We Should Be So Lucky

It is reported that almost 150 people are dead in Kenya as the result of an Al Qaeda terrorist attack.

A security operation is over and 147 people have been killed in an attack Thursday by Al Qaeda-linked terror group Al-Shabaab on a Kenyan college, officials said.

The officials said four attackers were killed during the operation.

The siege on Garissa University also left dozens more injured and hundreds of students unaccounted for.

Hours after the assault began, Kenyan security forces cornered the gunmen in a dormitory at the school, and President Uhuru Kenyatta said in a speech to the nation that the attackers were holding hostages.

"There are many dead bodies of Christians inside the building," Al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab told Sky News. "We are also holding many Christians alive. Fighting still goes on inside the college."

President Obama has made plans to visit Kenya soon.

Does Al Qaeda take requests?

IRS Commissioner, We Can't Abolish The IRS

The IRS commissioner on Tuesday brushed aside GOP proposals to abolish his agency, insisting the U.S. would have to have a tax collector one way or another.

“You can call them something other than the IRS if that made you feel better,” the agency’s chief, John Koskinen, said after a speech at the National Press Club.

Story here.

Thug Life Transplant - His Karma Rejected It

A heart transplant costs about a million dollars. And of course this nitwit gets one because it's raaaaacist not to waste a fortune on some knucklehead. I don't feel sorry for this POS nor for his family.

Heart transplant recipient, 17, dies in high-speed police chase crash - two years after hospital nearly denied him new organ because of his bad behavior

Anthony Stokes died on Tuesday after he crashed a stolen car into a pole while fleeing from the scene of an attempted burglary in Roswell, Georgia

• He had fired at an elderly woman after breaking into her home

• Less than two years ago, he was given a life-saving heart transplant

• He was initially denied the surgery because doctors said he had previously failed to take medication so would be 'non-compliant' with the treatment

• But they changed their minds following pressure from civil rights groups and the boy's family, who said he had been stereotyped as a troubled teen

• After the transplant, he said he was grateful for a second chance at life

A teenager who received a life-saving heart transplant two years ago after initially being denied because of his bad behavior has died following a high-speed car chase with police. 

Anthony Stokes, 17, died on Tuesday after he crashed a stolen Honda into a pole as he fled the scene of an attempted burglary at an elderly woman's home in Roswell, Georgia.

His death comes less than two years after he was given a second chance at life following a heart transplant at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. 

The boy, from Decatur, suffered from a dilated cardiomyopathy so his heart was unable to pump enough blood. The condition can lead to irregular heartbeats, blood clots or heart failure.

Story here.

Pull The IRS's Fangs

The government is pissing away money as fast as it prints it and this clown at the IRS wants more money so he can hire more thieves and bullies to collect more money. Typical government in action.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Tuesday that service at his agency has gotten so bad that they are ignoring more than 60 percent of taxpayers’ phone calls during this tax season.

Speaking at the National Press Club, Mr. Koskinen pleaded with more money, saying a budget boost would help them staff their overwhelmed customer service lines. He also said it would help reverse staffing cuts in their compliance division, where he said the government will lose $2 billion this year in money it would otherwise have been able to collect if it had better staffing.

Congress has cut or held the agency’s funding static for several years now, with lawmakers deeming the agency recalcitrant in solving problems, and unrepentant for having targeted tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny.

If Congress would stop passing complicated revenue laws that favor special interests and deep pocket political donors and simplify the tax code, they would collect more money. I pay an accountant to do my taxes just so the IRS leaves me the hell alone.

Last year the IRS went after me for another $1,500 in taxes. My accountant looked at the letter, looked at my return, said, "They're idiots" and sent them a letter explaining that I filed exactly the same as I did the previous year and they're not making sense. The IRS backed off. I wonder how many people are intimidated by these tactics and just pay up.

The best way to kill an unrepentant, out of control agency, is not to feed it. Hopefully that is what Congress will continue to do. Starve the IRS into a mere shadow of itself.

