Bride of Rove

North Korea’s web site is unavailable, currently, so I have no idea what’s really going on with the world according to Garp. Fox News is kitsching out on every Easter visual trigger ever conceived by marketing: Bouquets of flowers, Peeps, bunnies, pets in bunny costumes, miracles of animal survival, miracles of people survival, avalanches of chocolate, The Bible mini-series, Easter Songs and more Easter songs, etc.

So.

Happy Easter.

We will return to gloom and doom reporting tomorrow…

I think everyone is pretty much over the sequester discussions and talk radio has done an effective job of making sure everyone understands that it’s a capriciously applied game of smoke and mirrors that really only affects Federal Employees and no one likes Federal Employees anyway.

My husband is one of those Federal Employees so keep that in mind as you read on.

As my career has evolved in IT and in writing I have learned to always keep an eye out for new skills needed to make myself marketable in evolving technologies and to be able to honestly assert my value to a company or project and in what ways. I’m a little weird in that I will actually assess the job description, discuss the position and current business needs of the company and tell them whether or not I am a good fit. They don’t know me. They don’t know everything I can do or all of my hard won experience. I don’t want to come in at a high salary if all they need is another programmer. I won’t get into specifics but if you’ve been in the non-government business world for 30 years you know what I am talking about. My time is money to them. It’s money to me. Who I choose to give that time and my skills to is my choice and, in general, my expertise has value, the employer recognizes that value and utilizes it to their benefit. If they don’t, I go elsewhere.

Working for the U.S. Government is a very different kind of mindset.

The business owners are unskilled hacks who are not interested in setting rational business rules designed to improve a service or a product. They could. But they don’t. The employees of these idiots range from minimal skills to highly skilled workers and in the right hands they could move mountains and they have. In a normal, healthy business enviroment, skills and the applications of those skills to the betterment of the bottom line of the organization are encouraged and rewarded.

In the U.S. Government, the better you are at what you do, the more intense and vicious the beatings.

And yet, these men and women stay in Government jobs. Why?

I know the common perception is that they are lazy, trading off self-respect for job security and are thus pathetic beings conditioned to suck off the tax payers. I find that view hillarious. There may be some examples of low level employees who do worse than nothing and make more than they are worth and in a private firm they would be fired. In the government they persist like ticks and provide the few bad examples that warps the public view of all government employees because people in general like to accept the narrative reporters cram into their brains.

I know what’s true. I write fiction so I can see what is fiction in the news reports and opinion pieces.

In the begining years of our marriage, I begged my husband to quit. I have lost count of the weeks and months we have lived in blind terror when he worked missions in Peru, Columbia, Mexico and beyond. The death threats I received personally, pets murdered as messages to stop interdicting drugs and smugglers of human sex slaves and god only knows what else. The moves, starting over in strange places … with children, children who were tagged as the enemy because of what their father does for a living. There was one phone call I’ll never forget when they were in elementary school. My husband called me and told me to go get the kids out for the day and make arrangements for their homework for a few days.

Why? I asked.

“Because we are about to arrest about 25 parents of their friends today and I want them safe.”

“What about the kids whose parents are going to jail?”

“We have that covered.”

“That sucks, man.”

He reminded me that people make choices in life and they are not always good choices and they do not always factor in children to those choices. He could have been talking about himself, ironically. So minor, compared to other phone calls, just another day at the office and another day in the life of the family of a Federal Agent for the US Government.

He called me once,to ask if we could aford to go a month without his pay because the CIA had bugged out of Peru in advance of the Shinning Path overrunning their location and U.S. Customs would not authorize their unarmed personnel to evacuate as well. He was responsible for ten other lives and was trying to decide whether to bug out to Panama and wait for the spooks to give the all clear or stay there, unarmed and unprotected, and see if the Peruvians could hold that location. He was told if he evacuated they would all get a month off without pay. He was actually running the numbers of the death benefits for his family against the loss in pay and assessing the risk tolerence of his crew and gaming out scenarios for survival.

He’s just cute that way.

I told him I would figure out a way to pay the bills. Come home.

The Shinning Path overran that location and nearly everyone there was killed, except my husband and his crew and the spooks that departed before them. Once things were cleaned up and the bodies were buried, they went back. When talking heads blather on about how they tighten their own budgets when they don’t have the money coming in as regards to how people like my husband should suck it up and take the sequester hit, I laugh my ass off. They have no idea what they are even talking about.

