America Just Can’t Make It Anymore.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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The statement in the title is not true, except that it is.

If you are a little confused stay with me and let me clarify.

The United States used to be the industrial power house of the world. Its industries generated unprecedented wealth for the country, creating the world’s first self-made billionaires and productive wealth creating jobs galore for everyone. The whole country prospered.

Today, however, the United States has become the world’s second biggest importer of goods. Worse than that, even though America still exports billions of dollars’ worth in oil, consumer goods and automotive products, it imports even more. This creates a trade deficit ($471 billion according to recent figures).

So what are all these imports into the US?

Well, they include industrial machinery and equipment ($681 billion), automotive vehicles, parts, and engines ($309 billion), miscellaneous private services, primarily financial services ($201 billion), cell phones ($90 billion), travel passenger services ($86 billion), pharmaceuticals ($84 billion), computers ($65 billion), chemicals ($61 billion), other transportation services ($59 billion), computer accessories ($57 billion), telecommunications equipment ($54 billion), royalties and license fees services ($42 billion), apparel ($49 billion), petroleum products ($48 billion), fuel oil ($44 billion), industrial supplies ($29 billion), U.S. Government service imports primarily defense ($25 billion), fish ($18 billion), fruit ($13 billion), and vegetables ($11 billion).

If you are a bit shell-shocked by all those figures let me phrase it a bit differently using as examples the types of goods you would tend to buy.

• 100% (almost) of the shoes bought in the U.S. come from China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Mexico;
• 90% of white goods (washers, fridges, etc.) and consumer electronics are imported;
• 85% of household furniture is imported;
• 80% of cars on U.S. roads come from Canada (31%), Japan (24%), Germany (16%) and Mexico (12%); and,
• 65% of U.S. clothing is imported from China (37%), Vietnam (9.4%), Indonesia (7.2%) and Bangladesh (6.7%).

Probably the saddest part is that even things you thought were “American” are now actually made overseas and imported.

I remember while on a business trip to the US many, many years ago I bought a gift for the young son of a friend of mine. He was a big sports enthusiast so I reckoned that one of the most iconic symbols of sport from America would be a baseball. I bought one in Wal-Mart. It was marked with all the different holding positions for the various ways to throw a baseball (fast ball, curve ball and all that). The perfect gift.

I gave it to him on my return feeling ever so pleased with myself. The kid opened it, showed momentary delight, then looked up at me accusingly. “It says ‘Made in China'” he told me.

But it’s not only baseballs. Similar types of product that you would think are all-American, like Converse All Stars, Levi’s, Huffy bicycles, televisions, Monopoly, Etch-a-Sketch, Radio Flyer wagons, Barbie dolls, and last but by no means least, most of those American flags just ain’t American no more.

It really doesn’t have to be this way. Apple, for example, doesn’t have to become the richest company in the world by manufacturing its products in China and storing its vast hoards of cash overseas.

Or does it?

Everything on the lists above could still be made in the US and surpluses exported to other countries. But the US government and its moronic bureaucrats are spending their time and our money thinking up new ways, not to help American businesses, but to add ever-increasing amounts of rules, regulations and bureaucracy on to American companies.

American businesses can no longer compete, because their own government has ensured that the deck is stacked against them.

In the mind of a bureaucrat losing a million productive wealth creating jobs, for example, in the automotive industry, and replacing them with a million more administrative jobs that cost the country money evens things out.

It doesn’t. Simple math will tell you that. Every time it happens things get worse and America gets poorer.

So America just can’t make it anymore, but not because China has stolen the jobs. It’s because the US government bureaucrats gave them away.

Put the blame where it should be.

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How Do You Spell Bollocks?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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If you are a bureaucrat in the US government you spell bollocks ‘F-R-E-E-D-O-M’.

Then you stick that name on a new act and you sit down, confident that most of the politicians elected to represent the people are too dumb to realize what they are voting for. They were, the US Senate passed the USA Freedom Act by 67 votes for to 32 against.

Then you hope that most of the people are also too dumb to realize they’ve been conned again. And, sadly, most of them are. They listen to con men like Obama who lies to them, saying things like, “Glad the Senate finally passed the USA Freedom Act. It protects civil liberties and our national security. I’ll sign it as soon as I get it.”

In business there are rules for blatantly misleading consumers with false statements. If you run a pet shop, for example, you can’t sell a kitten as a puppy. There should be similar rules for governments. But unfortunately there aren’t. In politics you can sell the people as many pups as you like. That’s how Obama and the rest have got away with another scam.

Not that they would ever lie, of course. Take the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who in a briefing under oath swore that the NSA wasn’t collecting data on millions of innocent American citizens. He said this pre-Snowden’s well publicized whistleblowing.