Since 2000, the number of IRS employees has declined by 2.6%, from 97,074 to 94,516. Other than Congress, the IRS has the lowest public approval rating than any other US governmental entity.

About seven years ago the IRS wouldn't send me my federal tax over payment - a little over $1,000. I spent over six hours on the phone, two hours a day for three days, trying to get someone to give me an answer. Starve the bastards.


Story here.

Obama's Homecoming

Vowing to leave no golf course unparred until he secures world peace, Barack Obama will return to Kenya for the Nairobi Tournament of Champions. The grand prize will be announced as soon as they can scare up a virgin and two goats.

Washington - Barack Obama will make a long-awaited trip to Kenya later this year, visiting his father's homeland for the first time since becoming US president six years ago, the White House said on Monday.

During the long-promised visit this July, Obama will attend a Global Entrepreneurship Summit in the east African nation, a statement said.

Obama has visited Africa four times since becoming president, but has not visited the country where he still has relatives.

He owes them money.

Raising The Dead In Venezuela

There is an afterlife; I know because people are still voting long after they stop breathing. It says so in the Book of Rahm, chapter 12, verse 9, "And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes elections..." Venezuela does not fear a zombie apocalypse, but a zombie someday running for office.

MIAMI -- While U.S. and Latin American officials say that Venezuela’s political crisis should be solved through upcoming legislative elections, recent testimony before the U.S. Senate raised many questions: It said Venezuela’s voting registry includes the names of so many dead, many states have more registered voters than people.

In March 17 testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Russ Dallen, editor in chief of the Caracas-based Latin American Herald Tribune, said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government is overseeing a voting process that almost guarantees electoral fraud in the legislative elections tentatively scheduled for September.

In the CIA Factbook, Venezuela has about 28,870,000 people of whom 20 to 21 million (about 73%) are of voting age .... maybe.

In the US, it is estimated that in 2014 there where 245,700,000 eligible voters. This is 76% of our population of 322,580,000. So the numbers of eligible voters are not far off, but the registration of said voters might be. There is no measure of the percentage of eligible US voters casting ballots in the 2014 elections because 14 states have not bothered to submit this information, or refuse to, or can't.

Read on.

Venezuela’s voting registry has been manipulated by the Venezuelan and Cuban regimes since late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez contracted Cuban companies to run Venezuela’s passport and identification agencies.

In 2003, when Venezuela’s opposition launched a campaign for a referendum to revoke Chavez’s term, Venezuela had 11.9 million registered voters. Chavez managed to delay the vote for a year and a half, which gave him time to add more than two million voters, and by 2004 Venezuela had 14 million registered voters, Dallen said.

Angered by his defeat in a 2007 referendum to change the constitution and allow him to run indefinitely, Chavez once again ramped up registration of names, and added several million new registered voters. By the time of the 2013 elections, which the government-controlled National Electoral Commission awarded to Maduro by 1.5 percent of the vote, the registry had 18.9 million eligible voters.

“So, the voting registry increased by almost 60 percent in 10 years. Quite a population boom!,” Dallen said in his prepared testimony.

The miracle of Chicago lives on.

I Can't Imagine A More Discouraging sight

AKRON, Ohio – The stars of a charity calendar are in their 80s and 90s, but that didn't stop the men and women from an assisted living facility in Ohio from showing a little skin.

Miss March, who's 88, wears a green top hat and not much else in the calendar from Pleasant Pointe Assisted Living, and the centerfolds are two women in their 90s who seem to be playing poker with strategically placed oversize cards.

Flip to February and you'll see a smiling, white-haired Dottie Rutter soaking in a bubble bath and flower petals, with chocolates and lingerie nearby.

At 87, she's the same age as the youngest of three models standing in the cover photo, where their bare feet and shoulders peek out from behind a banner they hold advertising the Barberton facility and the affiliated Pleasant View Health Care Center.

It reads: "Pleasant View, Pleasant Pointe."

Another resident in the calendar is covered only by a large exercise ball.

More (ugh) here.

We Remember ....

They Remember....

