Later on, I joined a "moderate" or "progressive" Baptist church.  Yeah, there are such things.

I don't believe the story any more.  Why?  Because it didn't happen.  It simply isn't true.     

Of the four ministers who have worked there in the last 25 years or so, I know that two of them don't believe in Hell, and I'm confident that the other two don't either.  It never came up in conversation. 

So why have all four of them stood up in front of their followers and danced around the issue?  I think there is some worthwhile stuff in the book we know as "Bible".  There's also a lot of tribal, harmful junk.  What is the purpose of listening to someone stand up and talk for 20 minutes when his obvious goal is to get through his speech without pissing off the old people?  (That sounds harsher than I mean it to be, but I don't know how else to say it.)

But dammit, I want there to be something worthwhile happening in a church.  I know Bible, hymns, parables, psalms, and theology.  I know that church people give more to the poor than any other segment of society.  I want to be a part of something like that. 

I have no idea where I'm going with this.  I've learned that the more honest and vocal I am about politics, people, life, morality and almost everything else, the more people confide that they share those opinions. 

So there you have it.  Jesus didn't walk on water.  Moses didn't part the Red Sea.  Helen Keller isn't in hell.  The idea of someone or something else being punished for your mistakes is repugnant to me, and I hope that it is to you. 

If you grew up a devout Baptist, this kicks the supports out from under your worldview.  What is the meaning of life, if earth isn't a proving ground to separate the sheep from the goats and the saved from the unsaved?

Hmmmm.....

Later on this afternoon The Aggie and I are going to drive down to Waco and hang out with some friends.  We're going to fill pumpkins with an explosive called Tannerite and then shoot them with with high-powered rifles.  It's going to be awesome.