5.7% Growth of GDP

But don't get too excited... The two straight quarters of growth followed a record four quarters of decline, so we are still in a negative growth spiral. It's like a bump on a ski slope. No matter how far you bounce up, you're still headed down.

Obama loves to yammer on about about "saving" 2 million jobs... Sounds good until you realize we have lost 7.5 million jobs in the same period for real job losses of at least 5.5 million jobs.

None of this is progress. No way - no how.

And now this fool of a president says we're going to double our exports.

Of what? Solar panels? Give me a break.

We don't make anything the rest of the world can't make quicker and cheaper.

Yessir, the river's floodin', but we raised the levee 2 feet... While the water raised 7.5 feet. Ignore that wet, sloshy feeling you getting.

This blip in the GDP was fueled by companies refilling depleted stockpiles, a phenomena that will quickly vanish.

Blue Moon

Told you so last year:

When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.

NASA, as a major player in the worldwide space effort is finished. They cannot complete with what is being developed and used by other nations. Their upsized Apollo capsule attached to the top of quarter-century old modified shuttle boosters as America's future in space - a stopgap effort at best - cannot cut the mustard, and this administration - hostile to the space effort from the beginning - knows it.

It's a sad story... About an agency that started with real goals, focused on them, and got he job done... To an agency that has lost it's way and is now paying the price.

The first generation of NASA's people were incredibly focused and dedicated people. We all know of them and admire them for what they accomplished. NASA's people today don't even belong on the same page. For the most part, they are a huge network of PC bureaucrats generating vast amounts of paperwork... Guidelines, restrictions, a sea of non-mission oriented goals... All squandering away the money and time - and goodwill - needed by the designers, the engineers and the builders to stay ahead of the world and keep NASA viable.

While they still had support from both the public and the federal government, instead of sharply focusing on forging ahead with the engineering, design and construction for the next generation of state-of-the-art equipment needed after the now-obsolete space shuttle, they diverted irreplaceable money and effort with stuff like "teachers in space" and a long and useless list of "ladies first" publicity gimmicks. Good grief, they even had school kids orbiting spiders.

Maybe the NASA publicity crew thought all this was good stuff - to gin up public interest. Maybe it was science in a broad definition, but it was bad science. It was not, and is not, NASA's mission to sell itself to the public anymore than it is the mission of Fort Knox to worry about selling itself to the public.

In an PC era where we hire women to be firemen who cannot lift a firehose, women to be SWAT officers whose legs cannot reach the pedals of a SWAT vehicle, it is understandable that we train women to be soldiers... And then not allow them to be soldiers. Such a mindset is what puts women in space for no other reason than that they are females.

At a time when we already had a highly trained and incredibly expensive pool of astronauts, NASA chose to this balloon this cost by adding a women's auxiliary to the astronaut pool. Can a woman twist a wrench in space as good as a man? Yes, but at what additional cost? We already had the men trained to do the job.

A lot of "NASA forever" fans will not like this post, but it's the sad truth. The "teacher in space" disaster did more than any Washington politician could ever have done do to ruin NASA. An entire generation of American schoolkids learned - in one risky nationwide TV extravaganza - that space is dangerous and should be avoided.

NASA's mission was - at one time - space exploration, not what it has devolved into today, a place for social experimentation.

And just as we have forever lost so many manufacturing jobs given away to foreign competitors, we are losing space in the same manner. Foreigners are doing it cheaper, with newer and less exotic equipment, funded by governments that truly understand what's at stake.

But by golly, we'll have those photos of spiderwebs spun in space to look at and fondly remember when... And those now-widely denied and almost forgotten footprints on the moon.

How Smelly Is This?

"Smelly" may fall way short of defining this:

An NYPD inspector's frantic search for his missing wife ended in tragedy on Wednesday when he found her body inside her Mercedes-Benz, submerged in the family swimming pool, police said.

His terminally ill wife was missing. He was "frantically" searching for her.

OK, let's look at some of the reported "facts":

Wayne Bax went into his backyard and noticed jagged pieces of ice protruding from the swimming pool and a gaping hole in the pool's cover.

It's winter. Ice and slow everywhere. Wayne - searching for his wife - decides to take a walk in his backyard, and discovers:

The Mercedes-Benz totally submerged, it's transmission in reverse

with his wife's body inside.

