Peregrinating
2012

March

1 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

"After decades of sidelining the once-thriving American timber industry and taking the food out of the mouths of loggers' children to allegedly protect the spotted owl, the green bureaucracy is still not happy and has declared war on the environment," the director of the Occupy Occupy D.C. movement, David Almasi, said in the release. "One owl is being sacrificed for another. Where is the respect for the laws of nature? The one thing we do know from this travesty is that the Endangered Species Act is out-of-control and desperately needs to be reformed."

2 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

Veteran Las Vegas gaming figure Blake Sartini has gained preliminary state approval to become the biggest slot machine route operator in Nevada.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board has recommended approval for Sartini and his Golden Gaming to buy from Affinity Gaming its slot machine route and two casinos in Pahrump.
Sartini told the board this would give him 8,500 slot machines at 650 locations, and he would become the largest casino owner in Nye County. He already owns the Golden Pahrump Nugget and is acquiring Terrible’s Lakeside Casino and Terrible’s Town.

A controversial system of mobile euthanasia units that will travel around the country to respond to the wishes of sick people who wish to end their lives has been launched in the Netherlands.
The scheme, which started on Thursday , will send teams of specially trained doctors and nurses to the homes of people whose own doctors have refused to carry out patients' requests to end their lives.
If the team is satisfied that the patient's motives are genuine, they will contact another doctor with whom they will start the euthanasia process.
"They will first give the patient an injection, which will put them into a deep sleep, then a second injection follows, which will stop their breathing and heart beat," De Jong said.

3 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

4 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

5 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

6 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

7 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

8 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

9 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

Greece’s use of collective action clauses forcing investors to take losses under its debt restructuring triggers payouts on $3 billion of default insurance, the International Swaps & Derivatives Association said.
A total 4,323 credit-default swap contracts may now be settled after ISDA’s determinations committee ruled the use of CACs is a restructuring credit event, according to a statement distributed today by Business Wire.

10 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

11 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

The liberal believes that the group has a right to control every aspect of everyone’s life. He may permit many freedoms, but only those of which liberals approve. Abstract or general freedom holds no appeal for him. The limbic instinct of the inveterate liberal is to harry, regulate, and stifle the individual, of whose penchant for independent action he is profoundly distrustful.
Of course he does not think that he is stifling and imposing, but improving and instructing. For the unwilling he has no patience. The liberal is a creature of the homiletic herd, like a gnu wielding tracts, and believes in the “the masses,” in their infinite plasticity and potential for uplift and betterment, guided by him. Particularly he wants to uplift those who do not want to be uplifted, as their independence might be infectious. He sees himself in the capacity of the patient mother of a society of wayward two-year-olds who must be diapered, formed, and taught.
Thus his love of government in all its meddlesome intrusiveness, pedestrian witlessness, and unrestrained drive for dominion. He—or rather more often, she—knows that without coercion, some people will not do as they ought: that they will besot themselves, behave wrongheadedly, teach their children heaven knows what, and march off in all different directions. They must be restrained. And since the restrained usually find ways of evading the constricting tentacles, ever more and more-detailed laws must be enacted to thwart each new escape. Thus the government will eventually come to dictate the altitude, material, color, shape, texture, and compressive strength of toilet seats.
Liberalism is a feminine creed, embodying the kindness, short horizons, modest familiarity with reason, and placidity of the sex. It wants to buy people nice things without reflecting on how to pay for them. It believes in goodness but doesn’t often get much further, being benevolent while falling short of beneficence. As good mothers will, it tries to protect everyone from everything.
This is why the Democratic Party unrelentingly promotes security. Children must wear helmets while riding bicycles, swimming pools must not have deep ends, canoeists must wear life preservers, we must outlaw guns, and smoking, and drinking while driving, and we should all wear sunscreen so as to avoid melanoma. We must worry about safety until there is nothing left in life but its preservation.
With the seldom recognized totalitarianism of the female, liberals seek to impose happiness, whether desired or not, by therapy and mood-altering drugs, whether desired or not. People must be happy, must be safe, must be forcibly socialized to a life of orderly boring routine whether they want it or not. The herd will provide for all; the price is that all must yield to the herd. Thus the liberal aversion to any form of self-defense, whether conducted with a gun or a baseball bat. Self-defense is distressingly individual.

