From the Star Ledger:
Snooki buys new $2.6M Florham Park home
Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi is expanding her real estate portfolio.
The “Jersey Shore” alum purchased a $2.6 million home in Florham Park with her husband Jionni LaValle, property records show.
The three-story colonial home on 165 Summit Road sold for $2,589,786. It features a brick facade and beige siding. It’s unclear if Polizzi plans to use the new construction as a second home. The property is one of a handful of new homes built by RNJ Contracting, an area real estate agent told NJ Advance Media today.
Seems significantly overpriced for what appears to be very pedestrian exterior trim and design. $2.6 million? I don’t see it.
2.6 mm crapshack.
Grim the custom trim inside.
https://m.facebook.com/RNJContracting?refsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FRNJContracting
Making faux panel wainscot by attaching moulding to sheetrock doesn’t qualify as the appropriate technique in a $2.6m house … in my book.
My shit 70s ranch had faux wainscot executed with the same technique.
Look the builder is probably a great guy, and it’s probably is a good house, and I haven’t been in it, so I have absolutely no idea. But I’ve seen plenty of houses and transactions in that price range, and the pricing just doesn’t look like it’s where it should be. A 30 second scan of the recent $2m+ closings in Northern NJ show superior properties trading at lower prices. Nicer houses, in better towns, for in some cases nearly $500k cheaper.
@bpolitics:
“The shadow of crisis has passed, and the state of the Union is strong.”—
@BarackObama #SOTU
Isn’t that line from Star Wars?
So you think pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere has no impact because there are complex factors at place? Just simplify your approach and understand that this has to be doing something to the planet. To think that it has no effect is a very sick thought process.
Thomas says:
January 20, 2015 at 11:12 pm
Pumpkin face, how is Earth like an enclosed little bowl? The complexity of the Sun, gravitational forces, rotational forces, ocean currents, tides, jet streams, etc., is so staggering we have barely scratched the surface in understanding it. Anybody who claims that they are certain that CO2 is responsible for climate change is a fool.
Only one other closing on Zillow over $2M in Florham Park, it’s for some 8BR monster. So there is a good chance the house value will drop significantly the day they move in. I can understand the premium of new construction but I doubt it should cost that much.
@BarackObama:
“No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” —
President Obama #SOTU #ActOnClimate
7 –
Record CO2 Coincides With Record-Breaking Crop Yields, ‘Greening of Globe’
January 6, 2015 – 2:29 PM
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/record-co2-coincides-record-breaking-crop-yields-greening-globe
Eight years after the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned of mass starvation from global warming caused by high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), emissions of the greenhouse gas are at record levels. But so is worldwide crop production.
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, which was edited by then-chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri and released in 2007, predicted with “virtual certainty” that crop yields would plummet in some areas unless industrialized nations immediately adopted stricter limits on CO2, which the IPCC said was causing “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
“By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%,” the report predicted. But last year, even a record level of atmospheric CO2 did not keep farmers from reaping record-breaking harvests worldwide, including a record opium crop in Afghanistan.
The monthly CO2 average in November 2014 was 397.13 parts per million as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which maintains “the longest record of direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The level of atmospheric CO2 was 315.97 ppm in 1959, when it was first measured, and is now about 40 percent higher than it was during the pre-industrial era.
CO2 emissions
(NOAA)
However, according to a report also released in November by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, “world cereal production in 2014 is forecast at a new record of 2,532 million tonnes… 7 million tonnes (0.3 percent) above last year’s peak.” That includes a record level of wheat production worldwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Atmospheric CO2 increased 14 percent between 1982 and 2010, coinciding with a “5 to 10 percent increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments,” according to a June 2013 study published in the peer-reviewed journal, Geophysical Research Letters. The study stated that the CO2 “fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process” and has created “a greening of the globe over recent decades.”
That greening effect includes a growth spurt among redwoods and giant sequoias in California.
redwood
Michael Taylor, a naturalist who searches for the largest trees on the planet, looks up at a giant redwood near Orick, Calif. (AP photo)
“Since the 1970s we’ve seen an increase in wood production and that’s making these trees get even bigger than they were growing earlier in the 20th century,” said Emily Burns, director of science at Save the Redwoods League, who added that the accelerated growth winds up naturally sequestering the additional carbon.
