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Recent NorCal Blogs Posts
Holder Challenges Stand Your Ground Laws
Posted by Tina
Eric Holder spoke before the NAACP in response to the not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial> He took the occasion to criticize and challenge “stand your ground” laws that exist in several states including Florida. Odd, since the Zimmerman defense did not base its case on the stand your ground law. But Eric Holder would never let a manufactured crisis go to waste and so remarked:
The laws “sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods,” Holder said, by “allowing – and perhaps encouraging – violent situations to escalate in public.”More than 30 states, including Florida, have passed “Stand Your Ground” laws, which allow people to defend themselves with deadly force, rather than retreating, if they feel they are in danger or a serious felony is about to be committed.
Here’s a simple question for Eric Holder: If retreat is a preferable method for avoiding a violent situation wouldn’t that have been the better option for Trayvon?
Here’s another question: Why not portray breaking into the home or business of a fellow citizen, who may be lawfully and rightly armed, as “sowing dangerous conflict”?
When are you going to name the predator criminal as the most dangerous threat to safety and civility in our neighborhoods?
Bryan Preston of PJ Media observed today that liberal progressives are revisiting the 1970’s when the criminal aggressor was first portrayed as the victim:
From the 1960s well into the 1980s, laws regarding criminal justice and self-defense were stacked heavily against law-abiding Americans. Liberal judges routinely handed down minimal sentences after criminals had been convicted of heinous crimes. Americans who had defended themselves against criminals using force, often in their own homes, faced severe prosecution for exercising their natural right to defend their loved ones, their homes and their property. Crime rates soared and outrage built up as the legal system allowed criminal after criminal to walk free while acting in self-defense could ruin a law-abiding American’s life. Liberals did all of this in the name of “social justice,” on a theory that the system is inherently racist, poverty causes crime, and society is ultimately to blame for criminals. Crime victims by implication had it coming, and criminals are just misunderstood and should be freed after serving token sentences.
Two reactions evolved to stem the power of liberal judges and overzealous prosecutors who were making life easier for criminals. One was mandatory minimum sentencing. Legislatures passed laws tying the hands of judges so they had far less power to unleash violent criminals back onto the streets. Another was passing castle doctrine and stand your ground laws to codify the right of self-defense. These laws made it more difficult for prosecutors to grandstand and persecute Americans who had used force to defend themselves against violent criminals. State after state also passed concealed carry laws to enable Americans to exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms to defend themselves. This year, Illinois became the 50th state to pass concealed carry.
Mr. Preston notes that crime rates dropped following the passage of these laws except in the cities where liberal progressives remain in power and create law that favors the criminal over the law abiding citizen.
Eric Holder is wrong. His gun grabbing desires will do nothing to stop violent crime.
It’s time Americans stood their ground against criminality generally. We should let it be known throughout the land that violence or theft against any human being simply will not be tolerated or excused. Criminals, like children, need to know what the boundaries are. It is insane to make the boundaries optional…debatable…squishey…irrelevant! Strong laws and swift justice backed up by personal accountability in the home would end most of the violence in America.
Beware of People Selling Snake Oil
by Jack
17 Jul 2013 Enterprise Record. CHICO — Economic indicators are pointing to a more positive Chico future, and a number of Chico business owners and managers have told Golden Valley Bank they are more confident about Chico’s future.
The above story sounds rosey, but if you are staying abreast of the real financial news you might have a different opinion, one that is more cautionary.
What we should be aware of when evaluating small signs of recovery is the largest bond bubble in US history is about to implode, and if it does it could wreak havoc and set us back years. Local bankers are taking a fairly limited view when they talk about consumer confidence on the rise.
The nation’s economy is in trouble because banks have been holding too much “excess liquidity” and it’s not going for loans to help grow jobs and business. This is a little technical, so I hope you will allow me to explain. Banks by law are required to keep 20% their monitary assets on hand, but anything above that is called excess liquidity and it’s deposited in the federal Reserve Bank as a credit. While it’s there it earns interest and can be borrowed by other banks. Banks are encouraged to leave this money on deposit because the fed is paying them a rate better than treasure notes. The bailout money and QE’s to keep interest rates low were supposed to stimulate the economy, but the banks are simply sitting on the money! “According to the Federal Reserve, they have $1.5 trillion in excess reserves. This is extraordinary. It is as if individuals took $1.5 trillion of their savings out of stocks, bonds and every other income-producing financial asset and put it all into non-interest-bearing checking accounts back in 2009, and just left it there.”
