The Pencil: a lesson in economics and market forces

Heritage  "How does a pencil represent what Adam Smith called “the invisible hand” of the free market? A new film by the Competitive Enterprise Institute has adapted Leonard Read’s famous essay, “I, Pencil: My Family Tree As Told to Leonard E. Read,” to answer this very question."

"I, Pencil: The Movie shows that “if we can leave these creative energies uninhibited, there is no limit to what we can accomplish.”
"To see I, Pencil: The Movie with extended commentary, click here. 

That anti-fracking movie, "Promised Land", Financed by Arab oil country

Matt Damon fracking film backed by big OPEC member  "Critics contend the UAE is trying to drum up opposition to more U.S. oil production, which could compete with its crude exports.

...."Either way, the revelation could be a setback for a film on an important U.S. energy topic, and will only give ammunition to critics who say the movie was biased from the get-go."
So just WHAT is fracking?

WSJ; Jenkins: Good Will Fracking Hollywood wimps out and makes a formula film.
"After a decade of war and half-century of costly military involvement in the Middle East, the United States stands on the brink of "energy independence." Then a shadowy Canadian billionaire coupled with Mideast oil interests sponsor a Hollywood propaganda movie aimed at luring Americans into throwing away the instrument of their deliverance: shale energy.
"They co-opt a name-brand Hollywood movie star to be the useful idiot of their nefarious plot. The movie is released a few days after Christmas, just in time for Oscar nominations in a diabolical scheme to influence a national debate over fracking.
"...typically stupid Hollywood plot, one that doubles down on the conventional "evil oil company" stereotype."
...."Which is very much like what ideological critics are saying about Mr. Damon's "Promised Land"—that the film's backers are an unholy alliance of green money and oil sheiks out to abort America's fracking windfall."     Emphasis added.

Useful Idiot Matt Damon’s Anti-Fracking Movie Financed by Oil-Rich Arab Nation
"A new film starring Matt Damon presents American oil and natural gas producers as money-grubbing villains purportedly poisoning rural American towns. It is therefore of particular note that it is financed in part by the royal family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates."

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/strips/pc/prickly_city.php3

From Business Insider; Movie That Blasts Fracking Was Partly Funded By The Government Of Abu Dhabi  "The Abu Dhabi and the UAE economies have been driven by profits from their respective oil reserves for decades. Hydraulic fracking, a relatively new process, involves drilling about a mile below the surface of the earth in order to release natural gas from rocks within the "fractures" created by the drills (here is a more in-depth look to how it works). More gas derived from fracking means that the United States might need to purchase less oil from OPEC states like the UAE — which produces 2.7 million barrels of oil a day."

"Another source of controversy surrounding Image Nation's funding of "Promised Land" has been the fact that the chairman of the board of Abu Dhabi Media, His Excellency Mohamed Mubarak Al Mazrouei, is also the undersecretary to the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince's Court. His boss, his highness General Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, serves on the Supreme Petroleum Council of the Abu Dhabi National oil company, which is "the highest authority responsible for the petroleum affairs in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi." "

From Newsbusters:  (Emphasis mine, TD)

"As an OPEC nation with huge oil reserves, it is in UAE's best interest to do whatever it can to reduce the oil supply of its competitors ESPECIALLY America which just so happens to also be the world's largest energy consumer.

"An end to hydraulic fracturing in the United States would help accomplish this.  "Beyond this, as fracking promises to produce significant amounts of natural gas for the U.S., this will act to decrease the demand for petroleum products domestically and worldwide.
"For UAE, this would be doubly bad news as it is also the world's seventh largest producer of natural gas.
"As such, attempting to kill fracking in America by financing Damon's propaganda seems just what the doctor ordered."

