Another nail in the coffin...

...of Anthropogenic Global Warming/Climate Change/We're All Gonna Die.

Via Cold Fury, a calling-out of the chief Luddites that must be read to be believed.

You and I have been interacting, albeit at a distance, since I first asked you for your data some five years ago. I asked for your data in part because I was astounded by your answer to Warwick Hughes when he asked for the same data. You replied to Warwick at that time, “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

I couldn’t fathom that a leading climate scientist could actually believe that. Finding something wrong with other scientists’ data and ideas is an integral part of how science progresses. This requires transparency and access to the data. I also couldn’t believe that other climate scientists would let you get away with saying that, without some other scientist pointing out the anti-scientific nature of your denial.

Foolish me … d’ya think I might have been more than a bit naive back then about climate “science” realpolitik?

Anyone who cowers in terror of his pet hypothesis being disproven, has no right to call themselves a scientist.  "The science is settled," my skinny white ass.

ROFL

I have no idea whether this is a hipster parody, or a parody of hipsters...but it's damn funny either way.



(HT This Ain't Hell)

It's like that.

Via iOTW, we are treated to a clear and concise explanation of the evil of Islam, and why it must not be tolerated if Western civilization is to survive.


Bravo, Rep. Womick!

A bit more to be thankful for...

If you're reading this, chances are you're doing OK.  Maybe your house will never be featured on Cribs, and maybe you're not in the position of deciding whether to take the Bentley or the Lamborghini to the exclusive restaurant tonight.

But at least you're not living in a freaking ghost town.

"WC facilities function only when it’s warm in the street. In winter they are covered with icicles. Wastes go to the local river."

"There is a fire hydrant in the basement. Citizens of the ghost town use it to get water which is impossible to drink. They buy water in bottles for nutritive purposes."

"Raining outside is accompanied by raining inside."

Count your blessings.

Regarding my recent slackage

I'm just a bit overwhelmed, is all.  Not so much with work(although I am putting in a bunch of extra hours), but the accelerating destruction of America.  Seems like everywhere we turn lately, the Thug Regime is in our faces with yet another blatant "F.U." to the rule of law.  And, of course, none dare call it treason.

It's just damn depressing.

But I'm not giving up.  This Thanksgiving should remind everyone how lucky they are to live in this country, and how rare our freedoms are in the context of history.  I had about ran out of hope that America would wake up, but it's begun.  Though the odds may seem insurmountable, they aren't any more impossible than powered flight, men walking on the moon or computers in our pockets.  This country has always shown its best when our backs are to the wall.  We've done the impossible over and over again.  If any country on Earth can pull itself back from the brink of collapse, it's the United States of America.

May the Good Lord bless and keep us all, and give us the strength we'll need in the days to come.

Ann Barnhardt goes viral again...

...and this is making her Qur'an burning look like nothing.  Never mind her mention on the Rush Limbaugh show...when you make the comics pages, you know you're the issue of the day!!

Here's the original post(2 into 1):

BCM Has Ceased Operations

Posted by Ann Barnhardt - November 17, AD 2011 10:27 AM MST

Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management, It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator.
 
The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not.  And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.
 
The futures markets are very highly-leveraged and thus require an exceptionally firm base upon which to function. That base was the sacrosanct segregation of customer funds from clearing firm capital, with additional emergency financial backing provided by the exchanges themselves. Up until a few weeks ago, that base existed, and had worked flawlessly. Firms came and went, with some imploding in spectacular fashion. Whenever a firm failure happened, the customer funds were intact and the exchanges would step in to backstop everything and keep customers 100% liquid – even as their clearing firm collapsed and was quickly replaced by another firm within the system.
 
Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette.
 
I have learned over the last week that MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt. While other firms may not be as heavily leveraged as Corzine had MFG leveraged, and it is now thought that MFG’s leverage may have been in excess of 100:1, they are still suicidally leveraged and will likely stand massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days and weeks as Europe inevitably collapses. I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn’t that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm. 