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/the-fed-should-stop-paying-banks-not-to-lend/
Next problem: Bernanke has been pushing th Federal Reserve to print up more money to buy about $85B of bonds and real estate notes every month and that new money is backed up by the ”full faith and credit of the US government” and that faith and credit is getting pretty shakey! We’re headed south of 16 trillion in debt! We owe as much as we are worth and that’s not good! Whatever improvements we’ve been seeing in the economy is built on this credit card approach. Borrowing our way to wealth is not creating a stable, reliable recovery and it never has! All it’s done has been to prop up Wall Street and the big banks behind them and create some very well paid CEOs.
We’ve got a false economy built on borrowed money once again. We’re making some of the same mistake from previous burst bubbles like dot com bubble, the energy bubble and the last big real estate bubble and we’re making new mistakes. We can’t keep buying up $85B in bonds and loans every month forever, there’s a limit and right now any pull back spells disaster for the stock market, so they keep on spending $85b a month and they can’t stop or pow…disaster. It’s a huge Catch 22.
Here’s what awaits: When Bernanke merely hinted last month that this lavish spending and quantitative easing would be restrained just a little to maybe $80B a month, the stock market reacted with panic. It plummeted hundreds of points in a selling frenzy. What does that say about the stability of our economy? Many of our stocks inflated beyond their actual value and the only thing keeping them up is Bernanke’s spending. Its an illusionary economy that is doomed to collapse back to actual valuation.
To compound this problem we have a large percentage of employers (around 35% that say they are looking at reducing the work week to around 30 hours to skirt around the costs of Obama care.
Let me close with this, it all goes back to Keynesian economic theory that Bernanke taught at Princeton. But, it’s a failed theory that has not stood the test of time. It didn’t work during the Great Depression and it doesn’t work now. Bernanke has merely set us up with one more bubble and trillions in debt. Perhaps the day of reckoning will come in 2014 or it could be 2015, but it’s inevitable that it will come. When this bond bubble goes it will be extremely damaging to our recovery.
Tagged Bond Bubble
2 Comments
Al Sharpton’s New Girlfriend
by Jack
What’s an old racemonger like Sharpton doing with a hot looking girl like this? My first thought, could it possibly be she loves the media attention and sees an opportunity to get some of the big bucks this aging extortionist has weedled out of week-kneed corporations? It sure can’t be because of his good looks. Although the pin striped suit looks right on him, it’s just that the stripes are running the wrong direction.
Life Next to Bidwell Park
by Jack
Last night around 11 pm I heard a cat yell, it wasn’t very distinguishable as anything in particular, just one short, loud, Meroow and then silence. It had to be Lucky, he sleeps near the front porch until I bring him in at night. So, I ran downstairs and opened the front door. To my surprise there was small cat sized raccoon pressed against the door and my cat, Lucky, was poised a few feet away in full attack-cat mode. I looked down at the raccoon and he looked up at me. For a split second we shared a mutual “what the bleep”?
Of course I quickly closed the door before the animal could run inside. Now that would have been a good story…anyway, I watched through the leaded glass in the door and noticed that a larger Raccoon, at least 25 pounds, had positioned herself about 8 feet away from Lucky and was moving closer. So, as soon as the smaller raccoon fought his way off the door step, I opened the door again and grabbed Lucky’s steel water bowl and tossed at the advancing raccoon, but she wasn’t in the mood to move much, it just bounced to the side of her and she kept her focus.