Here's where it gets Twilight Zonish. His no-doubt good friend and drinking buddy Police Sgt. Harry Baumann said:

Marianne had apparently backed the car across the home's side lawn, covering roughly 100 feet and smashed through a chain-link fence before crashing into the pool.

100 feet? Side lawn? Chain link fence? Backyard swimming pool? All NYPD deputy inspectors have that sort of stuff, right?

A bit of background:

Wayne Bax is a deputy inspector in the Bronx. Yet he can afford a Mercedes-Benx for his wife, a home with a least a one hundred foot deep yard, a side lawn, even a in-ground swimming pool for his very upscale Nyack County home, all surrounded by a chain link fence.

Said his brother Dominick:

his "distraught" brother and nephew never noticed slight tire tracks on the lawn during their search.

Enough.

A NYPD Deputy Inspector doesn't notice tire tracks in his front yard.

A NYPD Deputy Inspector doesn't notice his fence is all smashed up.

The smelly part?

The guy's 54, still fairly young and healthy, has a nice home with all the trimmings... And a wife with multiple sclerosis, who had apparently backed the car across the home's side lawn, covering roughly 100 feet and smashed through a chain-link fence before crashing into the pool. Both Wayne and his nephew never noticed the tire tracks across his front lawn or the smashed up chain-link fence.

Well, of course not... He was "distraught".

Wayne's brother Dominick, no doubt with a straight face, proclaimed:

Because of her MS, her legs are wobbly, especially at the end of the day. But I do not know if that was a factor in what happened with the car or whether it was a mechanical failure.

Give me a break. Of course her MS had something to do with her death. But for certain it did not cause her to turn her car around in the front yard, put it into reverse, gun it over a hundred feet through a chain-link fence and into the backyard swimming pool.

You do realize that a chin-link fence can stop a vehicle in it's tracks? It happens all the time.

The lessons to be learned here?

If you marry a Bronx deputy inspector, Make certain he doesn't have a backyard swimming pool.

When you have a fence contractor build your chain-link fence, have a professional check the quality of his work.

Be cautious with your Mercedes-Benz... It just may put itself into reverse, take a mad dash across your lawn, crash through your shoddily-built chain-link fence, and then dive trunk first into your still filled swimming pool - In the middle of winter no less - leaving unnoticeable tracks across your front lawn, incredibly subtle clues as to your whereabouts that your "distraught" NYPD deputy inspector spouse will fail to notice.

But what the hell... nobody ever said life was fair.

Coakley Blows It

The woman who was considered a shoo-in just a few months ago for Kennedy's Senate seat blew a thirty point lead and lost by 5 to a relatively unknown newcomer.

She had the best of help:

A sitting president and and ex-president spoke out for her.

She had the worst of help:

A blatant liar and a adulterous womanizer spoke out for her.

The same two men, just different sides of them.

Over The Hill, Around The Bend...

... and long gone.

Actor Danny Glover believes that the Haitian earthquake was caused by climate change and global warming.

Said Glover:

When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?

OK, what is he saying? That it's not nice to fool mother Nature? That Gaia has a nasty temper and likes to target blacks?

He seemed a lot more sensible in those movies with Mel Gibson a few years back, but, he was acting then.

It was Mel Gibson who played the whacko nut case in the movies.

How times have changed.

Hattiesburg, Mississippi ?

Tiger Woods is getting treatment at a top sex addiction program in Hattiesburg, Miss., sources have told RadarOnline.com exclusively.

Well hell yes, Hattiesburg, Mississippi has the world's premier clinic for sex addiction sufferers.

Maybe that's actually true...

Isn't that the area where those backwoods ridge runners like to keep their sexual activities within the family?

Somebody send Tiger the Realdoll address.

Made In Puerto Rico

Marvelous:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration slammed Tylenol manufacturer McNeil Healthcare LLC during a media briefing this morning for what it called a slow response to problems at a facility in Puerto Rico that led to consumers becoming sickened by tainted pills.

Made in Puerto Rico. Tainted in Puerto Rico... By uneducated primitives that haven't a clue about what a hidden health hazard is.