Perhaps the most ominous dynamic that I have yet heard of in regards to this mess is that of the risk of potential CLAWBACK actions. For those who do not know, “clawback” is the process by which a bankruptcy trustee is legally permitted to re-seize assets that left a bankrupt entity in the time period immediately preceding the entity’s collapse. So, using the MF Global customers as an example, any funds that were withdrawn from MFG accounts in the run-up to the collapse, either because of suspicions the customer may have had about MFG from, say, watching the company’s bond yields rise sharply, or from purely organic day-to-day withdrawls, the bankruptcy trustee COULD initiate action to “clawback” those funds. As a hedge broker, this makes my blood run cold. Generally, as the markets move in favor of a hedge position and equity builds in a client’s account, that excess equity is sent back to the customer who then uses that equity to offset cash market transactions OR to pay down a revolving line of credit. Even the possibility that a customer could be penalized and additionally raped AGAIN via a clawback action after already having their customer funds stolen is simply villainous. While there has been no open indication of clawback actions being initiated by the MF Global trustee, I have been told that it is a possibility.
 
And so, to the very unpleasant crux of the matter. The futures and options markets are no longer viable. It is my recommendation that ALL customers withdraw from all of the markets as soon as possible so that they have the best chance of protecting themselves and their equity. The system is no longer functioning with integrity and is suicidally risk-laden. The rule of law is non-existent, instead replaced with godless, criminal political cronyism.
 
Remember, derivatives contracts are NOT NECESSARY in the commodities markets. The cash commodity itself is the underlying reality and is not dependent on the futures or options markets. Many people seem to have gotten that backwards over the past decades. From Abel the animal husbandman up until the year 1964, there were no cattle futures contracts at all, and no options contracts until 1984, and yet the cash cattle markets got along just fine.
 
Finally, I will not, under any circumstance, consider reforming and re-opening Barnhardt Capital Management, or any other iteration of a brokerage business, until Barack Obama has been removed from office AND the government of the United States has been sufficiently reformed and repopulated so as to engender my total and complete confidence in the government, its adherence to and enforcement of the rule of law, and in its competent and just regulatory oversight of any commodities markets that may reform. So long as the government remains criminal, it would serve no purpose whatsoever to attempt to rebuild the futures industry or my firm, because in a lawless environment, the same thievery and fraud would simply happen again, and the criminals would go unpunished, sheltered by the criminal oligarchy.
 
To my clients, who literally TO THE MAN agreed with my assessment of the situation, and were relieved to be exiting the markets, and many whom I now suspect stayed in the markets as long as they did only out of personal loyalty to me, I can only say thank you for the honor and pleasure of serving you over these last years, with some of my clients having been with me for over twelve years. I will continue to blog at Barnhardt.biz, which will be subtly re-skinned soon, and will continue my cattle marketing consultation business. I will still be here in the office, answering my phones, with the same phone numbers. Alas, my retirement came a few years earlier than I had anticipated, but there was no possible way to continue given the inevitability of the collapse of the global financial markets, the overthrow of our government, and the resulting collapse in the rule of law.
 
As for me, I can only echo the words of David:
“This is the Lord’s doing; and it is wonderful in our eyes.”
 
With Best Regards-
Ann Barnhardt

This, friends and neighbors, is integrity.  Make a note of it, since there may well be a test later...!!

"To be free, means to keep the law, and insist upon it."

WOW.

But, we also won’t be the ones to fire the first literal shot. We can’t be, for such a thing is against our live and let live nature. What is between what we have done, what we continue to do, and civil war? The only hope we’re clinging to, right now (aside from God working some long-term, Deep Miracles), is that we can hold out just long enough, that we can stretch what little is left until our efforts to take back our culture and our government start reversing the damage that has been inflicted.

This is not about the next election. This is about every single election we have left in this country, whether it’s this next one, or the one after that, or the one after that. . . Not a single person reading this comment will ever have the luxury of not having a life-or-death election ever again. It has taken generations to reach this point– it will take even more generations to get to where we need to be. Ladies, we know that it takes at least twice as long to lose ten pounds as it does to gain. Likewise, getting America back in shape will take longer than it took to get this far gone.