One of the best quotes regarding the Obama administration is this, culled from the Daily Timewaster:

...all we have to do is scrape this administration off our shoe in 2016 and return to doing good.

The story here is about the recent reactions of Europeans to the presence of US armed forces. Have a hanky available.

These are pictures of Polish citizens mobbing a US Army unit that transitioned across Poland this week. You'd think it was VE Day in 1945.

Story here and a lot more here.

Where Do Illegals Work?

According to a recent study, illegals as a percentage comprise more of the construction, farming, service and transportation workers than native born Americans.

Europe, here we come.

Illegal immigrants in the U.S. hold a variety of jobs throughout the nation, helping it function in many ways.

Though more illegal immigrant workers hold fewer blue-collar jobs and more white-collar ones now than it did before the Great Recession, a solid majority still works in low-skilled service, construction and production companies, according to new Pew Research Center estimates.

For instance, the service industry is made up of 33 percent of illegal immigrants, compared to 17 percent of U.S.-born workers.

Story here.

More Pew research on illegals here.

And if they don't work? Judicial Watch has a few words to say about them.

[...]States where immigrant households with children have the highest welfare use rates are Arizona (62%), Texas, California and New York with 61% each and Pennsylvania(59%).The study focused on eight major welfare programs that cost the government $517 billion the year they were examined. 

They include Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the disabled, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a nutritional program known as Women, Infants and Children (WIC), food stamps, free/reduced school lunch, public housing and health insurance for the poor (Medicaid).Food assistance and Medicaid are the programs most commonly used by illegal immigrants, mainly on behalf of their American-born children who get automatic citizenship. 

On the other hand, legal immigrant households take advantage of every available welfare program, according to the study, which attributes it to low education level and resulting low income.The highest rate of welfare recipients come from the Dominican Republic (82 %), Mexico and Guatemala (75%) and Ecuador (70%), according to the report, which says welfare use tends to be high for both new arrivals and established residents.

More here on the report.

Bar Titzvah?

Sunday, a yoga teacher in Scottsdale, Arizona, allegedly invited seven boys aged 11 to 15 while attending a boy’s bar mitzvah party, to stroke her new enlarged breasts.

Lindsey Radomski, 32, reportedly got drunk at the party on Saturday for 100 people, then showed her breasts to five adults and some boys near the swimming pool, before she was told to “sleep it off’ in a bedroom.

Hours later, on Sunday morning, she allegedly asked the seven boys if they wanted to come in the bedroom and fondle her breasts. After the boys had their fill and left, one 15-year-old remained behind. Radomski allegedly performed a sex act on him. His parents later reported her to the Scottsdale Police Department.

Radomski was arrested Tuesday evening, and though she admitted exposing her breasts, she said being drunk wiped out her memory of anything else. Sgt. Ben Hoster called the case “bizarre,” adding, “We haven’t had a woman allowing herself to be fondled by multiple juveniles before.”

Story here.

New Economic Paradigm?

Wealthy tech founders and the automation of middle-class jobs are often blamed for increasing concentrations of wealth in fewer hands. But a 26-year-old MIT graduate student, Matthew Rognlie, is making waves for an alternative theory of inequality: the problem is housing.

Rognlie is attacking the idea that rich capitalists have an unfair ability to turn their current wealth into a lazy dynasty of self-reinforcing investments. This theory, made famous by French economist Thomas Piketty, argues that wealth is concentrating in the 1% because more money can be made by investing in machines and land (capital) than paying people to perform work (wages). Because capital is worth more than wages, those with an advantage to invest now in capital become the source of long-term dynasties of wealth and inequality.

Rognlie’s blockbuster rebuttal to Piketty is that “recent trends in both capital wealth and income are driven almost entirely by housing.” Software, robots, and other modern investments all depreciate in price as fast as the iPod. Technology doesn’t hold value like it used to, so it’s misleading to believe that investments in capital now will give rich folks a long-term advantage.

Land/housing is really one of the only investments that give wealthy people a long-term leg up. According to the Economist, this changes how we should rethink policy related to income inequality.

