US Debt Exceeds GDP

Another achievement for the Obama administration!

The amount of money the federal government owes to its creditors, combined with IOUs to government retirement and other programs, now tops $15.23 trillion.
That's roughly equal to the value of all goods and services the U.S. economy produces in one year: $15.17 trillion as of September, the latest estimate. Private projections show the economy likely grew to about $15.3 trillion by December — a level the debt is likely to surpass this month.

By comparison, Greece's debt-to-GDP ratio was 120% before their economy collapsed.

Unfortunately, I haven't heard any of the Republican presidential candidates offer a credible plan to avert economic catastrophe.  And we know we can't count on the Democrats to do anything but borrow $Trillions per year.

Anything that can't go on for ever won't.  This insane borrowing and spending will stop.  The only questions are when and how.  Waiting longer will only worsen the inevitable pain.

Help Newark Violate the Bill of Rights

The mayor of Newark wants to make sure that his fellow residents are disarmed and defenseless against criminals, unlike Mrs McKinley of Oklahoma, who killed one of her attackers and scared away the other one.



Gun-grabbing politicians aren't concerned with your safety.  Otherwise, they'd allow you the means to defend yourself, which - by the way - is your right.  Instead, they constantly push laws that violate the Second Amendment and do nothing to reduce crime.  Which is why Newark's program is aptly named "Gun Stoppers", not "Crime Stoppers".

Radical Ducati RAD02 Imola Café Racer

From Asphalt and Rubber Magazine:

This is a beautiful bike.  Ducati builds some lookers, but these guys have taken an air cooled Ducati Desmodue engine and wrapped it in mechanical art.

I don't know how much it costs, but I'm sure I can't afford it.  Then again, the same is true of those polished rolling turds most people erroneously refer to as "choppers", and just looking at the running gear and chassis geometry, I'm confident this bike rides far better than any of those clunkers.  Heck, those turds don't even have rear suspension.

Check out the link for a bunch more pics and enjoy the video.



Making of Imola by Radical Ducati from Rocket68 on Vimeo.

Equinox: the Anti-Gym

Aimee wrote another great post; this time on Equinox Gym's New Year's ad campaign.

One gym this year based out of New York has taken their marketing to a whole new level. Equinox Gym's New Year’s marketing shows pictures of extremely skinny models doing out of the gym activities.  Here are just two of their advertisements.

I am happy to say that there has been a negative response to these ads.  Equinox’s Facebook account was flooded with complaints from their customers saying that their models look unhealthy and anorexic.  Equinox and the fashion designer photographer, Terry Richardson, are also getting all kinds of criticism from the general public.  ABC even published a very short article for which “Neither Terry Richardson nor Equinox returned requests from ABC News for comment.”

I suppose that kind of thing is to be expected when a company hires a fashion photographer to create their ad campaign.  Nevertheless, this strikes me as just plain weird.  Maybe that's because I've never been to an Equinox Gym.  Maybe the women who pay to attend those gyms really do want to be starved, emaciated and weak.  If so, they don't need to pay for a gym to achieve that goal.  Here's a quote from the ABC article.

Fashion news site Fashionista wrote, “The girls are undoubtedly thin-but they have some definition. The Equinox location in SoHo is overrun with models, and many of them I’ve seen there are a LOT thinner than these girls.”

"They have some definition"?  Where?  And these women are supposedly fit and healthy because they're not as starved, emaciated and weak as other models?  Really?  That's your standard of health and fitness?  Again, I suppose that's to be expected from a fashion website.  I give up.  I don't get it.  I'll never understand why so many women pay these people so much money for their twisted opinions.  

What I understand least is Equinox.  They run gyms.  They're supposed to promote health and fitness.  If they think those models represent health and fitness, they clearly don't know the definitions of those words.  If, on the other hand, they know those models don't represent health and fitness and they're selling that image to their customers anyway, that means they're deliberately committing malpractice in their field.

And their customers are paying for it.

No thanks.  I'll stick with Crossift.

Bill Whittle: The Bridge in Your Mind

I first stepped foot on Iraqi soil in FOB Anaconda outside of Balad in September 2004.  A couple hours later we were en route to FOB Gabe outside of Baquba and for the first time got a first-hand look at Iraq and immediately thought, "what the hell happened to these people?"

The "Baghdad Battery"

Babylon, Nineveh and Ur were all in Iraq.  All were part of great civilizations so far ahead of the majority of the world that foreigners who traveled there could only marvel at their wonders.  By comparison, my ancestors in Central America, southern Spain and southern Germany were still swinging from trees when Babylonian scholars were mapping the heavens, devising calendars that are still accurate today and even inventing a battery probably used for electroplating.

My Central American ancestors were still living in the stone age - literally - when the Spaniards arrived.  They hadn't even invented (or discovered) the wheel!

So, what the hell happened?  How did primitive, backward Europeans not only overtake, but quickly out-pace Middle Easterners so thoroughly?  Arabs use two main excuses; the Crusades and Genghis Khan.  My reaction to that is, "Seriously?  Genghis died in 1227, and the last Crusade ended in 1272.  What've you been doing since then?"