Whether our future holds bloodshed our not, and no matter who the victors in such a conflict might me, there is not a one of us who will live to see the day when America is where she ought to be (barring of course the End of Days up and happening, which naturally changes everything). Why did the Israelites have to wander 40 years in the desert before reaching the Promised Land? Because the generation of slaves had to die off first. Even though they’d been freed, their minds and culture had been warped by their upbringing, and therefore they had to pass on before Israel could be found. This is why even Moses could not enter the Promised Land—the best he got was seeing it from a distance.

...

Stew on that a bit, please. The law keepers, as we know them, are an artificial construct. When they fail, the responsibility to keep and enforce the law reverts to those who have always held the right, but rarely exercised it—all of us.

This is one of those things that I think we’ve always thought we knew, but maybe got just a little bit wrong. Yes, the police are supposed to be our friends, and the soldier keeps us safe. But these distinctions are distinctions of luxury. People can specialize to be a cop, or a fighter, because others prefer to specialize as a farmer or businessman. Vigilantism has been looked down upon with “Who are you to take the law into your own hands?!” Well, actually, it is our Right and Duty to Keep the Law in Our Hands. We may delegate to cops, but the right and duty is still ours. Only slaves are free of that duty. To be free, means to keep the law, and insist upon it.

RTWT.  Then read it again.  This, my fellow Americans, is the long and the short of it.

Where America Went Wrong: Publik Skool

The themes:

School is where our friends are (bullies included) and its institutional character prepares us for the grim "real world."
Home is an isolating, lonely place.
Friends are vastly more important than family.
"Socialization" is a necessity and can only take place in school.
"Socialization" is more important than learning.
Conformity is more important than learning.
Learning shouldn't be too pleasant an experience.
Herding us into groups is what we deserve.
Outside the institution of government school, personal advancement is not possible.

Here we have young people who can barely imagine what life would be like without school, or how they could possibly learn or make friends apart from this government institution. Their obsession with "socialization" attests to the breadth and depth of the peer-attachment epidemic.

I'm not sure what the poor things mean by "the real world," but I get the feeling they think it's going to be even bleaker than the current conveyor belt they're riding. Passivity and conformity have been bred into them from day one and all they can do is praise the system that is crushing them. It's not their fault; they never had a chance.

Page two features comments from homeschooling kids and parents trying to explain what it's all about. But it's like trying to describe daylight to the blind. In addition to the obvious leap in literacy, and at least as important as that, is the vitality evident in the homeschoolers' testimonials. They aren't blindered drones repeating what they've been fed since kindergarten.

Y'all MUST read this.  It's what I've been trying to tell people all my life.

How did I miss this guy?

Via Tam, please welcome Mike-Istan to the Infinite Blogroll.  Because this:

You could call it the freedom lover's side, but that is a little imprecise - everyone, including drunks, addicts, perverts, and thieves loves freedom, so that won't do at all. As a flag of convenience, let’s call our side the written word side. We believe the rules by which the government must abide are written down in words; the words have meaning; the rules may be changed by consent, but words can never be arbitrarily made to mean their opposite. It is the side which believes the good of having the government prohibited from doing harm far outweighs the harm of having it obstructed from doing good. It is the side which believes in putting the government on a tight leash and never letting it loose.

...

The constitution was originally conceived to act as an impediment on the ambitions of neo-monarchists. The founders understood it was the natural tendency for some people to look for kings, and the natural tendency for others to cast themselves in that role. But freedom is a mechanism which requires constant vigilance, and those who wished to be kings encouraged those who feared living without rulers to attack the very idea of that vigilance.

...
The conflict then, is between one side which must... MUST rule over others, and another which cannot understand why anyone would want to.

That's the long and the short of it.  Welcome to my blogroll, Mike!

More on GunGate

Some chick on Facebook has a great perspective on the role of Eric Holder in this whole deal.