I have problems calling income inequality a problem at all. When Mary poured perfume over Jesus head, Judas complained that the money could have been spent on the poor instead. Jesus replied "The poor you will always have with you..." (Mark 14:7).

There will always be people who have more money than others. Some are just better managers of whatever they have. Some are are smarter, or they work harder, or are on the right side of good fortune, or they inherited it ... or they stole it. Socialism will not cure that, it will only put everyone in the same misery zone and leave a ruling elite to truly enjoy the labor of others.

Rather than taxing businesses and wealthy investors, “policy-makers should deal with the planning regulations and NIMBYism that inhibit housebuilding and which allow homeowners to capture super-normal returns on their investments.” In other words, the government should focus more on housing policy and less on taxing the wealthy if it wants to properly deal with the inequality problem.

More here.

Hunting Diesel Subs

From the UK Daily Mail:

The US Navy is set to unleash an army of 'ghost drones' to scour the coasts for enemy submarines. They hope to end the growing threat of quiet, diesel powered enemy submarines enters American waters undetected.

The robot boats will go to sea for us to three months at a time.

The project began in 2010, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced that they were building a 132-foot autonomous boat to track quiet, diesel-powered submarines.

The program was dubbed Anti-submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV.

In six weeks of tests along a 35-nautical mile stretch of water off of Mississippi earlier this year, testers at engineering company Leidos and DARPA put the ACTUV's systems through 100 different scenarios.

The test boat was able to tail a target boat at 1 kilometer's distance, something military bosses say is a major step forward.

More at DARPA and here.

I wonder how easy it is to detect and destroy these 'ghost drones'? Are they capable of evasion or self defense? It sounds like the technology is not mature and will take a bit more development before it is truly mission capable.

Do The Math

The democrats seek political advantage by allowing millions of illegals to swarm into the US while preaching that they do the jobs that Americans refuse to do.

At the same time, manufacturing jobs are disappearing across the country.

[...]"Advanced robotics are changing the calculus of manufacturing," says Harold Sirkin, a senior partner at the management consulting firm.

A handful of nations, including the U.S. and China, are poised to reap the biggest benefits of the automation wave.

About 1.2 million additional advanced robots are expected to be deployed in the U.S. by 2025, BCG says. Four industries will lead the shift — computer and electronics products; electrical equipment and appliances; transportation; and machinery — largely because more of their tasks can be automated and they deliver the biggest cost savings.

About 10% of all manufacturing functions are automated, a share that will rise to nearly 25% in a decade as robotic vision sensors and gripping systems improve, BCG says.

Meanwhile, costs are tumbling. The cost to purchase and start up an advanced robotic spot welder has plunged from $182,000 in 2005 to $133,000 in 2014, with the price forecast to drop another 22% by 2025.

That's prodding manufacturers to replace workers. BCG says manufacturers tend to ratchet up their robotics investment when they realize at least a 15% cost savings compared with employing a worker. In electronics manufacturing, it already costs just $4 an hour to use a robot for a routine assembly task vs. $24 for an average worker.

So what happens when the jobs that Americans refuse to do disappear? How many bean pickers do we need? How many people on economic support programs can this country maintain before it all falls apart? 

Behind The Scenes

The reason for Obama's fury at Israel is uncovered. Netanyahu spilled the secret beans that Obama was cooking with Iran.

From Legal Insurrection:

The Obama administration has vented its fury at Israel based on Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, and pre-election statements.

None of those issues justified the complete fury coming from the administration. It just didn’t add up.

Now The Wall Street Journal reveals the back story — one in which the Israelis found out about secret negotiations and secret details concealed from Congress, and told Congress. Now the administration is promising long-term damage to Israel that will last beyond this administration.

It also becomes obvious that the meme that Netanyahu has been acting to help his reelection is wrong. There is a long history of Israel trying to stop a disastrous deal being negotiated in secret. Netanyahu’s opposition has been based on security concerns for years, not the recent election.