He’s Back …… I Think.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

It seems that after a mysterious disappearance from public view for the past eleven days or so, Vladimir Putin has re-emerged.

Over the past week and more there was a frenzy of speculation as to why he was nowhere to be seen and what had happened to him. His absence was significant, that much was agreed, but nobody knew why he had disappeared.

One of Putin’s former advisors, Andrei Illarionov, who has become one of his strongest critics of late, was quick off the mark to say Putin had been toppled in a backstage coup.

Many, well-connected in Russian matters, speculated that there was a full-scale Kremlin power struggle under way.

Other rumors quickly followed.

General Viktor Zolotov, Putin’s long-time bodyguard, was said to be dead. This was confirmed and denied and confirmed and denied, etc.,

Another of Putin’s top allies, Vladislav Surkov, was speculated to have fled to Hong Kong with his family.

The questions from the media and on the internet were also many and varied.

Had there been some kind of retaliation for the recent murder of opposition leader and former first deputy prime minister, Boris Nemtsov?

Would there be more bloodshed?

Was a coup under way in Russia?

Was Putin finished?

Was he perhaps unwell, which I suppose could be taken as a sign of weakness and spur on those who wished to topple him?

Was he in Switzerland celebrating the birth of a child by his secret lover, the gymnast Alina Kabaeva?

Would he re-appear soon, shirtless, macho and galloping on a horse to show everyone he is still a force to be reckoned with?

Or was the whole thing just a distraction from the murder of Nemtsov and the war in Ukraine?

The Kremlin, on the other hand, wasn’t asking any questions. It dismissed all such rumors and insisted that nothing was wrong with either Putin or his regime, apart from maybe a dose of the flu.

There is no doubt that, for all his political savvy, Putin has managed to get himself stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. He made his reputation by winning the war in Chechnya, and he cannot afford to cross the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. At the same time he cannot side against the politicians from the security or military services, often the officers of the former KGB, GRU, FSB, and all that, who came into power with him.

As usual, of course, most commentators missed the main question, which was apart from all the usual faffing around, ‘how should we react if such a thing were really to happen’?

Here in the West we, (including those in the intelligence community who are supposed to know about these things and brief world leaders like President Obama), don’t have much of a clue about Kremlin politics. You can be almost certain therefore that, if anything were ever to really happen to Putin, the danger is that the West would respond in entirely the wrong way.

A new Russian leader would be greeted by America and its allies as a more predictable and easier to deal with partner than Putin. But that is forgetting one crucial element. All Russian leaders are tough. Not just Putin. And the person who had the steel to oust someone of Putin’s caliber would have to himself be a very hard man and a shrewd operator.

More significantly, he would have to quickly stamp his authority and hold on power in Russia. The quickest and easiest way of doing that would be with more repression of opposition factions in Russia itself and with more flexing of Russia’s considerable muscles abroad, particularly in the Crimea and the Ukraine.

That would be a real puzzler for Obama, were it to happen during his last few months in office. And a defining moment for his successor.

Sometimes the devil you know is easier to deal with than one you don’t.

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It’s A Funny Old World

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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It definitely is a funny old world, especially when it comes to global warming and particularly the reasons for it happening – even though it isn’t.

It has also been funny watching all the pseudo-scientist and political upstarts trying to jump on this bandwagon to try to promote themselves in the public eye. Al Gore managed to bag himself a discredited Nobel Peace Prize and millions of dollars with his well timed trip on this gravy train. Although I still don’t know what global warming had to do with a prize for peace because as far as I know they hold wars in all temperatures!

I say “global warming” because that was what they called it. Scientists even falsified data to “prove” that the planet was getting hotter and hotter because of the increased emissions of carbon dioxide generated by us, people. We may well be in the midst of a climate cycle, but the reliable evidence does not show that it’s our fault. Nor is it the fault of too many cows letting too many farts, which was another one of the not so scientific theories that was doing the rounds a few years ago.

Then there was the theory that the Polar ice caps were all going to melt, raising the sea level so much most of us would drown. Technically I suppose if you were keen enough you could drown in a couple of inches of water, but I think personally I would just pull on my gumboots and walk casually toward some higher ground.

Unfortunately for it’s supporters, the REAL evidence has been showing little or no change in average temperatures, certainly not the apocalyptic amounts forecast by the flawed models of the global warming scientists.

