Quick Roundup 520

Blogroll Updates

It has been eons since the last time I updated the blogroll, but I finally started that over the weekend. I have gotten the process as close to automated as it can get, but I still have a bug to track down and squash. In any event, the immediate goal, after the bug fix, will be to go through a large backlog of new blogs a few at a time until I have more or less caught up and can make the process more manageable in size and regularly-occurring. (Each depends on and will enable the other.) This round's new additions number six and are marked, "new."

If you post regularly, were here before, and find yourself missing, drop me a line. Similarly, if your blog is on the inactive list, but you've started writing again, let me know.

Racism in "Polite" Society

A joke relayed in a comment in a very interesting thread over at New Clarion struck me instantly as racist in more ways than one:

Regarding the Tea-Parties-as-Racist meme, it is so pervasive, Letterman, during his monologue, made a joke -- something to the effect "its got as much black in it as a Tea Party rally; i.e. none." The audience gave a big laugh.Yes.

This is not just anti-white bigotry and a smear against advocates of limited government. It is also implicitly an example of a very common slam against blacks and the virtue of independence, as if no black man in his right mind would oppose Obama's ideal of a Leviathan state.

This is all on top of the fact that the whole punchline is also patently untrue: Individuals of every hue have attended Tea Party events out of concern about statism.

Our Declining Net Worth

Priced in Gold offers the folllowing translation of a recent "news" story titled, "Americans' net worth rises for third straight quarter":

Americans saw their wealth shrink again last quarter, mainly because of losses in the value of the dollar. The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that household net worth fell 8.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, to 1,526 tonnes of gold. Net worth had risen 2.5 percent in the second quarter and fallen 1 percent in the third. Aside from the second quarter's uptick, net worth has been falling every period since the third quarter of 2007. Falling home prices caused a major hit: Real estate holdings dropped 9.6 percent to 467 tonnes. The value of stocks fell 6.3 percent in the period, to 217 tonnes of gold. Underlying all of these drops is the continuing debasement of the US Dollar, as bogus "bailouts", "stimulus plans" and other reckless deficit spending take their toll.

Americans' net worth would have to rise 227 percent to get back to its pre-recession peak of 5,000 tonnes of gold.

Interestingly, Barack Obama sees nothing wrong with this, and so has not made "wealth reform" a top priority. (This is not to say that I would necessarily want his idea of what that would entail, which would be even worse than this.) Incredibly, the opposition party seems completely unaware of the opportunity such an opening could represent or indeed that there even is an opening.

Heh!

From Bubblehead's April Fool's post:

Word on the street today is that President Obama is going to confirm the existence of the secret submarine base under the Nevada desert.

And then he quotes from the Navy's Facebook page:

Today the Navy announced a new and unprecedented partnership with the U.S. Air Force on the next Aircraft Carrier. The next Ford class aircraft carrier will be jointly crewed by both Navy and Air Force personnel becoming the first fully joint warship. In the spirit of this partnership the ship will be named the "James Doolittle" after Lt Col. James Doolittle that famously led a raid on Tokyo in April 1942. In the spirit of environmental efforts in the Navy, the ship will include a new 'Green Flight Deck' designed to Air Force specifications. Naval aviators have never been so excited about an upcoming deployment.

The picture there says it all!

-- CAV