12 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

During the first few days of February, about a week before Obama declared a so-called "accommodation" to the contraception/abortifacient mandate, a Washington Post/ABC poll showed Obama's approval rating at 50 percent, with 46 percent of Americans disapproving.
Then, from March 7 to 10--a week into the national media firestorm surrounding Rush Limbaugh's degrading remarks about Georgetown Law student and liberal activist Sandra Fluke--Washington Post/ABC conducted another poll. It found Obama's approval rating at 46 percent, down four points from February, and his disapproval rating at 50 percent, up four points from February.

Conservatives by contrast believe that the individual has a God-given right to rob others. As the liberal has good intentions without rationality, the conservative has rationality without good intentions. He worships at the shrine of personal freedom, by which he means only his prerogative of making money regardless of damage done to others. He dislikes government as he dislikes anything that might inconvenience the pursuit of private rapine. He believes in the sanctity of private property, unless someone buys the lot next to his and builds a hog-rendering plant, when he will see the merits of zoning.
Conservatism is a masculine faith, hard-eyed, coldly logical, frequently bloodthirsty, and typically out of touch with any reality beyond the commercial. The conservative has no concern for the less fortunate, who he believes probably deserve it anyway. There is in conservatism a strong streak of social Darwinism.
Conservatives are fond of war, partly to be sure because of the consequent flow of contracts but also because war is an age-old, genetically mediated hobby of males. A robust conservatism embodies all the brainless pugnacity of the male. Note that history is chiefly the record of armed bands of men poking each other with sharp objects, after which the survivors drink mead and tell themselves how glorious it was. The Iliad, Beowulf, the Song of Rolland, and the Old Testament for example all read like the annals of teenage gangs in Chicago.
In the conservative mind, martial derring-do is wrapped like a birthday present in notions of glory, valor, sacrifice, virility, and transcendence. Women and most Democrats seem to see it in terms of deeply rooted and intransigent idiocy.
Conservatives conspicuously lack aesthetic sensibility, a love of beauty being a concern of women and homosexuals. Show the conservative an Arcadian idyll of rolling fields and ancient oaks and he will see a site for several garish hotels, a parking lot, and a Wal-Mart. Like a congenitally deaf man watching the inexplicable sawings of a symphony orchestra, he is puzzled by conservationists. A dolphin, an elephant, a panda he calculates in terms of cans of dog food at thirty-seven cents per, and, for an additional three cents a can to cover legal contingencies, he would pack his grandmother. He sincerely has no faint idea why anyone might object.
He is likely to be a Christian, though not to the extent of letting his faith moderate his misbehavior. For him faith is a justification, not a limitation. While conservatives generally do not engage in herd behavior (note that they seldom hold demonstrations, while liberals seldom stop) they do believe in military aggression. Christianity provides moral cover as he does things that might otherwise raise nagging doubts, such as dropping large bombs on other people’s cities. I was only following orders, from on high.

The solution to the conflict between the two groups should be obvious to all thinking people, if any: Drop them down an abandoned oil well, pump large amounts of potassium cyanide after them, and stuff Oprah into the hole as a plug. A cap of cement couldn’t hurt. The silence alone would justify this wise deed.