On that very subject, some of these scientists are currently “baffled” by the fact that, rather than the Polar ice caps melting, there now seems to be an all-time record area of sea covered by ice around the Antarctic’s coasts.

The beautifully named lead scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, Ted Scambos, admitted “What we’re learning is, we have more to learn,” as he announced the latest annual sea ice maximum for the austral continent.

The sea ice surrounding the Antarctic continent reached its maximum extent on September 22, 2014, at 20.11 million square kilometers (7.76 million square miles). This is 1.54 million square kilometers (595,000 square miles) ABOVE the 1981 to 2010 average extent, which is nearly four standard deviations above average.

This new record follows consecutive record winter maximum extents in 2012 and 2013. The reasons for this recent rapid growth are not clear. Climate scientists have been puzzled by the behavior of the southern ice for many years.

You have to laugh as you watch the pro-global warming scientists squirm as they try to fight off reality by proclaiming that their forecasts should be correct and what is actually happening should be wrong!

Suck it up guys, whoever created the model to show that the icecaps would melt was wrong, not the ice caps!

In fact, air temperatures have been steady for the last fifteen years and more, and deep ocean temperatures are not increasing either. They call it a mystery. The real mystery is why anyone still takes them seriously!

But, remarkably, a lot of gullible people still do. When it became too obvious that there was no global warming, rather than giving up their lucrative money and publicity maker, it’s proponents simply changed the name from “global warming” to the more generalized “climate change”.

And as recently as the last weekend of September, hundreds of thousands of these idiots turned out in the ‘People’s Climate March’ in New York City calling for governments to address the so-called “crisis” surrounding climate change. The demonstration was timed to coincide with a meeting at the United Nations to discuss how countries can come together to combat temperature fluctuations, hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, blizzards and other forces of nature.

So, if the evidence does not back up the theory of global warming (er, I mean… climate change) being the fault of mankind, why do governments persist in wasting time on the subject with wide-ranging plans and conferences in a host of different countries?

There are various reasons.

Politicians like Obama used it to get himself elected and has had to stick with the lie ever since or back down and publicly admit he was a fool. Other politicians in other countries are similarly caught.

Also a false crisis like global warming is a welcome distraction from some of the real crises we are facing due to continued government incompetence.

And the manufacturing of a global warming crisis leaves the way open for the imposition of “carbon taxes” and other spurious ways for governments to try to steal our money. Watch so-called “carbon taxes” being levied on corporations who will no doubt pass on the cost to the people who buy their products.

Yes, that’s you and me, folks. We’re going to have to pay to fix something that isn’t even broken!

It’s painful to have to watch this going on. Even more so when there seems to be nothing that we can do to bring stupid people to their senses. All you can do is have a rant now again.

Oh, look, I just did!

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Forget That The Criminals Are The Problem – Let’s Attack The Decent Law-Abiding People

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Time for a bit of a rant today.

First one this year, I don’t know how I held out for so long.

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Since the horrible massacre of schoolchildren and their teachers by a mentally deranged moron in Connecticut the real debate has again been sidelined into the convenient ‘to-ban-or-not-to-ban’ guns.

I can’t make up my mind as to what proportion of the gun-banning side of this so-called debate are idiots repeating what other idiots have said, how many are malicious, or how many are people trying to grab a handy headline or two.

The first lot can be easily compared with a flock of sheep. Sheep aren’t noted for their intellectual prowess, nor their debating skills, but when one sheep goes “baaa” you can be sure a lot more will say the same thing.

The second lot, the malicious ones, are deliberately rather than unintentionally refocusing the debate on to their liberal/fascist agenda of increasing bureaucratic interference wherever they see an opening.

And the third group are people, usually politicians or those with a political agenda, using the misery of other people to publicize themselves and their cause, but primarily themselves. Never one to let a band wagon roll past him, President Obama has jumped on this one, all guns blazing as it were!

For all these groups the ‘to-ban-or-not-to-ban’ guns debate is a handy, and a welcome, distraction.

It gives the first group something to say without stopping to analyze the real problem in detail. It gives the second group more ammunition (no pun intended today) to curtail freedom. As for the later group, the politicians love this distraction because it gives the impression that they are compassionate and caring and trying to find a solution, even though they are addressing the wrong problem.