Presidents come and go and Federal Employees are treated well or badly depending on who is in office. So they hunker down through bad administrations and do their jobs as well as they can hoping the next election will set things right. Because for some reason my husband believes that laws should be enforced and that keeping three terrorists from Yemen from crossing over into Florida from the Bahamas is a positive way to spend his time. Time which is funded by taxpayer money. He thinks that stopping a container full of young girls and boys from being exported to sex shops overseas is a valuable return on tax payers investments. He thinks that making sure goods coming into the country are processed for safety, and tarrifs are paid to offset the tax payer burden for facilitation of commerce across borders, has value.

CNS News reports that in spite of the sequester, the Federal Government spending is up this year over last.

So. Air officers take a 40% hit in pay. My husband takes almost a 20% reduction. Upper management sees no change in pay. They have no gas to fly because there has been no budget since 2008 and 2008 dollars will buy only half the supplies – like gas for the planes — that it bought back then. Congress votes themselves a raise.

This is chaos, pure and simple.

There are no business rules. There is only entropic disdain for any logical, measurable standards and methods. This is a government-business-society cracking into a perverted mosaic of itself. I am watchng all of this from a private industry perspective and watching a good man try to navigate the horror of it. The stress is off the charts.

So I haven’t written much here for the past few months. I have been spending most of my time trying to help him navigate the madness and decide what to do next, because, I believe, that this time he cannot hunker down and wait it out until the next administration comes in and gets it under control. I think the tipping point has passed and it is too late to restore order and logic. I am trying very hard not to remind him of those days in the beginning, when he was so certain he could make a difference to this country. I remember quoting Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22″ to him during an argument, once. Actually I threw a lot of quotes from that book at him as I tried to understand how it must be to work for the US Government, but one of my most quoted was after someone got appointed over him with no clue what the hell they were doing and no concern over what that meant. As things turn to shit I remind him:

“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch 22

Nothing about government follows rational patterns of behavior. Nothing works the way it logically should. Just stay solidly grounded in who you are, what you believe, keep building your skills and adding to your personal foundation and no matter how this explodes out under the pressure, those things will keep you sane and save your ass.

I want, desperately, for him to retire. I fear, desperately, for our future generations if every good man and woman working for this country chooses to leave the service of it. I believe, rationally, that what is coming next is inevitable. And thus we plan how to navigate.

He is a pilot. He is a suba diving instructor and rescue diver. He is a boat captain. He is a paramedic.

Lately, because there is no gas money to fly missions, he has been training the entire office and other offices in First Responder certifications, CPR and basic emergency response skills because he and I believe that the country is going to need a LOT of people who know what they are doing in those areas. It’s a better way to spend the day than watching the world melt down.

Strange days.

Let’s go there shall we?

According to CNN Marco Rubio taking a sip from a bottle of water during a speech after the SotU badness was a career ender.

Dear CNN,

Sadly? There is no one left to explain the obvious to you amongst your peers so I shall take a stab at it. Rubio drinking water during his speech was not a career ender. But more importantly: IT WAS NOT EVEN NEWS.

That you have made it news and escallated it to the level of scandalous, career-ending, on-dits and tried so desperately to meme the crap out of as if you believe you can drive pop-culture with a near zero audience IS NEWS. It is us, watching the death rattle of a network, checking our watches because your relevence to the world can be marked in minutes now.

It’s sad.

Stop it.

“Step One: Form a shadow government using humanitarian aid as cover. ” ~ How to collapse a government

While I don’t think we are ever past the point where we follow current events (Does anyone care or believe that Obama enjoys shooting guns? No.) every now and again it’s nice to just step back and ponder the more nuanced fissures in our emerging political philosophies. I am reading a book about the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, January 12th, 2010 from a hard core liberal perspective, which is painful reading, but there is a paragraph or two near the beginning that mention Sean Penn arriving shortly after with friends, supplies and a lot of cash. He hit the ground running and got to work assisting people. It’s not the first time he’s done this. He was in New Orleans on a boat pulling people to safety after Katrina. He didn’t just go, get his photo taken and leave. He set up a fund for rebuilding and holds events to raise funds for J/P HRO Haitian Relief organization.
He has won high praise from at least one skeptic who knows Haiti and her history well:

The new book moves through the post-quake ruins and tent camps capturing loss, survival and frustration in shifting pictures held together by Wilentz’s unsparing voice and a few recurring threads. One is a doctor named Megan Coffee, a selflessly effective heroine in a jury-rigged tuberculosis ward.