13 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

Many Americans fear the federal fiscal train wreck will turn us into Greece. But, barring major change, they need look no further than California to see what this future portends. Relying on ever-higher taxes to fund payments to an outsized population of benefit recipients is a recipe for exporting prosperity*. That is one California trend that other states emulate at their peril.
After running a $5 billion deficit last year and another likely deficit this year, Gov. Jerry Brown's budget increases spending next year by $7 billion and finances the higher spending with income and sales-tax hikes. Specifically, he's proposing a November ballot initiative raising the state's top income tax rate to 12.3%, making it the nation's highest, and raising the basic state sales tax rate, already the nation's highest, to 7.75% from 7.25%.
The ballot initiative's $31 billion, multiyear "temporary" tax increase is larger than the "temporary" hike it replaces and its income-tax hike is retroactive to Jan. 1, 2012. Worse, it doubles down on excessive reliance on high-income taxpayers, especially their stock options and capital gains, which are taxed as ordinary income. During economic good times, it's not unusual for the state to collect one-half of all income-tax revenue from the top 1%. This extreme progressivity leads to boom-bust cycles of rapidly rising revenue followed by complete collapse.

14 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

People and governments by nature temporize, avert their eyes from forthcoming catastrophe, eschew the needful but unpleasant, and do not readily believe that the status quo can abruptly change. But it can, and does, and is. Meanwhile absurd intellectuals write pointless articles in glossy magazines. Soon it will be too late for civilized answers.

15 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

Crude oil production on Federal and Indian lands decreased 13 percent from 739 million barrels in fiscal year 2010 to 646 million barrels in fiscal year 2011. Production of crude oil on Federal lands is dominated by offshore production, which fell by 17 percent in fiscal year 2011, mostly notably due to government actions taken following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. These actions include a moratorium on offshore drilling by the Obama Administration, followed by a permit moratorium. Only recently has the Obama Administration leased any federal land offshore to oil and gas drilling.
The big picture is clear that government policies undertaken by the Obama Administration have produced a significant decline in offshore oil production on federal lands in fiscal year 2011. That is certainly not a way to increase domestic production of oil and keep oil and thus gasoline prices in check.

16 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

17 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

18 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

To control the politics of a nation, control of the culture is a precondition. For who controls the culture defines what is moral and immoral, and what is heroic and villainous. And if you can set limits on what journalists write and broadcasters say, you can shape what people think and believe.
Through history, frightened establishments have dealt severely even with peaceful challenges to their power, which is why Socrates was forced to drink poison, Christ was crucified, Sir Thomas More was beheaded and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Gulag.
When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” for demanding that Georgetown Law School subsidize the $3,000 women students annually require for birth control to exercise their sexual freedom, the media that piled on Rush objected less to the term than to the target he picked: one of their own.
Bill Maher routinely uses far more odious terms on Sarah Palin. Yet his $1 million gift to an Obama Super PAC was welcomed by agents of the same president who phoned Fluke to console her over Rush’s remarks.
Rush apologized. But the left still campaigns to have his voice stifled and censored, by threatening advertisers of his radio show with boycotts if they refuse to drop him.
Thus does the left honor the First Amendment.
As shown in HBO’s “Game Change,” John McCain in 2008 ruled out attacks on Barack Obama’s 20-year ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago preacher of “God damn America!” fame.
Why? Wright and Obama were black, and such attacks might agitate the latent racism of white America. The Republican Party censors itself so as not to antagonize a cultural establishment that wants to see it dead.
“Beautiful losers,” my late friend Sam Francis called them.

19 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

Did you notice in the President's interview for The Atlantic earlier this month he did NOT say, “We don’t bluff.” His formulation was: “I don’t bluff.” And that “I” should not be ignored. The Bush administration promoted a cult of presidential power, of (as they called it at the time) a “unitary executive.” No one in the White House uses such a term these days, any more than they use the term “Global War on Terror,” but if both terms have disappeared, the phenomena they named have only intensified.
The Global War on Terror, with its burgeoning secret military, the elite special operations forces, and its growing drone air force, controlled in part by the CIA, should be thought of as the president’s private war. In addition, as legal scholar Jonathan Turley wrote recently, when it comes to drone assassinations (or “targeted killings” as they are now more politely known), Attorney General Eric Holder has just claimed for the president the “authority to kill any American if he unilaterally determines them to be a threat to the nation.” In doing so, added Turley, “Obama has replaced the constitutional protections afforded to citizens with a ‘trust me’ pledge.” With terror in its crosshairs, war, in other words, is increasingly becoming the president’s private preserve and strikes on the enemy, however defined, a matter of his own private judgment.
It is no longer a matter of “we,” but of a presidential “I” when it comes to unleashing attacks in what has become a global free fire zone for those drones and special ops forces. War, in other words, is increasingly lodged in the Oval Office and a commander-in-chief executive. As the Libyan intervention suggested, like the American people, Congress is, at best, an afterthought — even though this Congress would rubber-stamp a presidential act of war against Iran without a second thought.