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On the face of it, Obama’s proposals can be dressed up as reasonable. If you haven’t seen them on the media (how could you avoid it?) they include:  

• asking Congress to reinstate and strengthen a ban on the sale and production of assault weapons that passed in 1994 and expired in 2004;
• a ban on the sale and production of magazines with more than 10 rounds, like those used in Newtown and other mass shootings;
• criminal background checks for all gun sales, closing the longstanding loophole that allows buyers to avoid screening by purchasing weapons from unlicensed sellers at gun shows or in private sales;
• banning the possession or transfer of armor-piercing bullets;
• and cracking down on “straw purchasers,” i.e., those who pass background checks and then forward guns to criminals or others forbidden from purchasing them.

As I said, on the face of it reasonable, but I suspect this is just the first salvo of a much more comprehensive agenda.

However, the question of the moment is simply this  –  would a gun ban, whether partial or comprehensive, work?

And the answer is categorically, NO!

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And the answer is ‘NO’, not because I am a champion of the 2nd Amendment – I’m not, it doesn’t even apply to me! The answer is ‘NO’ because taking guns away from law abiding people won’t stop the criminals or those with criminal intent.

It doesn’t take a genius to work that out, but no one in the gun-ban lobby is even asking that fundamental question. Nor do they want it to be asked!  

You see this is how gun bans work. I’ve seen them in operation in numerous countries.

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If gun ownership is banned, law-abiding Joe Public won’t be able to go to Walmart and buy a gun as before. And he won’t be able to buy his gun because all that gun-banning legislation does is to make sure that no law-abiding citizen can buy and hold a legal firearm.

Joe Public is buying his gun (99.99 percent of the time) because he uses it for sporting purposes, or because he is a collector, or because he feels he needs it for his protection and the protection of his family.

The criminals, on the other hand, who don’t shop at Walmart, but are more likely to deal out of the trunk of a car in some isolated spot well away from prying eyes, will still be able to buy their guns and use them how they please.

Why?

Because they buy illegal guns from illegal dealers. And illegal guns from illegal dealers are not part of these new proposals. As a matter of fact the illegal guns are already banned which in itself proves that banning does not work! 

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So what has to be the inevitable result of a ban on legally held weapons?

Simply this. When you ban law-abiding decent citizens from buying or owning guns all you can possibly end up with are armed criminals versus unarmed civilians, with the police (who would have been used by the politicians and bureaucrats to subjugate the law-abiding population and remove their protection) now being the only form of defense and they will be grossly inadequate in numbers to ever hope to do so effectively.

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As another example of just how far up their own asses some people can stick their heads and still think they are getting a tan, an idiot reporter named Dwight R Worley of the New York Journal News recently published the names and addresses, complete with an interactive map, of people in Westchester and Rockland Counties who owned legally held firearms.

Like all such journalistic crap it was parceled up in ‘caring for the community’ and ‘public interest’ wrappers, but all this article did was to point an accusing finger at law abiding citizens who had done nothing wrong.

Well, when I say “all it achieved” that’s not quite accurate, because it also gave the thieves, the home invaders, the rapists, the thugs, etc., a map of the homes that were protected BUT equally the homes that were not.  

Thanks to dickhead Dwight R Worley (who incidently owns a .357 Magnum himself adding the crime of hypocrisy to his stupidity), Mr. Thief and Mr. Mayhem now know which houses in Westchester and Rockland Counties they can attack with impunity and those that they should stay clear of.

As it turns out, the people who should be most upset by this article are the ones who don’t have a gun, not those who do!

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Zip this forward to a gun-ban country where all the law abiding people are defenseless targets for the criminals and there can only be one result. Not just an increase in violent crime but also a vast increase in petty crime. The detection rate for the latter is already minuscule, so think for a moment what it will be like when the criminals have little fear of their victims and even less fear of being caught.

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The truth is that legally held guns probably save many, many more lives than they harm, and in most cases they do so without ever being used. But there aren’t any statistics for that.

The truth is that banning legal weapons will not stop illegal gangland shootings, which constitute the vast majority of deaths by gunfire in the United States.

The truth is that banning legal weapons won’t decrease the number of illegal weapons in circulation.

And the truth is that banning legally held weapons won’t stop morons or mentally deranged individuals from going on a murder spree – a knife, a bow or a can of gasoline will get the same job done.

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The saddest thing of all is that the people and politicians who are calling for these bans know it. It would be nice to see them show a bit of backbone and integrity for once and attack the criminals and leave the law-abiding people alone. But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen. 

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