Another is the self-serving visitations of celebrities of any stripe, be they from medicine, politics or Hollywood.

One notable exception is Sean Penn, whom she counts “among the freest and most personally committed and involved of the reconstruction outsiders who came to save Haiti.” ~ Amy Wilentz

You look at his love fest with Hugo Chavez and other nasty actors on the world political stage, his films which are a mix of some really great character studies, and I include Fast Times at Ridgemont High in that mix, and social activist preaching. I don’t know him, never met him, never watched him speak other than to promote a film … as far as I know his only publicized character “flaw” is a rather famously short temper. That makes sense in relation to how fast he also reacts to disasters in our hemisphere. Maybe he doesn’t really think too deeply about an issue, he just sees a problem and immediately decides to solve it, never looking sideways at anything and very definitely never wondering why someone else may see the issue very differently. If you disagree with him? I would imagine he doesn’t care, even if he knows you and likes you. That’s just a guess, though.

But that is the way of thinking that many liberals employ and it is intensely frustrating to conservatives who usually step back dispassionately to assess everything before acting.

Let me explain.

Christopher Hitchens famously flayed Mother Teresa for her support of some of the worst dictators and architects of human suffering ever to walk the planet, Papa Doc Duvalier among them, and penned a book titled, Hell’s Angel in which he deconstructs her as a hypocrite and probable atheist. What she was, was a pragmatist who saw a problem, needed funding, and got it. She saw a problem. She saw people in poverty. She needed money to fix that. She got the money.

Stay with me here, I have a point.

Paul Farmer, founder of Partners In Health, operates in much the same way. When his ambitions on behalf of the world’s poor and sick outgrew his funding, he did not hesitate to accept funding from George Soros and political stroke from the Clintons. There is one chapter in the novel, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder where he is on a quest to cure MDR, Drug resistant TB, before it becomes an epidemic. It’s a noble goal and definitely worth donating time and money to, and I “get” that diseases do not respect governments or borders.

Dr. Paul hooks up with a Russian counterpart in medicine who has funds for Russian prisons who introduces him to George Soros. Soros is famous for bragging about collapsing five different governments and their monetary system for his own profit and to further his very publically stated goal of one world currency and one world government.

The Seven Steps of Collapse

Soros is known as the man who broke the Bank of England. The prime minister of Malaysia called Soros an “unscrupulous profiteer.” In Thailand, he was branded an “economic war criminal.” They also said that he sucks the blood from people.

In 1994, George Soros stated: “Just right that the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.”

The following are George Soros’ seven steps for bringing down a regime and causing a currency collapse:

Step One: Form a shadow government using humanitarian aid as cover.

Step Two: Control the airwaves. Fund existing radio and TV outlets and take control over them or start your own outlets.

Step Three: Destabilize the state, weaken the government and build an anti-government kind of feeling in the country. You exploit an economic crisis or take advantage of an existing crisis — pressure from the top and the bottom. This will allow you to weaken the government and build anti-government public sentiment.

Step Four: Sow unrest.

Step Five: Provoke an election crisis. You wait for an election and during the election, you cry voter fraud.

Step Six: Take power. You stage massive demonstrations, civil disobedience, sit-ins, general strikes and you encourage activism. You promote voter fraud and tell followers what to do through your radio and television stations. Incitement and violence are conducted at this stage.

Step Seven: Outlast your opponent.[15]

When people rail at corporatism and the evils of multinational corporations running governments, they are talking about George Soros.

Are you seeing where I am going with this? Examine the motives of the source.

Why, now, would Soros be offering a few million to cure TB in Russia?

Well, because people like Paul Farmer, with a driving need and the skills to do good in the world, will get a taste of success, see the scope of the full issue and come back for more money. And when they do, Soros sends them to the World Bank, the World Health Organization and they, in turn hit Russia up to take out a loan (because while private donations are important, it’s even more important that we “not let governments off the hook”). Russia took out a 50 billion dollar loan with the World Bank. In turn the World Health Organization and the World Bank got to decide what entities got what percentage in many meetings with very important people who move human beings around like dots on a board. Never once did Paul Farmer seem to question any of this. He needed money for his cause. He got it. Soros? Got the Russian government further in debt and his organization will collect the interest even as the “World” organizations he sponsors grow stronger and individual governments grow weaker.