Even after the Snowden revelations about the horrific extent of the government’s snooping, Clapper insisted he told the truth. It was a bit like Bill or Hilary Clinton’s ‘truth’, because apparently in Clapper’s head if you store data but don’t look at it, it’s not the same thing as collecting it.

That leaves me wondering if I robbed Clapper’s house but didn’t look at anything I took, would I have really stolen anything? I’m not going to try it to find out because I think I know what the result for me would be.

Getting back to this new legislation, on the face of it “Freedom” sounds great.

The bureaucrats knew that it would. They deliberately choose the word to deceive the American people. The ‘USA FREEDOM’ bit in the USA Freedom Act is supposed to mean “Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring”.

‘Supposed to’, being the key words.

Let me be quite blunt.

If you believe the USA Freedom Act is ‘Strengthening and Uniting America’ then you are a fool.

If you think it is ‘Fulfilling Rights’ then you are a bigger fool.

And if you think it will ensure ‘Effective Discipline Over Monitoring’, then you are out of your frigging mind.

The only mitigating factor in your defense is that you have been brainwashed by the unthinking media who have swallowed hook, line and sinker all the government’s ‘spin’ on this new piece of legislation, and repeated it ad nauseam. Misleading headlines such as the Washington Post’s “NSA phone program doomed as Senate passes USA Freedom Act”, or USA Today’s equally ridiculous, “NSA data collection ended” are examples of lazy and bad journalism and a complete failure to properly assess the impact of this new Act.

They all want you to think what the government wants you to think, and that is that the USA Freedom Act is a victory for civil liberty.

It is not. In fact it is quite the opposite.

For example, the USA Freedom Act only slightly modified one small part of a single NSA data collection program. Now, instead of the NSA directly capturing and holding the metadata for every American citizen’s cellphone conversation – i.e., your phone number, the numbers you call, the length of your phone calls, etc – the telecommunication companies must hold on to it for the NSA, and give it access to it through the federal court system any time it wants it. Basically the USA Freedom Act just saves the NSA from having to store the information itself.

Meantime the NSA can still monitor and collect anything it wants from the Internet. It will continue to snoop on your medical records, emails, business deals, where you are and practically anything else, which is far more valuable than cellphone calls.

And as General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, has said, it doesn’t take much metadata to specifically identify and track anyone. “We kill people based on metadata,” he said.

See, this Freedom Act makes you so safe again.

So that is my take on the USA Freedom Act. Another piece of government deceit. And another attack on the Constitutional rights of Americans. For a country that for so many years has taken pride in its freedom, it’s allowing it to be taken away with very little comprehension or fight.

The true fact is that the United States of America, which has more controls on government data collection than any other country in the world – including the USA Freedom Act just passed – spends more on intelligence collection and analysis than the rest of the world combined.

But at least now you know how to spell ‘bollocks’.

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There Is Only One Batman In The World – Yes, It’s Fact Day.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Yes, today is fact day on the fasab blog.

And apparently there is only one batman in the world.

That and other unusual offerings below.

Enjoy.

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In Germany you are not allowed

to run out of gas on the highway

 

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Although there are McDonald’s restaurants

in 119 countries,

40% of the total number are found in the US.

The only place in the continental US

that is more than 100 miles from a McDonald’s

is a desert in northwest Nevada.

 

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The mayor of Batman city in southeastern Turkey

sued Warner Bros for using his city’s name

without permission.

“There is only one batman in the world”

he was quoted as saying.

 

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The Museum of Non-Visible Art

sells art that only exists

in the imagination of the artist.

In 2011 a moron

– sorry, a woman –

bought one of their “non-visible”

art pieces for $10,000.

I wonder if she hung it on her imaginary wall

in her imaginary house???

 

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In space,

about 10 billion light years distant,

there is an enormous water vapor cloud

that is estimated to hold up to 140 trillion times

the mass of water found in all Earth´s oceans.

 

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And still with space,

in typical bureaucrat fashion,

just in case life is found on some other planet,

NASA has an Office of Planetary Protection

already prepared.

 

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The cardboard thingy that goes around

your coffee cup is called a ‘zarf’.

 

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The inventor of the diesel engine,

Rudolf Diesel,

committed suicide because he thought

his invention wouldn’t be successful.

 

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Despite being the largest pre-Colombian American empire,

the Incas never developed a written language.

Thus there are no census records available

and estimates of the size of the Inca population has

varied widely from 4 million people to nearly 40 million.

 

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Karl Marx was once a correspondent

for the New York Daily Tribune.

 

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Abraham Lincoln dreamt of his own assassination

just a few days before it happened.

He dreamt he could hear sad wailing in the White House

and, in getting up and trying to find it,

finally came upon a room with

mourners and his own corpse…

 

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The first official fan-made music video

was Grégoire Pinard’s claymation video

of Placebo’s song “English Summer Rain”.

The band were so impressed that

they decided to make it official.

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