Do not take all this lightly because, as we saw in the 2012 election, a steady diet of one-sided propaganda does make a big difference in the American electorate, as we can see here:

timesunion.com

Keep all this in mind about John Kerry for Secretary of State

canadafreepress

Ken Blackwell; Question John Kerry Long and Hard!  "Sen. John Kerry has a long and dubious record in foreign policy.
"In the 1970's, he testified against his fellow Vietnam War veterans before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He charged that they were violating the Geneva Conventions every day in Vietnam. Some POWs were outraged at Kerry's disloyal statements. They said they had been tortured by their Communist captors trying to force them to make such untrue statements.
"Worse, Kerry went to Paris in 1971. There, he met with North Vietnamese Communists. We need to see all his notes from those meetings. Any negotiation between a private U.S. citizen and a foreign power is illegal. It violates the Logan Act of 1798. Did Kerry demand of the North Vietnamese Communists that they abide by the Geneva Convention? Or is that only a demand he made of his fellow Americans?"....
No big deal; so far you've just described today's Democrat. It's what they are like.

From Freedom Outpost; Are Swift Boat Veterans Giving John Kerry A Pass On Secretary Nomination?  "I wrote previously about Swift Boat Veterans Founder John O’Neill’s claim that should Senator John Kerry received the nomination from Barack Obama that the group would resurface and protest his nomination. However, it appears from reports that there will not be an organized effort by the group to challenge Kerry’s nomination.
"Back in 2004 the group took on Kerry’s campaign for the White House and many believe it was effective enough to keep the Senator from gaining the chair of the Oval Office."
Hat tip to Tom Williams at Oregon Military Veterans, Family and Supporters

http://markhumphrys.com/election.04.kerry.html

Grotesque Obama eulogy for Sen. Inouye

It was all about Obama and little about the departed Senator
American Thinker    "Signs are accumulating that re-election has aggravated an already serious ego problem for Barack Obama. His eulogy for Senator Daniel Inouye yesterday shocked even some people favorably inclined toward the president, for its focus not on the departed, but on Barack Obama himself. Emily Yoffe of Slate - far from a conservative outlet -- wrote with disgust:

Someone needs to tell Barack Obama-it must get particularly confusing this time of year-that his own birth is not Year One, the date around which all other events are understood. His much-noted, self-referential tic was on cringe-worthy display Friday when the president gave his eulogy for the late Sen. Daniel Inouye, who served in Congress for half a century representing Obama's birth state of Hawaii.

The Slate article quoted: Today We Are Gathered … To Hear More About Me  "President Obama was supposed to eulogize the memory of Sen. Daniel Inouye. Instead he told us about his favorite summer vacation."

Tax the Rich, The Critique

On Dec 6th, Tunnel Wall posted this article about a video narrated by Ed Asner: Calif. Teachers Union Releases Cartoon Video Featuring ‘The Rich’ Urinating on the Poor. Accompanying it was text that included these words by Prof. William Jacobsen , who blogs at Legal Insurrection :

When Soviet-style propaganda comes to America, it will be published by the California Federation of Teachers and narrated by Ed Asner
"The video is reminiscent of Soviet anti-capitalist propaganda cartoons, with gross caricatures of voracious rich people feeding off the poor:"

Now we have a critique of this video with point-by-point refutation of Mr. Asner's claims.
"Lee Doren presents a scene by scene critique of the controversial cartoon ‘Tax the Rich’ which was paid for by a California Teachers Union."

Spaghetti with Regulation Sauce; Restaurant owners work overtime to figure out Obamacare.

As usual, wondering fearfully what our government will do to us next.
Weekly Standard "One common misconception about the health care law is that employers could avoid the mandate entirely by replacing their full-time employees with a greater number of part-time employees. That’s not going to work. They would still face a mandate, although it would only apply to their full-time employees.

floppingaces.net/

"There’s a reason the law refers not to full-time employees but full-time equivalents. Under Obamacare full-time employees are those who work more than 120 hours per month. Two part-time employees who each work 60 hours in a month would be counted as an additional full-time worker in determining whether the business falls over or under the 50-employee divide. So an employer must sum all the hours his part-timers work over the course of a month and divide that total by 120 to determine how many “full-time equivalent” employees he has. The only real way to avoid the mandate, then, is to keep your business small."
...."If you’re a business close to the 50 full-time equivalent mark, a heavy summer season or a holiday rush could put you over the top.
"The mandate takes effect in 2014 but will be based on the prior 12 months. So starting in January 2013, owners will need to keep a close watch on their employees’ hours. At the end of the year, they’ll know their situation better."

http://obamacartoon.blogspot.com/2010/09/obamacare.html

But wait! There's more! Domino’s Founder Files Lawsuit Challenging HHS Mandate  "Monaghan’s plight is a dramatic illustration of the coercive “incentives” built into Obamacare, which has concentrated broad powers in the hands of the federal government. This gross government overreach even extends to commandeering religious employers into directly paying for drugs and services that violate their faith despite conscientious objections."