This is a classic example of “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” and this is how conservatives see these charities and global level machinations. Liberals do not understand.

Sean Penn, Paul Farmer, Mother Teresa … they fix a few problems even as the noose tightens further around the neck of human freedoms, the right to representative government … sigh … we head deeper down a rabbit hole of servitude on a global scale to monsters like George Soros.

Sean Penn is probably a good guy. I might even like him if we ever met in person. But I think the divide between the way I see things and the way he sees things is not a divide that can be bridged. He sees the poor suffering here and now, in this moment, and decides to fix it and he gets the funds from any source, unquestioning of the ulterior motive, never pondering the end game of these players or why they choose to assist here and not over there. You can say “Damn the cost” in the heat of the moment, but sometimes the cost damns generations for decades to come. Embrace people like Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, George Soros and the Clintons (didn’t Bill choke off all aid to Haiti during his time as President of the United States and didn’t he keep help from going to Rwanda dring the masacre that killed a mllion people there? And he wants to help Haiti now? You’re kiling me, man. Just killing me.) but really see that embrace and watch how it strangles the life out of people around them.

I see generations currently living hard working and decent lives. I see them giving birth to the next generation that is already trillions in debt, being drawn inexorably under the rule of unelected, non-representative overlords who will control them, direct their labors and their comforts or lack thereof, decide the value of their lives — I see them in a socially engineered hell.

First, do no harm, dude. If you can at all help it, do not sell your soul to demons for a moment of comfort here and now. Question everything. Do good works. Don’t hug dictators and scum. It’s simple.

We both donate our time and money to charity. I? Realize that no good deed goes unpunished. The Sean Penn’s and Paul Farmers of the world? Have no idea what that quote from Clare Boothe Luce even means.

Feels like it

And so it goes in Shreveport tuned out the innauguration and so did I. Good thing because after watching it the despair was rampant.

Lou Holtz after Obama’s inauguration: ‘I’m done, finished, the country’s over with, we’re not doing this again!’ ~ Daily Caller

And if John Boehner is the only Republican left trying to talk you out of departing the field then you need to run, not walk away from the GOP. Obama bent Boehner over. There’s no sugar coating where we are at right now. It doesn’t matter what it was he said, the optics of Mrs Obama rolling her eyes dismissively at Boehner says everything anyone needs to know about how much respect he commands. He needs to read Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince

Here is what you are dealing with, dude:

“Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

The majority of Americans have bought the nice guy image of Obama. You can’t fix that. You can’t fight that. Score One.

“There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

In spite of all evidence to the contrary in his personal writings and actions, people believe that Obama believes in a higher power. Score Two.

“the ends justifies the means”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

Obama recognizes no laws, no rules. He fully demonstrates the idea that it is easier to ask for forgiveness after than to ask for permission before. He ain’t asking for forgiveness yet because no one has called him on the carpet. The things he has done, with no one to stop him? Score three.

With all due respect to Glenn Beck, while the left may be playing by the Rules for Radicals play book, Obama is also employing Machiavellian doctrine to stomp all the hell over the GOP. Boehner is a lost cause at this point. But let’s give it one last shot, shall we?

Mr. Speaker. it’s time to take some advice from the Anita Blake’s in the arena:

“She stared up at me, and there was something in her eyes, something that said we finally had an understanding. She was afraid of me, and sometimes that’s the best you can do with people. I’d tried kindness. I’d tried friendship. I’d tried respect. But when all else fails, fear will do the job.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, Narcissus in Chains

We need you to stop being polite, stop trying to be more likeable and popular than the dilettante-in-chief. You can’t. You are from a working class family. It’s time to get off your ass and get mean.

~ Regards
BoR

Time to stop playing golf and living the DC country club dream and get serious. Your party is leaving you.

The book is finished and released off into the wild so I can relax a little now that my brain has unscrambled.

Where were we?

Reading the news I see that Newsweek is comparing Barack Obama to the Anti-Christ and that’s cool. It’s good that Newsweek clearly has no idea what the hell they are talking about and falls right in with my theory that the liberal media outlets are completely incapable of understanding what they see and read, so focused are they on sounding ominous and overwhelming the audience with empty imagery.