As far as innovation goes, the answer is; "not much".  The reality is that Middle Eastern culture stopped innovating about 700 years ago, and in many areas actually regressed.  But, why?  It comes down to a pattern of thought, which eventually becomes a culture, which then feeds into people's patterns of thought.  It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, unless it's interrupted by an outside source.  Bill Whittle talks about the pattern of thought that enabled Westerners to build the most prosperous, most free societies in history.
 


As Whittle makes clear, other cultures can - and have - integrated that pattern of thought into their own cultures - some even more successfully than Westerners.  In other words, there's nothing inherent about it.  We're not entitled to the liberty, opportunity and prosperity we enjoy.  Millions before us won it for us through toil, great risk, war and blood.

Traveling to Kuwait, Iraq, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan has deepened and broadened my love and appreciation for Western culture and my adopted country - the United States of America - more than all the history books I've read ever could have.  Let's not lose our ancestors' hard-won victories like so many great civilizations have.  Let's learn from their mistakes.  Let's preserve our liberty (without which opportunity and prosperity are impossible), and defend it from all who threaten it.

UPDATE: And speaking of losing our liberty, this is how it's most likely to happen; not by foreign invasion, but by legislative and judicial over-reach.

Mom With a Gun

She's 18 years old, her husband died of lung cancer, leaving her to raise their baby boy alone, and a week later two thugs broke into her house.



She killed one intruder with a shotgun and the other ran away, called 911 and turned himself in. There are a few factors to note.

1. This is the kind of story that gun-grabbing, anti-Second-Amendment types love to ignore and/or deny exist.  Reality disagrees.  Dr Gary Kleck published a study in 1995 concluding that up to 2.5 million Americans used guns to defend themselves from criminals in 1993.  In 1997, the Department of Justice published a study concluding that 1.5 million Americans used guns to defend themselves from criminals in 1994.  The National Institute of Justice reports that in 2005 "477,040 persons were victims of a crime committed with a firearm" and that "Homicides committed with firearms peaked in 1993 at 17,075".  That means that Americans use guns to defend themselves from criminals 3.1 to 5.2 times more often than criminals use them in crimes, and 87.8 to 146.4 times more often than criminals use them to kill their victims.
2. Gun-grabbers claim they want to protect people by keeping guns away from criminals.  Let's assume they're right in concluding that gun laws keep guns out of the hands of people who refuse to obey the law (they're wrong).  The criminals that broke into Mrs McKinley's house did not have a gun.  They had a knife.  Who do you think would have the advantage in a fight to the death between two drugged out male criminals armed with a knife and an unarmed 18-year-old mom with a baby boy?
3. Gun-grabbers claim that only well-trained people - such as military or law enforcement professionals - are capable of defending themselves or others with guns.  Most gun owners - they claim - are more likely to kill themselves than a potential attacker.  Mrs McKinley said she'd only shot her late husband's shotgun once before she killed a criminal with it. Furthermore, the millions in Dr Kleck's and the NIJ's studies prove the gun-grabbers ignorant or liars.  Training is good, more training is better, but even untrained people use guns to defend themselves effectively hundreds of thousands of times per year.
4. Gun-grabbers claim that police are perfectly capable of protecting all of us and therefore we don't need to own guns privately.  Mrs McKinley was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher for 21 minutes!  Think about that!

Mrs McKinley's guns served their purpose perfectly.  Guns are physical equalizers.  They give physically weaker people an advantage over physically stronger opponents.  Even if the criminals had been armed, she still would've had the advantage because she knew where they were.  They didn't know where she was.  She ambushed them. 

Gun-grabbers hate stories like Mrs McKinley's.  Gun grabbers believe Mrs McKinley should've turned her late husband's guns into the police after his death and allowed her attackers to have their way with her - whatever that might mean.  In their eyes, that would've been the morally superior thing to do. 

Thank God for the Second Amendment.  Thank God Mrs McKinley and her baby are safe.  May her dead attacker burn in Hell, and may the live one fry. 

Aimee: Standards of Beauty

Aimee published a great post along the lines of mine on "Anorexic Action Heroines", but (obviously) from a woman's perspective.

What is beauty?  How do you define it?  Do you see yourself as beautiful?  What would you have to change about yourself to see yourself that way?  What is your ideal body image?  Why do you have that image?  Come on, ladies.... let's get real here.  Let's be honest with how we feel about ourselves and ponder why we feel that way.  What makes you feel the way you do?

For a long time I bought into the idea that anorexic-looking, big breasted, exceptionally tall celebrities are the ideal of beauty.  If only I could get my 5'4'', slightly pudgy self to magically transform into a 5'11'', 110 pound woman with a 42-inch bust, then I would finally be beautiful.

What do you think?   Is this your standard of female beauty?

Or is it something more like this? 

Or is it something else?  Why?