On examination, most of the measures purportedly taken to stifle Terror don’t. Opening mail without a warrant? It’s pointless once the terrorists know you are doing it, but effective in intimidating honest citizens. The same is true of warrantless wiretaps and searches. Does the gutting of habeas corpus make us safer against terrorists? Or merely suppress dissent by citizens?
The whole business looks remarkably like malign vaudeville, like mummery intended to accomplish two things. The first is to persuade the foolish that the nation is At War. Actually only the president is at war. The second, and I would like to be wrong about this, is to train the public to obedience. The formula is simple: Keep’em scared and you can do anything. It works. Americans are rapidly becoming accustomed to Soviet-style surveillance, to the state’s power to search and spy without restraint, to being barked at and ordered about by low-level federal employees. People deserve what they tolerate.

20 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

21 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

President Obama will tout investments in “renewable” energy Wednesday at the local Copper Mountain Solar 1 plant, although the plant has only five full-time employees.
The plant, owned by San Diego-based energy company Sempra, was built in late 2010 at a cost of $141 million. Funding included $42 million in federal-government tax credits and $12 million in tax-rebate commitments from the state of Nevada.
In addition to wanting to create many new jobs, President Obama has claimed green-energy investment will decrease America’s energy costs and reduce the country’s dependency on foreign oil. In Boulder City, however, renewables have produced no lower energy costs. Instead, in late 2009, the city approved a 35 percent rate hike, while power generated by Copper Mountain is to go to Southern California — rather than serve Nevadans whose taxes helped finance the plant.

22 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

Any sacred cow whines to YouTube and Facebook and as a result, whatever the sacred cow is whining about is immediately taken down.
But a song that openly calls for the killing of Rush Limbaugh apparently doesn't offend YouTube or Facebook, in the least.
Disgusted by Rush Limbaugh's recent antics? Blast our song, 'KILL RUSH'
Just don't call anyone a "slut."

23 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

George Kohler, a personal trainer and avid cyclist, was found in a shallow gully about 1 1/4 miles east of the Mesquite Spring campground where he was staying in the northern part of the park, said Carma Roper, an Inyo County sheriff's spokesman. It appears that Mr. Kohler left the campfire and took off cross-country on foot," said Cpl. Terry Watterbury, a Sheriff's Department search and rescue coordinator.
Kohler had seemed off-kilter that day and before the ride began, said Kimo Goree, a resident of New York City who was on the tour. Kohler fell three times on a warm-up ride the day before the trip, he said. "It is very unusual for a strong rider to fall three times in one day," Goree said. He said there was no indication Kohler, who was wearing a helmet, had hit his head. On the first day of the Death Valley tour, Kohler lagged behind the other riders, Goree said. "I think we all recognized that George needed a little bit of assistance," he said.

