Death Sentence

Reuters reports that Kim Jong Il of North Korea has pancreatic cancer.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has pancreatic cancer and the illness is life-threatening, South Korean broadcaster YTN said on Monday based on information gathered by Chinese and South Korean intelligence sources.

Kim’s health is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the reclusive communist state. Kim, 67, was widely thought to have suffered a stroke last year, but there has never been official confirmation.

The survival rate for pancreatic cancer essentially amounts to not good.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about Kim’s impending death as far as he is concerned. I am worried about the situation in North Korea should he die soon, however. Kim has tried to pass along the family business of hereditary boutique stalinist dictatorship by anointing his son as heir apparent.

I don’t recall another third generation stalinist state leader. A civil war in North Korea worries me a lot.

Smoke And Mirrors

Since the last post was about magic – sort of – it seems appropriate that this one is also about smoke and mirrors. Specifically the hand waving of magician-in-chief of Barack Obama and his endless campaign:

Aside from the important and apparently successful stress tests for which the Administration and the Fed rightly deserve credit, the most successful and effective actions taken by the Obama Administration in its first six months were the continuation of the TARP capital purchase program and the extension of the auto loans. Both were initiated by President Bush.

I cannot see what else counts as as “swift and aggressive action” that “we [the Obama Administration] took in those first few months” that “has helped pull our financial system and our economy back from the brink.”

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was not expected to restore the economy to full health on its own but to provide the boost necessary to stop the free fall. So far, it has done that.

2.6 million fewer Americans are employed now than when the President took office, and the unemployment rate is 9.5% and climbing. Job loss in June was greater than in May. The good scenario is one in which we continue to lose jobs for “only” another six months. Please prove that the stimulus is working. To use the Administration’s misleading metric, how many jobs have been “saved or created” so far?

It was, from the start, a two-year program, and it will steadily save and create jobs as it ramps up over this summer and fall.

Uh-oh. Why are the verbs now in the future tense? And what happened to the specific and oft-repeated prediction of 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year? Those are important language changes, along with the implicit admission that the stimulus has not yet “ramped up.”

This did not have to be a two-year program. Congress could have front-loaded the stimulus had they instead given the cash directly to the American people, as they did on a bipartisan basis in early 2008. We would have saved much of it, paying off our mortgages, student loans, and credit cards (which would not be a bad thing). We would have spent the rest much more quickly than the federal and state government bureaucracies now stumbling through their usual corrupt, slow and inefficient processes. Instead the President handed the money and program design over to a Congress of his own party, who saw it as a big honey pot rather than as an exercise in macroeconomic fiscal policy. The President’s primary macroeconomic policy mistake was allowing Congress to pervert a rapid Keynesian stimulus into a slow-spending interest-based binge.

Read the whole thing, please. It is devastating. It pretty well proves that the magician is a charlatan.

Obama’s statements are outright falsehoods. That is not how the “stimulus” was sold to America. It was supposed to “save or create” jobs right away.

Aside from a few rookie cops in Toledo who had jobs saved for exactly one year, what other gazillions of jobs has the administration claimed to have produced – by name. I am not crediting the nebulous numbers the administration purports to have saved. Name the jobs or admit this is complete nonsense.

All Americans are used to “construction season” when road crews are building various improvements to roads, bridges and whatnot. They are used to the endless traffic problems this creates. It is a normal part of life in the US.

It is also normal full-employment season – as in, every, single equipment operator has a job – for the skilled equipment operators who do this sort of work. So the question one should be asking here is if the “stimulus” was meant to suddenly build even more infrastructure projects, where are the equipment operators supposed to come from? These are not jobs that can be done by new hires – it takes training and experience to run heavy equipment. 

There is a project being constructed on an interstate that I use daily. Replacing some bridges over creeks. They have been working steadily on it for a few months now. I have no idea if this was a “shovel-ready” project or a long-planned bit of work. What I do know is that another project a few miles to the north – one that has been going on for several years now – suddenly has NO work going on whatsoever. No equipment, no workers, no progress. I mean nothing at all.

That project was so important that they worked it through the winter – and suddenly stopped cold, moved their equipment and started something else.

Is this happening where you live? Are you seeing smoke and mirrors?

I Put A Spell On You….

Feeling magical? Have the urge to put a hex on someone? Have a notion to make a potion? Fancy making £50,000 ($80,000) a year for casting a few spells? Well, then, there’s a job opportunity that is right up your alley.

It is not so much a recruitment drive as a witch hunt.

A tourist attraction in the West Country is looking for someone to fill the role of local hag. The advert for the job at Wookey Hole specifies that the successful applicant ‘must be able to cackle’ and ‘must not be allergic to cats’.

Equality requirements mean the attraction is not permitted to specify the witch’s gender. This is because they are unable to definitively prove if the ‘real’ Wookey Witch – said to have lived with pets in the caves hundreds of years ago – was male or female.

For the past six years, the job has been held by Jane Brenner, 66, who is moving to another post at the tourist attraction.

The £50,000 salary is pro-rata, and will depend on the number of shifts, but organisers say there is every likelihood the new witch will earn this amount.

According to legend, the original Wookey Witch was turned to stone by Father Bernard, who had been appointed by the Abbott of Glastonbury to rid villagers of her curse. Daniel Medley for the caves said yesterday: ‘Wookey Hole wants the appointee to go about her everyday business as a hag, so that people passing through the caves can get a sense of what the place was like in the Dark Ages.

(A hint for men: it probably would not be a really good idea to suggest that your mate would be a good candidate for this career.)

However, if any readers of the Crabitat are interested in the job, we have some eye of newt and a black cat just laying about the place that we’d be happy to give away.

Ok, you got me. We’re all out of the eye of newt, but I was hoping someone might take the cat. She hates me. Actually, she hates everyone except my wife.

Princes, Peasants And Collateral Damage

Mark Steyn:

“Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales has warned. … And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.”

He then got in his limo and was driven to his other palace.

It takes a prince, heir to the thrones of Britain and Canada and Australia, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea and a bunch of other places, to tell it like it is: You pampered consumerists are ruining the joint. In the old days, we didn’t have these kinds of problems. But then Mr. and Mrs. Peasant start remodeling the hovel, adding a rec room and indoor plumbing, replacing the emaciated old nag with a Honda Civic and driving to the mall in it, and next thing you know instead of just having an extra yard of mead every Boxing Day at the local tavern and adding a couple more pustules to the escutcheon with the local trollop they begin taking vacations in Florida. When it was just medieval dukes swanking about like that, the planet worked fine: That was “sustainable” consumerism. But now the masses want in. And, once you do that, there goes the global neighborhood.

By contrast, as an example of an exemplary environmentalist, the Prince hailed his forebear, King Henry VIII. True, he had a lot of wives, but he did dramatically reduce Anne Boleyn’s carbon footprint.

And that’s really the goal here: reduce the world population to the same substandard level of misery. The princes will be driven in their limousines while the peasants are driven to penury by carbon taxes. Prince Gore will continue his globe-trotting Gulfstream lifestyle, pimping his green “investments” and getting richer by the day.

The rest of us, not so much.

I was talking to the owner of a very small winery just yesterday. He said that they would be driven out of business by the cap and trade scam, as would all of the other wineries he was in touch with. Just more collateral damage to the limousine liberal ”princes” who know better than you how your life must be led. And who don’t care if your energy prices skyrocket.

They already have their wealth and power, you see.

Now they want yours, too. Back to peasantry for you and me.