I kinda like this sign...

Hey, it works in Israel.

Sometimes You Just Have To Do Something…

"In the meantime, I sympathize with liberals who say we need to do something right now…something like banning random types of firearms, for no particular reason. No, seriously–I get the fact that sometimes we need to do something, just to make a statement…to show that we care…even if what we do is only symbolic. I agree that this is such a time. So this morning, I joined the NRA."

From Power Line

New Study Finds Democrats Fully to Blame for Subprime Mortgage Crisis that Caused 2008 Financial Disaster

The Gateway Pundit  "In his early activist days, Barack Obama the community organizer sued banks to ease lending practices.

"State Sen. Barack Obama and Fr. Michael Pfleger led a protest against the payday loan industry demanding the State of Illinois to regulate loan businesses in January 2000. During his time as a community organizer Barack Obama led several protests against banks to make loans to high risk individuals."

Democrats and the media insist the Community Reinvestment Act, the anti-redlining law beefed up by President Clinton, had nothing to do with the subprime mortgage crisis and recession.
But a new study by the respected National Bureau of Economic Research finds, “Yes, it did. We find that adherence to that act led to riskier lending by banks.”....More...

Hat tip to The Infidel Bloggers Alliance

For you low-information voters who re-elected Obama, here is a summary of this story:  Obama and other Democrats applied pressure on the mortgage industry. I believe charges of "racism" were leveled and the industry buckled, giving loans to people who went in knowing they could not pay for these.
 In spite of warnings from the Bush Administration, the housing industry collapsed, causing the US economy to fall into what is called "the Great Recession" at the end of the Bush Administration. This led to the mess that Obama has repeatedly said he "inherited". Obama has pushed this "inherited" excuse for over four years (accurately enough, save for who caused it), blaming it on President Bush, unfairly.
All this has been absorbed by the low-information electorate (watchers of The View,Oprah, People Magazine readers, Obamaphone recipients,and all TV shows into the late evening,  et al) who number about fifty million.
I'm not sure news people on the networks, CNN and MSNBC could be classified as "low-information", but as collaborators. Rather than being "low-information" people themselves, they helped create those low-information voters.
I believe it is accurate to say that President Bush inherited this economic mess from Barack Obama. Obama is now doubling down on these actions, making them even more draconian, so we can expect the next administration to inherit a big mess from all this. TD

Stalin's birthday marked in Russia and beyond

Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger to lead the California Legislature in singing "Happy Birthday".

Sacramento Bee  "... several ethnic Crimean Tatars trashed a small street exhibition on Stalin. The entire Crimean Tatar population of Ukraine was hastily deported in cattle trains on Stalin's orders in 1944 for their alleged collaboration with Nazi Germans during World War II. Of the 200,000 Crimean Tatars, almost a fifth died of starvation and diseases, and the survivors were allowed to return only in the late 1980s.

"... Stalin ordered the deaths of at least 724,000 people during the purges and repression of the 1930s, while millions died as a result of the forced labor system in Gulags, the Soviet prison system.

"But, some people believe he was a strong and valiant leader whose grip on the nation was needed for security and his popularity in Russia has been climbing amid Kremlin-backed efforts to defend his image. "
Everyone but liberals have misunderstood M. Stalin and failed to see his real greatness.

The roots of mass murder

Charles Krauthammer 

"Every mass shooting has three elements: the killer, the weapon and the cultural climate. As soon as the shooting stops, partisans immediately pick their preferred root cause with corresponding pet panacea. Names are hurled, scapegoats paraded, prejudices vented. The argument goes nowhere.