And where is President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder in all of this? When did he first know about the operation? In his testimony to the House Oversight Committee on May 3, 2011, Holder stated, “I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.” But the DOJ’s own documents prove that Holder had been receiving briefings on Fast and Furious for nearly a year before that date. In other words, our government’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder, lied to the American public. He finally admitted this week to the Senate Judiciary Committee, “In my testimony before the House committee [on May 3], I did say a few weeks. I probably could have said a couple of months. What I said about a few weeks was inaccurate based on what happened.”

When the nation’s highest law enforcement official lies to the American people, he must go.

And if he claims that he didn’t lie, then how else do we explain this situation? He’s either lying or he’s so grossly incompetent and lazy that he didn’t read important life and death briefings from his deputy attorney general and didn’t know about this deadly operation run by people under him. So, which is it? Incompetent, lazy, or lying? No matter which explanation fits, he needs to go.

Who is this woman, and why isn't she running for President?  ;)

11.11.11

The next time this many ones come around on the calendar, we'll all be gone.  That'll be 11.11.2111, and I don't think anyone who's old enough to read is going to be alive.

Now that you're all awestruck by a bunch of numbers, rmember what day this is:  Veterans' Day.  Never forget the sacrifices others made so that you might enjoy the blessings of liberty.  Then resolve to fight ever harder, on the home front, to wrest that liberty back from the statist scum who want to snuff it out forever.  Our warriors deserve no less from us.

In other news, I've found another addition to TIB, via Bubba.  Please welcome the...er, 'colorful' literary stylings of This Ain't Hell.  Anyone who digs the late Mike Royko is OK by me.

Take a moment.

Think about all the comforts you enjoy...and then think of what it takes to bring them to you.

On this day, in 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald went down with all hands.  She carried iron ore, which may seem a boring commodity to some of you.  But without the people who earn their living with seemingly mundane things, a civilized first-world lifestyle would be impossible.

For some reason, no matter how many people rag on it, I've always loved this song:

Occupy this.

He's right, ya know.

Posted without comment.  RTWT.

In 1775, we literally went to war against terrible odds to kick out a government that was less intrusive and more well loved than this one. Today, we have people demonstrating in the streets to give the Congress they hate more power.

Good to live in a more enlightened age, huh?

Yeah.  It's like that.

DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT!!!

As regular readers know, I'm a truck driver.  Public Citizen is one of the many groups dedicated to screwing over the trucking industry, which means I hate them.  I also despise Reps. Louise Slaughter and Raul Grijalva; Grijalva for being a racebaiting punk and Slaughter for being a general-purpose Leftist.

And now, I have to stand in their corner.  F*******CK!! <---beats head against wall

While the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) routinely scrutinizes market transactions and traders for insider deals, no such oversight exists for members of Congress, congressional staffs or most other federal employees.

That's because the SEC defines insider trading as a breach of confidentiality – an obligation that most federal employees do not have.

They obtain confidential financial information as a function of their work, and how they use that knowledge outside of work to benefit themselves or their friends has never been addressed. But it is a matter of serious ethical and legal concern.

...

For that reason, Public Citizen supports the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (the STOCK Act, H.R. 682), a measure sponsored by Reps. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), Louise McIntosh Slaughter (D-N.Y.), Tim Walz (D-Minn.) and Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.).

Public Citizen's legislative lobbyist, Craig Holman, has coordinated support for the bill with other public interest groups. Together, they sent a letter to the bill's co-sponsors on March 4, stating their belief that the reform measure restores balance to how insider trading laws are applied to the public and private sectors.

This law will likely be ignored by our current lawless thug administration, just like they ignore every other law they find inconvenient.  Still, it's a step in the right direction.  And unless Congressional Republicans know something about this bill that I don't, they'd best explain why they're not signing on to this.

W.R.O.L.

Memorize this acronym:  Without Rule Of Law.  Then wrap your head around it.  Because that's where we're at.  (Actually, we've been there for some time now...they're just growing increasingly blatant about it.)