That’s not a coincidence, says Dr. James Taylor, senior fellow for environmental policy at the Heartland Institute. “For virtually every crop that’s grown in the United States and globally, we see record crop production on just about a yearly basis,” he said. This is happening at the same time that CO2 levels have been rising because plants use the greenhouse gas to make food in a process called photosynthesis.
“Claims that global warming and more atmospheric carbon dioxide are harming crop production are simply preposterous, and they’re proven preposterous by the real-world, objective data,” Taylor told CNSNews.com.
“We know that in recent decades, we’ve seen an actual tripling of production of the most important staple crops: corn, wheat, and rice. There’s been a record production of wheat in the past year in the United States, in India, in much of Africa, and throughout the world where the wheat harvest is important.”
Instead of diminishing crop yields, high levels of CO2 actually help to increase them, he said.
@ianbremmer:
The Inconvenient Truth isn’t that climate change is happening. It’s acknowledging that we’ll continue to behave like it isn’t
#climateaction
10- What happens when CO2 levels continue to increase? This article points out that the CO2 levels are rising at a fast pace. Also, so many things factor into a crop yield. Were they using new technology?
12 – I have no idea but the IPCC had dire predictions years ago and said people would be starving to death because of decreasing crop yields affected by Global Warming and CO2 emissions.
I’m not a scientist but given the fact that the complete opposite has happened, I’m increasingly skeptical of their “predictions”.
heh-heh. he said trim.
Grim the custom trim inside.
1. It’s perfect. (crosses Florham Park off the list)….
If you want to campaign about pollution, go somewhere it’s actually happening at scale.
Call up the Chinese consulate, ask them what you can do to help, or India, maybe a few spots in Africa, Asia, and South America as well.
We’ve done our part, now it’s their turn.
Just a friendly reminder that Bulls make money, Bears make money, and pigs ( no reference to Senator Ernst) get slaughtered.
—————
Zach Schreiber, the hedge fund manager who said at the Ira Sohn Conference in May that the price of oil was headed lower made about $1 billion on his short, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Katherine Burton, Kelly Bit, and Simone Foxman.
Bloomberg reports that Schreiber’s PointState Capital gained 27% after fees in 2014 with the firm’s profit coming in at $2 billion for the year.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/zach-schreiber-oil-short-profit-2015-1#ixzz3PSw2mpJe
Toxic,
Just another scam to put “government experts” in charge of more things, while creating an entirely new branch in the propaganda ministries.
It’s ingenuity that allows humans to survive dramatically changing climate and environmental conditions over the past tens of thousands of years, and wealth and capital resources are what have made the big difference in surviving disasters over the past several hundred years.
The clear rejection of realistic cost-benefit analysis illustrates that the climate zealots are on a religious mission, not a mission to help humanity. They don’t actually want Grim to drive an electric car, they want Grim to live in a small grass hut eating dandelion greens, and to die without reproducing.
@BarackObama:
“I know how tempting such cynicism may be. But I still think the cynics are wrong.” —President Obama #SOTU
Boehner’s microexpressions are priceless. He looks like he he’s mad he can’t get up and smoke a cigarette. I see this look at work from people that want to oppose a position but realize that the numbers don’t support their position. What’s even funnier is he looks darker than President Obama now. Is that from a tanning booth or spray on?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmB_B6qmCv0&x-yt-cl=84359240&x-yt-ts=1421782837#t=15
Montclair’s City-Suburb Conflict Surfaces in New Developments
MONTCLAIR, N.J. — This community is easily described as a place where the city meets the suburbs, but its residents are struggling to decide just how suburban their township should be.
Two new developments on the western edge of the bustling downtown, the MC Hotel and a mixed-use complex called Valley & Bloom, will add taller buildings along Bloomfield Avenue in an attempt to extend the prime shopping district west. But the projects have rattled many residents who fear that the structures, a pair of six-story buildings, an eight-story hotel and a refurbished parking deck, could undermine the charm of this community of about 39,000.
With 258 rental units, 148 hotel rooms and 20,000 square feet of office space, the developments are likely to attract more traffic to an already congested thoroughfare. On the other hand, the additional 22,000 square feet of retail space might persuade shoppers to venture onto Bloomfield Avenue, which struggles to attract pedestrians. The MC Hotel, part of the Marriott Autograph Collection, will have a rooftop bar and farm-to-table restaurant, amenities that might draw an evening crowd farther west.