“[President Obama] went wrong by unloading too much too soon. He came forward with three trillion-dollar proposals. He had cap and trade, he had health care and he had the stimulus package and that was more than America could swallow. That led to the outbursts once they had a chance.”-- Former Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, talking to The Hill>.
Rather than being a part of a larger remaking of American government once promised, the health law became the definitive element of Obamism. When given multiple chances to get away from the law... The thinking was that if Republicans could block the law after so much time and effort, he would be forever branded a weakling and a failure. Team Obama concluded that enacting an unpopular law was bad, but that trying and failing would be worse.
And that’s when Obama gave up his brand for good. Obama ran in the general election on good government, bipartisanship and innovative thinking. He ended up sacrificing all of that in the name of victory on a law that ended up looking very little like what he had originally called for. Rather than being transformative, the Obama presidency had become just an amplification of what voters already disliked about Washington. When Obama packed the East Room of the White House for a partisan pep rally with chants of his campaign slogan for the signing ceremony two years ago today it was a fitting finale. It was hackish, not historical.
Bill Clinton had the political acumen to change course when his audacious agenda ran aground during his first term. Obama has instead concluded that his task was to reeducate the electorate. Unpopular at its inception and unpopular at it’s passage, Obama would convince Americans that they really liked its law. As he is now doing on energy, Obama has concluded that his task is to disabuse Americans of their views, not accommodate them.
We don’t know what end Obama’s energy education will meet. But we know where his health education effort stands today. On the two-year mark of the most significant law passed in Washington in 30 years, the president is standing silent and his re-election campaign minimizes the sweeping parts of the law and focuses on narrow provisions that could have easily passed with bipartisan support. Health law education has turned into health law evasion.
Only 23 percent of employers in a survey by human resources consultants Towers Watson were confident that their firms would be offering health benefits a decade from now. Four years ago it was triple that. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 20 million workers will lose their private insurance in the next decade.
With such uncertainty looming, most Americans would like to see the law either repealed or partly undone. And given the way the legislation was made, it’s understandable that voters would have little confidence in it.
The justices of the Supreme Court may yet bail out Obama and strike down the law, or at least big parts of it, before the election. But at the two-year mark, the legislation remains the unhappiest success of any modern American politician.

24 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

Because Obama has a reputation for being intelligent, one might make the mistake of expecting him necessarily to behave intelligently. No. Brains only provide the means to be more elaborately and ornately stupid. The smart merely make more complex mistakes. Historically, horrendous misjudgements have usually been the children of good minds. When you mix acuity with fanaticism, you get an ungodly stew almost certain to end in disaster. This may be worth thinking about.

25 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

26 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

It was announced by Mikhail Muhammad, leader of a small militant organisation called the New Black Panther Party, who said he was seeking up to 10,000 black men willing to form a militia to find Mr Zimmerman and administer what they regard as justice.
Asked if he was inciting violence, Mr Muhammad said: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." To the sound of cheers from followers, who wore black uniforms, he promised: "If the government won't do the job, we'll do it."

27 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But the reason, the reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act. In the law of torts our tradition, our law, has been that you don't have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger. The blind man is walking in front of a car and you do not have a duty to stop him absent some relation between you. And there is some severe moral criticisms of that rule, but that's generally the rule.
And here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.

28 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

29 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

30 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

Last Friday, Mr. Obama wandered into the killing of Trayvon Martin. Aided by his ignorance of the situation, knee-jerk prejudices and tendency toward racial profiling, Mr. Obama played a heavy hand in elevating a tragic situation in which a teenager was killed into a full-blown hot race fight.
Americans, he admonished, need to do some “soul-searching.” And then, utterly inexplicably, he veered off into this bizarre tangent about how he and the poor dead kid look so much alike they could be father and son. It was election-year race-pandering gone horribly wrong.

31 March
Pair-A-Dice Escapees
Pahrump, NV

..crude ideas of causation...are the ideas of those who infer that unlimited liberty of speech is improper, because productive in certain states of society of disastrous results. It is to the abnormal condition of the body politic that all evils arising from an unrestrained expression of opinion must be attributed, and not to the unrestrained expression itself. Under a sound social regime and its accompanying contentment, nothing is to be feared from the most uncontrolled utterance of thought and feeling. On the other hand it may happen that where disease exists, exposure of the sore places of the state to the cold breath of criticism, will superinduce alarming symptoms. But what then? A Louis Philippe, a General Cavaignac, or a Louis Napoleon, may find excuse in a corrupted and disorganized state of things for espionnage, censorships, and the suppression of public meetings. But what then? If a nation cannot be governed on principles of pure equity, so much the worse for the nation.