She hissed at me, and then crept closer toward the fight. Her maternal instincts pushing her to attack Lucky who again had her baby engaged next to the garage door. This is less than 10 feet from the front door of my house and here I am in shorts and barefeet. The two combatants threw a volley of swipes at each other, it was a real fur ball, but fairly harmless. The mother raccoon made a run towards the fight and I had to act fast to disengage these two before Mama jumped Lucky. The only thing available was… one more cat bowl? Oh great, some weapon and I’m running out bowls! I made a quick for Lucky’s food dish just as Mama raccoon made her attack, I flipped it as fast as I could at her and fortunately the flying bowl interrupted the advance. It hit just hard enough to distract her at the last possible second before she pounced on Lucky. At that moment Lucky noticed the second raccoon and in this was enough of a distraction for the little raccoon to run to Mama and away from us. Both raccoons had enough and all they wanted to do is get out of there. I moved foward to grab Lucky. But, he started to follow the pair! Oh no… I yelled at him and he apparently heard me and stopped just long enough that I could grab him. We made a bee-line back inside the house. Miraculously, Lucky had no bites or injuries at all and it’s unlikley the raccoon had any either.
Lucky is 16, he only has four teeth and his hearing is almost gone, but that didn’t seem to slow him down when it came to defending his turf, as has been his typical MO with cat intruders.
Looking back, I bet the raccoon was after Lucky’s cat food on the porch. Lucky was probably still sleeping on the sidewalk as the raccoon pranced right right by him and started munching on his food. But, when Lucky finally noticed, that placed the Raccoon between my front door and Lucky and the raccoon had nowhere to run. Mama was likely following a discreet distance behind and so the 3-way cat and mouse, er, cat and raccoon game began.
We live across from Bidwell Park so wild animals in the front yard are not unusual. We’ve had deer eating my grass, possums looking for bugs, turkeys, squirrels, an occasional skunk and of course the raccoons, always looking for a free meal late at night. I’ve noticed skunks walk past Lucky, but for some reason he’s never given them a second look, maybe he thinks they are related? Both are black and white.
Tagged cat story
6 Comments
X Your Fingers and Pray
Posted by Tina
All of the bad news in the world seems to have conjoined today to form one big black layered mass in my heart. Corruption and injustice abound. My country is teetering on the edge, threatening to fall into an unforgiving abyss of racial ugliness. Incredibly, after nearly fifty years of making amends and striving for equality there are those who actually court such a thing happening.
Our economic situation does not offer solace or safe harbor for any American and the overall economic state of the world offers little solace. Is it any wonder I’m feeling down?
But just as I was about to begin my blues repertoire I tripped over an article that produced some light.
The article, “As Washington Dithers, Arabs Rally To Egypt’s Revolt Against Political Islam,” by Youssef Ibrahim is featured in The Sun of New York and begins:
Arabs are flocking to support Egypt’s upheaval against political Islam.
In the past ten days alone Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates pledged $12 billion in cash, fuel, food, wheat, interest-free loans, and gifts. Vast shipments of gasoline and wheat have poured in so fast that the four-hour standard waits at gasoline stations and a shortage of bread disappeared overnight.No doubt the support is sincere, but no doubt, too, that the endorsement is also driven by the danger Islamists represent in these countries’ own backyards. On July 3, the day President Morsi was removed by the army in Cairo, a court at Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, sentenced 61 professionals of the Muslim Brotherhood to between 10 and 25 years for plotting a coup….
Has anyone heard anything like that before? I can’t believe it…and this quote that comes a little further in, “In a new vernacular, radical Islam emerges as malevolent monster conspiring against multi-sectarian, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic societies, advocating Wahhabi Islam, civil wars, and financial ruin.”
Blinking my eyes now…might it be possible that there is a solid commitment among the Arabs to defeat this violent radical enemy? Read on dear friends to a message that I couldn’t have wished more to hear:
A more innovative American approach would start with a public renunciation of political Islam as the anti-democratic and fascist practice it is for any people aspiring to liberty.
I wouldn’t count on that one but on a day when lady liberty hung her head in shame in America, it is good to hear there are those in the Middle East with a clear headed vision to defeat the bad guys. The white hats are in view…at least for now.
I also noticed a couple of bad guys in the drug business were captured recently, one in Mexico and another in Europe.
I’m feeling a bit better now. Hope you all have (had) a good night.
The Election of a Black President…
by Dennis Prager
. . . Has Meant Nothing!
This has not happened. The election, and even the re-election, of a black man as president, in a country that is 87 percent non-black — a first in human history — has had no impact on what are called “racial tensions.”