"Let’s be serious:"....

...."The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.
"A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass killers. Just about everyone around Tucson shooter Jared Loughner sensed he was mentally ill and dangerous. But in effect, he had to kill before he could be put away — and (forcibly) treated. "

...."While law deters the rational, it has far less effect on the psychotic. The best we can do is to try to detain them, disarm them and discourage “entertainment” that can intensify already murderous impulses.

"But there’s a cost. "....

http://cartoonsbyhenry.com/

‘Queen James Bible' Scrubs 'Homophobic’ Passages

CNS News " “The Queen James Bible (QJB) is a big, fabulous Bible,” its website explains. Released on Nov. 27 by a publisher named “Queen James,” anonymous editors say they “wanted to make a book filled with the word of God that nobody could use to incorrectly condemn God’s LGBT children.”

" “And we succeeded,” they said.
"LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.
"The "Queen James" Bible changes a total of eight verses in the King James Version that deal with homosexuality, which it says are used by “anti-LGBT religious activists” to condemn homosexuals."
More excerpts from the CNS article:
...." “We side with most Bible scholars who understand the story of Sodom and Gomorra(sic) to be about bullying strangers,” it states under “Editor’s Notes.” "
...."The editors also argue that Leviticus 18:22, which labels sexual relations between two men an “abomination,” would mean only “scandalous” in today’s world."...." “Given the definition of the Hebrew word … we suggest that by today’s standards, a biblical abomination would be understood to be ‘scandalous.’” "
...."“Commonly known to biographers but often surprising to most Christians, King James I was a well-known bisexual,” the editors write. “Though he did marry a woman, his many gay relationships were so well-known that amongst some of his friends and court, he was known as ‘Queen James.’” "

(UPDATED) Unverified Report Claims Westboro Baptist Church's Plans to Picket Sandy Hook Funerals Thwarted by Good Samaritan Bikers

Seeking confirmation of this story; The Newtown Bee has no mention of these bikers attending yet.  Nor does the Woodbury newspaper. Below is what we have found on the story. Tunnel Dweller.

Update from Dec 15th: Connecticut school shooting: Protest planned to stop Westboro Baptist Church  Counter-protest Facebook page here. Excerpt from the Facebook page:

There was a collection of mostly local people on the Woodbury town green from noon on, growing to over a hundred by 2pm. People ... formed a human wall to block the signs of any would be protestors. There was also a number of members of a biker club, and visible police presence. The Westborough Baptist Church ... did not show up. The atmosphere was quiet and respectful for the sake of the families. .... I believe our numbers and our determination to not create a media scene or any trouble they could capitalize off of dissuaded them from showing up today.

The Stir   "Anyway, after Westboro threatened to picket the funerals of these innocent children (but haven't actually done so yet so far as I can tell), strangers from all over traveled to Newtown to form a human chain to block messages of hate from the eyes of the grieving townspeople. These human chains have been formed before at the funerals of soldiers.

"This time, a line of motorcyclists formed on the streets to keep watch for the Westboro loonies. "All these guys see us and think we're bad. We're not. It's solidarity, is what it is," New York biker Jim Hannigan told a reporter. "I just felt I had to be here." Seriously, Westboro, do you want to mess with bikers?!

"I don't know what kind of God Westboro Church believes in, but it's not the God the majority of people believe in. The idea that God sent down a reign of terror on Connecticut because of its gay marriage laws is absurd. But, you know, there's all kinds of nutty people in this world. I think this group only gets attention because it calls itself a church. I really feel sorry for the children (most of them children of the pastor) who are stuck in this "church.""

Westboro Baptist Church to picket Sandy Hook funerals: 4 ways to respond "How do you solve a problem like Westboro Baptist Church? Here are a few options."

Photo above from Hells Angels-1 Westboro Baptist Church-0  This story is unverified by other sources; "A group of other "Angels" and their leather clad brethren formed a human chain along the road in Woodbury to protect the mourners at Sandy Hook Elementary School principal Dawn Hochsprung's services today alongside firefighters and town's folk. It worked, the WBC stood down. "