“In order to have a successful downtown in the 21st century you’ve got to provide people with the opportunity for easy downtown living, working and playing,” said James M. Driscoll, a senior vice president for Lcor, which owns and operates Valley & Bloom and is developing it with the Pinnacle Companies. The first Valley & Bloom building is set to open in late May. Construction will begin that month on the hotel, which is being developed by the Pinnacle Companies and the Hampshire Real Estate Companies.
Valley & Bloom will feature rooftop solar panels, bike storage, a car-share program and electric car-charging stations in the parking deck. Developers predict that Valley & Bloom will attract tenants who might choose to ride bicycles or the train rather than drive, reducing the traffic burden. A shuttle bus is also planned to ferry tenants and guests to the Walnut Street or Bay Street train stations during rush hours.
Whether and to what extent tenants will avoid driving cars is unclear. The closest train station is nearly a mile away, although a shuttle ride would reduce travel time. Despite a Whole Foods Market across the street, residential tenants will still need a car to navigate suburban New Jersey.
Many residents worry that the developments will add large, bulky buildings to the streetscape, detracting from the historic quality that differentiates Montclair from some of its less picturesque neighbors. The designs, they argue, could be found anywhere along the state’s strip-mall-strewn roads.
The developments are “going to look absolutely hideous,” said Jason DeSalvo, a Montclair resident. “They’re basically sheer walls. It’s like a concrete canyon,” he said.
“We are pushing back on the ugliness,” said Martin Schwartz, a member of the Montclair planning board and a critic of the developments. “We are saying we want redevelopment — we just don’t want it to look like Route 46 New Jersey.”
Downtown Montclair is an eclectic mix of historic, classical architecture interspersed with unmemorable construction. The focal point is Church Street, a charming destination with sidewalk cafes and street performers. But venture onto Bloomfield Avenue and the rush of traffic makes for an unpleasant walk, and stores struggle to survive. Although downtown extends much farther east to the Bay Street train station, few shoppers make it past the Wellmont Theater, a performance venue on Seymour Street that has been host to Elvis Costello and Snoop Dogg, among many others.
“The downtown is vibrant, it’s great, but we need more customers to make it truly sustainable,” said Luther Flurry, the executive director of the Montclair Center Business Improvement District.
Supporters of the new developments argue that they are replacing two DCH car dealerships and a former gas station, removing blight from what could be a central location. The new construction would also connect downtown with the Montclair Art Museum, which is farther west on Bloomfield Avenue and has long been cut off from shops and restaurants closer to Church Street.
“I didn’t find the abandoned auto dealer and the abandoned gas station particularly quaint,” Mayor Robert D. Jackson said. The new developments “will liven up that corner and bring activity and life to our downtown.”
Aesthetics aside, township officials hope the developments will deliver substantial revenue to Montclair, which has punishingly high property taxes. In 2013, the average tax bill for a Montclair homeowner was $16,686, more than double the state average of $7,988. Montclair generates about $165,000 in tax revenue from the entire site, Ira Karasick, the township’s counsel, said. Mayor Jackson estimated that the developments would generate a total of $2 million a year in revenue from state tax alternative programs.
Another site that the township singled out for redevelopment is Lackawanna Plaza, a once-stunning Greek Doric-style train terminal built in 1913. It houses a run-down shopping mall with a grim supermarket, surrounded by deteriorating parking lots. “The Lackawanna development is in dire need of some help,” Mr. Jackson said. “There is no redeeming value there.”
Lackawanna Plaza, at Bloomfield Avenue and Grove Street, certainly has potential. It is a short walk from the Bay Street train station and could connect the eastern edge of downtown with the vibrant Church Street area. The Pig & Prince Restaurant, which opened on the west side of the plaza in 2012, has become a popular destination. The owners restored the property, formerly a video store, showcasing the original vaulted ceilings, exposed brick walls and archways.
In September, the Pinnacle Companies and the Hampshire Real Estate Companies bought the plaza: the retail building, two sprawling parking lots and an empty office building. The developers hope to renovate it as a mixed-use complex, with potential plans for a national grocer, office and retail space and possibly a row of restaurants.
“Our goal is to completely redo that so it looks new and modern,” said Brian Stolar, the president of the Pinnacle Companies, a Montclair-based company. “It’s going to be fantastic when we’re done.”
The township is also considering relocating Montclair’s municipal offices at the plaza site, a proposal that could stir more criticism if too much office space is included.