In case there was any doubt about this, the reactions to the George Zimmerman trial have made it clear. The talk about “open season” on blacks, about blacks like Trayvon Martin being victims of nothing more than racial profiling and about a racist criminal justice system, has permeated black life and the left-wing mainstream media.
I put quotation marks around the term “racial tensions” because the term is a falsehood.
This term is stated as if whites and blacks are equally responsible for these tensions, as if the mistrust is morally and factually equivalent.
But this is not at all the case.
“Racial tensions” is a lie perpetrated by the left. A superb example is when the New York Times described the 1991 black anti-Semitic riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as “racial tensions.”
For those who do not recall, or who only read, viewed or listened to mainstream media reports, what happened was that mobs of blacks attacked Jews for three days after a black boy was accidentally hit and killed by a car driven by a Chasidic Jew.
A Brandeis University historian, Edward S. Shapiro, who wrote a book on the events, described those black attacks on innocent Jews as “the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history.”
Blacks stabbed a Jewish student to death, injured other Jews, and screamed, “Heil Hitler!” and “Death to the Jews!” while carrying signs with messages such as “Hitler didn’t finish the job.”
And how did the New York Times report the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history?
As racial tensions.
One of the Times reporters who covered those riots was Ari Goldman, now a professor of journalism at Columbia University.
Last year, eleven years after the riots, this is how Goldman described his former newspaper’s reporting of the events:
“In all my reporting during the riots, I never saw — or heard of — any violence by Jews against blacks. But the Times was dedicated to this version of events: Blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions.”
As a New York Times editorial described the black attacks: “The violence following an auto accident in Crown Heights reminds all New Yorkers that the city’s race relations remain dangerously strained.”
That was the entire left’s take: “strained relations” between blacks and Jews. “Racial tensions.” Both sides equally at fault.
Once one understands that “racial tensions” is a euphemism for a black animosity toward whites and a left-wing construct, one begins to understand why the election of a black president has had no impact on most blacks or on the left.
Since neither black animosity nor the left’s falsehood of “racial tensions” is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America could do will affect either many blacks’ perceptions or the leftist libel.
That is why hopes that the election of black president would reduce “racial tensions” were naive. Though a white person is far more likely to be murdered by a black person than vice versa, all it took was one tragic death of a black kid to reignite the hatred that many blacks and virtually all black leaders have toward white America.
Let’s put this in perspective. Ben Jealous of the NAACP, Al Sharpton of MSNBC, Jesse Jackson, and the left-wing media compete to incite hatred of America generally and white America specifically. Over what? A tragic incident in which a Hispanic man (regularly labeled “white”) said, with all physical evidence to support him, that fearing for his life, he killed a black 17-year-old (regularly labeled “a child”).
The very fact that George Zimmerman — who is as white as Barack Obama — is labeled “white” bears testimony to the left-wing agenda of blaming white America and to the desire of many blacks to vent anger at whites.
And that is why the election of a black president has meant nothing. Indeed, to those whose lives and/or ideologies are predicated on labeling America and its white population as racist, it wouldn’t matter if half the Senate, half the House and half the governors were black.
Civilization is Advanced in Technology, But Short in Real Wisdom
by Jack Lee
If you look back over the past 100 years or so, the scientific advancements in civilization are huge, the airplane went from 25 mph to supersonic jets in the blink of an eye. In medicine we discovered penicillin, the polio vaccine, heart transplants became common. Then we have radios, TVs, computers, the internet, synthetic fabrics, nuclear and solar power, spaceships, and most this arrived on scene in just the last 60 years!
Go back another 100 years and we’ve got the industrial revolution, the cotton gin, telegraph, the assembly line and more. We’ve come a long way technologically speaking, but can we say the same about society? We still have the barbarians among us as evidenced by every war you care to look at right up to 9-11 and Boston. 3000 years ago we had idol worship and today…we still have those among who are idol worshipers. In the 21st century Voodoo is as legitimate as Catholicism, or so says our government.