The American Media are shallower than a sheen of spit.

That’s why we all read blogs more than news sites anymore.

So let’s go to the blogs and alternative media sites where people still think before they react and write what they think based on reality.

Is anyone still writing? Let’s go see, shall we?

First Go-to is Pat over at “And so it goes in Shreveport”

We need to keep level heads as this discussion moves forward. There are bad people out there, crazy people to be sure, and it’s a plain fact that no amount of gun control will keep weapons from them. None of the proposals mentioned so far would have stopped the Sandy Hook massacre.

As for me, I’m going to learn how to shoot. I’m signed up for my first class already and I’m looking forward to learning. ~ Keeping a level head on gun control

She does a nice round up of the gun control discussion in the teeth of the President’s executive orders laid down on our heads like the tyrannical squid that he is. Shit happens. Crazy people go crazy and manage to do bad things. It’s when the seemingly sane people do bad things with guns that you need to react and it says a lot about us as a nation that we did not react to Fast and Furious. It says a lot that the majority of Americans heard about the President shoveling tens of thousand is weapons into Mexico, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and god only know where the hell else … it says a lot that Americans are unable to connect even the most basic dots on that activity and the reverse thrust here at home. Too stupid to live? Yea. I think so.

We can bring ourselves to have an opinion of Michelle Obama’s new Tina Turner wig, though.

He can’t even tell the truth about her wig. She looks like Puxiltawy Phil peeking out of his hole (no insults to ground hogs intended.) ~ Adrienne’s Corner

I will say this about the wig, She has come a long way from her college photo and if her hair is falling out at 49 and she needs to wear a wig, wear a wig.

Whatever.

I had planned a media blackout for tomorrow but now I’m having second thoughts. ~ Pundette

I was not deliberately ignoring the tv news but I actually was and then I had to pick up pizza for a party and sat there at Domino’s for fifteen minutes with CNN blaring on the tv and holy mother of GOD it was an avalanche of stupid. People were lined up waiting for the shows to start like it was the Oscars or something. The level of insanity and adulation being heaped all over the Obamas was disproportionate to the reality that household incomes are down more than 8 percent since Obama took office, unemployment is still hideously high, gas is double, your house is worth half what it was five years ago, more people are on food stamps and disability than any other time in the history of this country, The national debt has soared from 10 trillion to 16 trillion in four short years and he is demanding that we raise the debt ceiling higher for him and threatening to just go around Congress if they don’t raise it … and he is the second coming of Jesus Christ to these people who have no idea what the second coming actually heralds in for them.

Leave the tv off, Pundette. Just leave it the hell off.

I need to ease back into this blogging thing slowly. I think my head might explode.

I had plans this weekend to write 12,000 words and finish off my novel. I took Friday off from work because my husband and I were going out with friends. I had a lot of errands to run.

The bad news started early and was just relentless all day on Friday. My daughter is in the middle of a crisis, the shootings at Sandy Hook, the list is long and no writing got done, I have no Christmas shopping done, no decorations up and I am scanning the websites on a Sunday night just wondering what the hell is wrong with people?

Mr. Huckabee? You are not helping the situaiton by saying that if god was allowed in schools that a twenty Year old psychopath who is autistic and so nuts his own mom feared him … and she wasn’t altogether normal given the end of the world obsession she had going on there … god being in school would have prevented this? Are you high? Cut it out. You sound stupid and I know you aren’t.

The Westborough Baptist Church says they are going to picket the funerals. It’s time to Baker Act these people. Seriously. Let’s just call them crazy and stop pretending they aren’t. That thinking didn’t save the Sandy Hook shooter’s mom and it’s time to take them off the street. God has nothing to do with the way they behave either.

The Democrats are shoving through one freedom sucking new regulation after another while no one is looking and Boehner is crawling all over himself, abasing the entire Republican party while he thinks no one is watching … holy shit, man. Where are your balls? Find them and put them back on right now before you humiliate yourself and further. We may be grieving but we are not deaf and blind.

Hillary Clinton is faking a fall to get out of testifying and John Kerry, America hater and Military nemisis, is now the new Secretary of State.

The gun control freaks are in full throated scream-mode.

It’s all just noise, the white noise that televisions used to make when there was no signal-an absence of anything and yet the soundand strange static screen continue. No one is home there.