“Lackawanna Plaza has such potential to be a vibrant space. It is incredibly located,” said Leslie Kunkin, a real estate broker for Keller Williams. “But if you put municipal there, you’ve just killed whatever you had.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/realestate/commercial/montclairs-city-suburb-conflict-surfaces-in-new-developments.html?_r=1&gwh=3721437FD899F4ED15F04474E386565B
Fact is last time C02 levels in the atmosphere was this high wild horses and wild camels lived in the Arctic, and the oceans were from 30-100 feet higher.
The glaciers are retreating for sure there is no denying that, the closet analogy in time we can find to today in the fossil record and ice core samples was the Pliocene warm period. This period spanned for a millions of years and there were several glacial cycles during that period where the water froze and then thawed.
The real question is how long will this take for us to see these effects, there won’t be a sudden drastic ocean rise unless the ice sheets all melted very quickly. It could take hundreds or even thousands of years for that to happen.
In my humble opinion we will run out of oil and coal before that happens in its entirety in a few short centuries. We surely won’t be around the see LBI and NYC disappear under the Atlantic Ocean waves as it rises. And nobody can say for sure if even Humans will even be around when it happens, after all we have only been around for short period of time. it would be pure hubris to believe we will even exist in 100,000 years from now.
if only plants and crops benefited from CO2……
What caused the ice age? Were the dinosaurs polluting too much? This climate change might be caused by as simple of a change as the earth’s tilting a bit more on it’s axis than it used to. The scientists sold on climate change forgot about one of their basic tenets of conducting experiments, which is to reduce the number of variables that could affect the outcome. And don’t think that many of these conclusions are not driven by those vested in the profits to be derived by carbon exchanges. And last I read that the polar ice caps are larger now than they were at any time in the last 50 or so years. Whoops?
Listen up sheep. Growing up, I ate tons of Country Crock margarine rather than butter since that’s what the scientists said was healthier. They actually reported that the long term affects of ingesting partially hydrogenated oils were better for you than churned milk.
So now, tell me unequivocally that we are destroying our planet!
As per usual, Grim gives real advice. Forget what we are doing here for our environment and check out the rivers in India and in China. Or just the air in China. We probably pollute on a scale of less than 1 to 1,000 when comparing our EP laws to theirs. And just wait until their poor become middle class consumers. The problems will explode exponentially.
Enjoy your feel good tweets, twits!
My brother rails about climate change, I suggested the 330 million Americans should kill themselves to help the issue, but, alas, 2.5 Billion Chinese and Indians probably continue living….
@BarackObama:
“14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.”
—President Obama #SOTU #ActOnClimate
re # 24 – re: What caused the ice age?
Which one?
How sad is it that it took Oblamer 6+ years as POTUS, after he’s lost both houses of congress, spent all of his political capital, has thrown a bone to every special interest that supported him, that he finally steers toward the middle class. Fixing the inequality gap must be a real top priority for him.
“Developers predict that Valley & Bloom will attract tenants who might choose to ride bicycles or the train rather than drive, reducing the traffic burden. A shuttle bus is also planned to ferry tenants and guests to the Walnut Street or Bay Street train stations during rush hours.”
Dumb, dumb progressive liberals. I’d be willing to bet any taker that anyone willing to pay $600K for a 2br apartment will also own a car, if not two of them. It’s such a moneygrab for the developers and is going to look absolutely horrible on the mountainside, especially when considering the beauty and grandeur of the Montclair Art Museum. But we have to keep those municipal workers paid 100K per year. All 33 of them. After all, this is progressive Montclair. I am so glad that we moved out of that money pit.
“14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.”
And this is definitively caused by?
Dumb twit.
Here is the live reading on CO2 the tree huggers squawk about.
280 ppm pre-industrial world to 400 ppm today.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
I have a feeling one we run out of fossil fuel it will drop quickly again.
@BarackObama:
“Our unemployment rate is now lower than it was before the financial crisis.” —
President Obama #SOTU
Here’s a nice essay from Michael Crichton about mixing government with scientific theorizing:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/09/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-caltech-lecture-by-michael-crichton/
His last novel “State of Fear” was excellent, also about this topic.
