sunset from behind the wire

sunset from behind the wire

Friday, December 6, 2013

Is This Helping?

What do you feel like when you see this branding:

You wonder if the people at the US National Reconnaissance Office (part of CIA) are living in a cave in the Gobi Desert and are not let out very often.
(Fox News) The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office launched a new spy satellite Thursday evening on mission NROL-39 -- and the new logo and tagline are quite an eye opener. 

How does this logo make you feel?  (this is not a scientific survey)

A) "I'm glad that the NSA is listening to all my telephone calls and is downloading my computer and i-phone information. It's for my own good."

B) The octopus may be overreaching.

C) They could have found a more sensitive totem when you consider that our allies are using this to ram up our back sides.

D) Other.

Fly-Over Country

2012 Electoral Map (by county)

Watching the feature films The Hunger Games and Catching Fire reminded me of the situation that befalls people who are left behind in Fly-Over Country - the term coined by Hillary R. Clinton (The Bitch of Benghazi) and trumpeted in turn by President Barack Obama. 
(IBD) Victor Davis Hansen writes: The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America's big decisions are made. 
The road to riches and influence, we are told, lies in being branded with a degree from a coastal-elite campus like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or Berkeley. How well a Yale professor teaches an 18-year-old in a class on American history does not matter as much as the fact that the professor helps to stamp the student with the Ivy League logo. That mark is the lifelong golden key that is supposed to unlock the door to coastal privilege. (Click here to go to the original article) The article continues and I feel that it's worth your time to read it.
The US is no different than Russia, where ambitious people flood to Moscow (and to a lesser extent, St. Petersburg/Lenningrad) and the rest of the country goes to pot. In China it's Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. In France, it's Paris, etc. 

When I was a young man, I too left "the farm" and ended up living on either side of fly-over country. It's nearly a default setting for those who are interested in advancing themselves and have no family pull or inherited means. As polar as it was "back then in the olden days", it's far worse now. A friend of mine who lives in the Virginia suburbs continually trumpets how there is no recession or unemployment in (the Beltway) his part of the country. That's because Barack Obama has spent $7 trillion in borrowed funds and money pledged against future taxes while he grew government and money flowed to Washington DC.
( For decades in the US, any poor person could work their way up to the middle class simply by learning their job, working hard, and staying out of trouble. Those who aspired to more could go further through education or imitative. You could literally go from the assembly line to the boardroom over the course of your life if you proved your merit. Further, the majority of the people who were wealthy earned it by providing some product or service that people needed. They were compensated by the free market and we saw them as heroes for their achievements: they made the world better. The keys were this: (1) wealth was generally earned, (2) political power had little to do with the earning of wealth, and (3) you could work your way up the ladder to each level. 
Over the past few decades this has changed. For one thing, the wealthy today rarely earn their wealth through the private market. Instead, they enter the worlds of law or finance, and their wealth comes from the misuse of the legal system to force their way into transactions. In other words, they actually “earn” their wealth by setting up toll booths to clog the free market system, and what they earn is stripped away from companies and people who could otherwise use it invent new products and employ more people. Moreover, their pay does not come from free market mechanisms, it comes from monopoly pricing. Thus, today’s rich make a hell of a lot more money than the rich in the past and they are “earning” it without providing anything useful to society... to the contrary, they are hindering society. Thus, they have gone from heroes to villains.
Nowhere are these villains more clearly identified as a general group than in California. Liberal Californians are considered to be a plague in states bordering California and as far away as Colorado. They take the money that they make in high income zones, move to really nice areas where prices are not as high, buy everything that they can get their hands on (inflating costs for everyone else) and vote Democrat, trying to make their new corner of the world into the morally bankrupt land that they just departed. Merely driving a car with California license plates in those regions brands you as a species of 'sub human'.
When vacationing in Oregon about three years ago, a friend of mine in the Oregon State Police gave me a set of "cold plates" to put on my 4x4 so I'd look like a local, and people wouldn't automatically resent me. 
Because the urban hells have the population, they have the votes to decide national elections despite the will of the people who occupy most of the American landscape. And it's unlikely to change in the near future.

Fly Over State politicians try to convince their constituents that they will make a difference, and while they do incrementally, South Dakota has three electoral votes. New York has 29, California has 55, and tiny New Jersey has 14. You only have to do the math.