The ignorance in over half the world’s population is staggering! Europeans living in medievil times had about the same understanding the world these 3rd world people. Even now,with all of our great advancements in medicine, science, education, information technology, engineering, etc., we still have people who subscribe to slavery. We still have male dominated theocracies. We still have genocide and other barbaric abuses of authority by the powerful over the weak and helpless.
Human nature lends itself to emotion first and reason is a distant second. It’s a genetic thing that had to do with our survival in the wilds, a flight or fight kind of thing that we needed to escape danger. Now it seems to put us in danger, when the times call for deliberation and reason.
We have no trouble reacting emotionally do we? But, we have to force ourselves to pause and think logically and rationally, because this does not come naturally. It is an acquired attribute found only in the most advanced cultures. People who are quick to anger and say or do hurtful things are seen as stupid, because they have not evolved as much as those of us who are more stable, logical and reasonable.
Have you ever spoken with a person that was so emotionally invested in a subject near and dear to them that you couldn’t reach them with a ton of facts or common sense logic? I’m sure we’ve all been there. But, the really scary part is they are multiplying faster than us and despite our best efforts global ignorance is gaining on humanity. Look at that dumbed down woman who married the Boston bomber. She has a solid start in a modern family. She was educated and yet she was able to easily be turned back into a citizen of the 10th century through coercion and duress. It doesn’t help to be educated, if you don’t have the courage to back it up.
Here’s another bad example and this 0ne is far less forgivable, because she’s from our own Congress. I listen to this idiot Congresswomen for about 5 minutes yesterday on CSPAN and she was so emotional over the Zimmerman verdict that she broke down on camera! She became so overwrought she couldn’t speak and lost her train of thought before the media. This ridiculous, shallow woman, I forget her name, but she spoke with a thick Spanish accent that it was sometimes hard to understand her is representing America in Congress? I’m thinking, how in the world could we elect such a fool to Congress? She can’t even speak English and she’s an emotional wreck, completely devoid of logic and reason?
What does that say about us?
It’s disturbing to think that at the pinnacles of power here and in places around the world, we have people with such low emotional development, a low E.Q. (emotional quotient) Even the President of the United States fails. He has repeatedly demonstrated he is given to using emotion over reason. He has been unable to aside his personal bias for the good of the nation. His emotional development, or lack thereof, cuts both ways. He was so underdeveloped emotionally that he could not understand how spending tens of millions of dollars on air travel for vacations during the height of this nation’s worst recession was not a good idea. Like a child who wants ice cream for dinner, he just did it because he could and he did it repeatedly.
On another level he has allowed his racial identity to cause his insertion into local issues heretofore considered beneath the dignity of the White House. And this is the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger? This is the man who can order military forces immediately into action without the consent of Congress or who can spend millions of our taxdollars by a presidential order. But, we elected him and again, what does that say about us?
We’ve not come very far emotionally and that’s scary, because for the first time in history we have the power to destroy ourselves.
The philosophers of ancient Greece would be appalled at the lack of progress in mankind’s maturity especially when it’s back dropped against our miraculous technological advances. The danger here is too obvious, if we don’t catch up emotionally to match our technical lethality…we may not have long to go before global events results in a great thinning of the human herd. Then we’ll be reduced back to a level equal with our intellect. In other words, if we stay on course… logic says we’re headed for ox carts, not space ships.
Conservative Media Need Not Attend…Or Else!
Thugs beat up on a filmmaker…are they feeling entitled to do that?
Daily Caller reports that conservative filmmaker, Christian Hartsock, was beaten and kicked as he peacefully filmed at the Trayvon Martin protest in Oakland last night. Follow the link if you wish to review the particulars about his experience.
Hartsock, feeling unrepresented in media, showed a lot of guts simply showing up at such an event in Oakland. The point for me in posting this is to deplore what I consider a new sense of entitlement on the left and in the black community. Not only do nthey think America should redistribute wealth, they also believe that there is only one position r point of view…all others are not aloud and must be stopped even through violence.
This sort of confrontation is indicative of the Obama administration’s divisive posturing and agenda and a direct consequence of lousy, partisan, bigoted, and possibly racist leadership.
I wish we could move on. If these protesters had a damn clue they would be marching on Washington and beating down the doors because of the lack of good jobs and the rising cost of insurance and healthcare services under Obamacare!!!