In other news, I bought a wireless thermostat for my home. Not that fancy overpriced Nest since programming a thermostat is something my 9-year old could do without a problem, but a $100 Honeywell. Had to wire an external transformer to it since the old thermostat ran on batteries and was afraid of stealing current off the boilers transformer since it’s kind of old. So far, it’s really cool technology and decently implemented. I can see how I could save a ton of money through the convenience of being able to adjust the thermostat lower when we are not around unexpectedly. I highly recommend it for those who haven’t made the jump yet. Especially considering that with the anti-fracking laws about to be released (even though it can be performed cleanly) and partisan disapproval of mining for natural gas as well as shipping it in this country. Trust me, it’s going to get very expensive to heat our homes again.
I like that theory.
My biggest problem with climate change is the rapid change in weather patterns. That’s the scary part. Good luck trying to supply 7 billion people and counting with food under extreme growing conditions. You will have no idea what to expect from the weather.
“In my humble opinion we will run out of oil and coal before that happens in its entirety in a few short centuries. We surely won’t be around the see LBI and NYC disappear under the Atlantic Ocean waves as it rises. And nobody can say for sure if even Humans will even be around when it happens, after all we have only been around for short period of time. it would be pure hubris to believe we will even exist in 100,000 years from now.”
Obama blew it the moment he accepted campaign contributions. Once all you sheep understand this, you can then begin to think critically about how little our government cares about us.
Besides running out of fossil fuels, our ability to innovate and adapt will increase exponentially. Heck, we burn most of our trash today, create electricity from it and the impact to the environment is minimal. When they did this in Europe thirty years ago, kids were dropping dead from the pollution.
So far what we know about climate change is very inaccurate, we do not have one good model. I am inclined to agree that CO2 is not helping the situation but there are so many other factors involved in climate that we cannot yet model with any accuracy what will happen in the next 5 years let alone 20 or 50. The problem with any of this is the European have gone all out to reduce CO2, the US has reduced it’s CO2 output, but China and India are not going to and have 3 billion people. If the US goes carbon crazy we will lose even more of our economy to the Chinese who will burn every piece of coal we don’t. I think the march toward renewables and natural gas over coal is a natural path, I think pushing energy efficiency is a good idea and not just from an environmental standpoint. The idea that the government, yes the same dysfunctional government that shuts down every other year and seems to mess everything up, should now be involved in setting CO2 limits and taxing accordingly or more likely giving GS or some other wall street banks a new market to game is INSANITY. Also the climate change pushers act like the Spanish Inquisition, any dissenting opinion is attacked as a denier and generally they try and ruin the person in the scientific community. That gives me some serious pause and tells me there is an agenda someone is pushing.
24- Lib, ice ages were most likely caused by volcano’s. Climate change is always happening. The question is, if we contribute to rapid climate change, will we be able to adapt? No one argues that climate change is a natural occurrence. What people are worried about is the “rapid” change we are contributing to. It’s like we have been artificially blowing up thousands of volcano’s the past 200 years. I don’t think you can keep going on this path and not see huge differences in how the earth reacts.
jcer…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/11/03/blood-and-gore-making-a-killing-on-anti-carbon-investment-hype/
To the contrary Passion Fruit, we could completely end our use of fossil fuels and then a couple of volcanoes could explode and do the same amount of climate change in one week than we humans did the decade prior. Just saying. There’s a lot of profit to be had in climate change. As there’s a lot of profit to be had in creating and selling tests for the core curriculum in our schools. Sadly, the masses still take their cues from their corrupt political leaders, when in actuality, the power is truly in the voters hands. Too bad the voters are just suckers being played.
So many sound bites last night that anyone who actually knew the numerical context would scoff at.
Something like “Consumer confidence is the highest its been in eight years” sounds great. But then look at the long term graph and get statistics, and you find out that even the top month in Obama’s reign of consumer confidence was equivalent to only a 43rd percentile score of non-recessionary months since 1977. His best “normal” year remains below average. Just as the recovery has been well below average, yet he brags about how his policies created it.
I have not watched a state of the Union or State of the State address in over 20 years. That’s when I first realized what a crock our government is.
Nice post. Both sides are crazy. The people stating climate change is not affected by humans are nuts and have an agenda. The people stating that climate change will be the end of us are also crazy and have an agenda.