Start demanding that your medicines be manufactured by companies and plants that have - at the very least - a workforce that uses indoor plumbing.

Or boycott them forever.

A Different Kind of Consumerism

Have you ever met this gal? Seen her in a movie or TV magazine?


Odds are about 100% that you have not...

This a a photo of one of those "Realdolls" I talked of a few post back.

If you're thinking that some pimply-faced geek who has been endlessly ridiculed by the prom queens and cheerleaders his entire life won't shell out a few thousand bucks on his Visa card for a life-sized anatomically correct Barbie like this, think again.

The Consumers Are Not Consuming

We have been endlessly informed that consumer spending is critical to any sustained economic revival, since consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of total economic activity. We all have been urged to get patriotic, do our bit to save the economy, go out and buy, buy, buy!

Remember Bush the Simple and his plea for more spending to save the nation right after 9-11? Go out and buy more and more of that cheap but high-priced offshore-manufactured stuff that will end up gathering rust and dust, unused and forgotten, tucked away on cluttered shelves, stuffed away in a closet, or consigned to the trash heap we all like to call the "garage".

Regardless of federal prodding to max out our credit cards one more time, retail sales fell in December, closing off a year in which sales have had the largest drop on record. Consumers without jobs do not consume. When you have millions and millions of jobless consumers, guess what happens:

Retailers suffered their worst annual performance in more than four decades in 2008, according to data from the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Duh.

So where is all the activity that has pushed the stock market up to 10,500 coming from? Certainly not from an upsurge of consumerism.

It comes unsustainable government spending, the spending of hundreds of billions we do not have, money we have borrowed from other nations.

We have lost millions and millions of jobs to other countries, job losses championed by the federal government with its insane polices of free trade, its disastrous course of creating permanent American disadvantage with the likes of NAFTA and GAT, their elitist but simple-minded ideas about how America could become a "service" nation and not have to dirty it's hands with all those low-class manufacturing jobs.

It's not working. It cannot possibly ever work. There is no way that 100% of America's workers can end up in glass towers, sitting in front of computers generating mountains of ultimately valueless paperwork.

Unfortunately, we just can't ask for all those ordinary American jobs back that created merchandise that had actual exchangeable value to the rest of the world, and return our economy to the status it once was. Americans that were used to $20/hr. building widgets cannot possibly compete with a Lower Slobivian being paid $1.00/hr. to do the same job, and once the widget factory is up and running in Lower Slobivia, that's where it will stay, along with all the widget jobs.

And that's what's happened. Greedy corporations, led by men of historical short-sightedness, provided the money and expertise to build widget factories around the world where cheap labor was plentiful, to provide widgets to America with a huge built-in profit. But since America has lost so many good-paying jobs - including those widget jobs - masses of Americans can't afford widgets anymore, at any price.

Well DUH.

The Lower Slobivian widget factory now supplies the world-wide demand for widgets, and even if we build a brand-new hi-tech widget factory hoping to recover widget making jobs for say, a reduced pay of $10/hr. or even less, we still lose, because there is no way we can survive on the competitive pay scale required to match that $1.00/hr. that that a (insert the nationality of your favorite slave laborer here) gets.

Those millions and millions of jobs are lost forever, and we just keep losing more, as this present federal government continues the policies that are taking us down the road to national suicide.

Bottom line? Our economy is collapsing, the gum'mint can't keep up spending borrowed money, but they will print more and more money... Until inflation destroys the dollar. The politicians will run out of lies, they will all(to save their worthless hides) skip out to some offshore haven, and the rest of us will go down the tubes.

Get ready. The only person that will help you survive is you. In the coming new America, consumerism as we have known it will cease to exist. We will buy only what we need to survive at a much lower level of comfort that we will learn to tolerate. We are about to become a two-tiered nation consisting of the haves and the have-nots, and the vast majority of Americans will be a part of a huge mass of have-nots.

We will survive, but not in a way any of you have hoped for, and those of us on a fixed retirement income are in for a new hell on earth.

Debris Slides

A fantastic photo from Mars:


It shows what appears to be "trees" amongst the sand dunes of Mars.

The photograph shows Martian sand dunes coated with a thin layer of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice, less than 240 miles from the planet's north pole.

However, the explanation is far less exciting:

The "trees" are really trails of debris caused by landslides as ice melts in Mar's spring.

OK, the experts have spoken.

But I keep wondering - If the sand dunes are made of sand and are sand colored, and if the frozen carbon dioxide is whitish in color - why are those debris trails such a dark brown?

Just what sort of debris is it? If it's not sand or carbon dioxide - it is a different color - where does this debris come from?

And why do all those "landslides" just happen to slide in the same direction?

Coldest In 115 Years

December 14th, the coldest day in 115 years.

The US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, says the Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007.

Whatever is left of the "global warming" fraud has got icicles hanging off its nose.

Now we are being told to expect another Ice Age in twenty or thirty years.

They never shut up. They never quit. Always trying to scare us all into a never-never land of climate terror.

Remember the old fairy tales?

The little dutch boy with his finger in the dike(not that dike), chicken little with the "sky is falling" bit?

Well, now it's the global warming/climate change B.S., joined lately by the cap and tax scheme.

Stuff 'em all into a meat grinder... They will - at the very least - be useful as dog food.

No more STD's

She has arrived.

Five different personalities.

She can't cook or wash windows, but she likes what you like.

She talks cars. She talks football. She even goes to sleep at night.

It's the all-new - now available in the United States and England - lifesize robot sex doll.

I told you she was coming a couple of years ago, but I missed on the price. My estimate was $7,000 per doll, but she's selling for around $9,000 a copy today.

And they already have orders for 2 million dolls

So.

All you college educated liberated free spirits that got Herpes while getting what you laughingly call an "edcation" have been put on notice.

Your replacement is here.

This Is An Issue?

OK, so what?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada described in private then-Sen. Barack Obama as "light skinned" and "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

He just recently stated:

I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African-Americans for my improper comments.

Most Negroes are not "African American". Just ask any one them that were actually born in Africa somewhere. They are no more "American" than Osama bin Laden is. There is an estimated 150 million blacks in Nigeria, and not a one of them is an "African American". Would they get all bent out of shape if a United States Senator referred to them as having a "Negro dialect"? Would they even care?

American blacks should stop acting so sensitive about labels, particularly since many of them seem to like calling each other the dreaded "n" word amongst themselves, demonstrating the old worn-out "we can, you can't" nonsense. Childish and tiring, since it appears blacks only get insulted when a white uses what they decide to be "improper" racial identification. When Whoopie Goldberg uses the dreaded "n" word repeatedly on national Television - And not a single black gets excited or indignant - it pretty much exposes how phony the whole issue really is.

A bit of adult conduct would be most welcome.

The bit about Obama and his "Negro dialect"? We have all seen TV spots where he is speaking to a black audience and shifts - perhaps unintentionally - to Ebonics* as he speaks.

All part of the game... But the rules should be the same for everybody.

*Webster defines "Ebonics" as "Black English".

Plastic Bag Tax

What a bunch of crap:

Residents of the US capital may have to dig a little deeper into their pockets when they go grocery shopping once the city slaps a five-cent levy on each plastic bag issued at the checkout line.
The measure, which takes effect on January 1, 2010 and is the first such initiative in the United States, seeks to make consumers bear the brunt of clean up costs for the bags which currently are dispensed for free with a customer's purchases.

The "brunt of clean-up costs". Yeah, right.

Here's a quote from yet another idiot in a position of power:

"Our research shows that plastic bags are a major component of the trash in the Anacostia River," said Maureen McGowan, interim director of the city's environment department.

"By taking disposable bags out of production and out of the waste stream, everyone who goes to the store can help keep the waters clean."

You get ten bags of groceries that cost 80 or 90 dollars and you won't even notice fifty cents tacked on for bags. Ten Zip-Lok freezer bags cost three times that, but mentally-challanged interim director Maureen believes that a nickel a bag will take "disposable bags" out of production.

What nonsense. What idiocy. What stupidity. It's just another tax being loaded on our backs by an out-of-control government and the idiots running it.

Remember what Hillary Clinton recently said?

If it moves, we tax it. If it doesn't move, we tax it.

You gotta remember that it's just a few thousand of these state and federal government A-holes that are running us into the ground. Get rid of them, and things will start looking up.