The way I look at the problem is like this. If western civilization continued on the same path they were on a 100 years ago (burning massive amounts of coal and polluting everything and anything) there would be no hope. So I don’t think it’s wrong to ask places like China and India to not make the same mistakes as us. We have been down that road and we know it doesn’t end well. So why does china and india have to remain ignorant and screw over the other 50% of the population on this planet. Why? Why do we allow the pollution of our drinking water and air? For money? Wtf is that going to do for you when you poison yourself every time you take a breath or take a sip of water. It’s insane what we do for money. It’s disgusting.
jcer says:
January 21, 2015 at 10:16 am
So far what we know about climate change is very inaccurate, we do not have one good model. I am inclined to agree that CO2 is not helping the situation but there are so many other factors involved in climate that we cannot yet model with any accuracy what will happen in the next 5 years let alone 20 or 50. The problem with any of this is the European have gone all out to reduce CO2, the US has reduced it’s CO2 output, but China and India are not going to and have 3 billion people. If the US goes carbon crazy we will lose even more of our economy to the Chinese who will burn every piece of coal we don’t. I think the march toward renewables and natural gas over coal is a natural path, I think pushing energy efficiency is a good idea and not just from an environmental standpoint. The idea that the government, yes the same dysfunctional government that shuts down every other year and seems to mess everything up, should now be involved in setting CO2 limits and taxing accordingly or more likely giving GS or some other wall street banks a new market to game is INSANITY. Also the climate change pushers act like the Spanish Inquisition, any dissenting opinion is attacked as a denier and generally they try and ruin the person in the scientific community. That gives me some serious pause and tells me there is an agenda someone is pushing.
Pumpkin, the earth has a mechanism. Mark my words, if the climate gets too warm the saline currents in the ocean will stop functioning which will cause many places to get much colder. Ice ages caused by volcanoes? Not bloody likely, the sulfur effect would not likely trigger long lasting climate change like that. There are a lot of factors in climate, there are feed back loops, and steady states and many more factors than we model. The variance in the weather has nothing to do with CO2, it has everything to do with the solar cycle, your air current patterns are from solar forcing and changing this pattern changes the air flow, reduced solar activity makes arctic blasts and a warmer Alaska a reality, this is relatively well understood science that the climate change cult doesn’t like to discuss. With CO2 I’m more concerned with ocean acidification than climate change.
What is sad about the state of the union address is that it confirms that the govt understands the problems facing the people. They came out and stated it in the speech. So they talk about, but then do nothing about it. So what was the point of even talking about it and bringing it to the attention of the people if you have no intentions of fixing it.
Libturd in Union says:
January 21, 2015 at 10:27 am
I have not watched a state of the Union or State of the State address in over 20 years. That’s when I first realized what a crock our government is.
Good points. Can’t say that I don’t agree.
Profit drives everything. Now I know why they say money is the source of all evil.
Libturd in Union says:
January 21, 2015 at 10:23 am
To the contrary Passion Fruit, we could completely end our use of fossil fuels and then a couple of volcanoes could explode and do the same amount of climate change in one week than we humans did the decade prior. Just saying. There’s a lot of profit to be had in climate change. As there’s a lot of profit to be had in creating and selling tests for the core curriculum in our schools. Sadly, the masses still take their cues from their corrupt political leaders, when in actuality, the power is truly in the voters hands. Too bad the voters are just suckers being played.
Why is the PRM trying to extend the “prime shopping district” west, when the current downtown has a vacancy problem that’s been ongoing for eight years?
Would love to see PRM turn into NJ’s version of Flint within our lifetimes.
I predict the Siena will collapse within the next five years.
not that this is new news…
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/396786/healthcaregov-sharing-personal-data-third-parties-andrew-johnson
A new report by the Associated Press reveals that the federal government’s health-care website has been sharing users’ personal data with “dozens” of third-party entities, including advertising companies. While the companies are prohibited from using the collected data for personal or business gains, the Obama administration did not explain how it would monitor the companies’ use of the data and enforce that policy.
stu (36)-
Funny how almost nobody ever mentions that Bojangles’ chief of staff during his first term was Richard Daley Jr., the former Midwest head of JPM. The banksters provided him with a personal minder at precisely the time he could’ve been doing a William Wallace on them in the public square.
When all the banksters got off scot-free and the joke that is Dodd-Frank became law was when I wised up to the fact that Bojangles is nothing more than a hack Chicago machine politician, race hustler and general lowlife. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the middle class…and neither do the other 535 chimps in that room last night.
Why North American Producers will Blink First in the Global Oil War
Saudi Arabia is keen to flood the market with oil and keep prices low, thereby forcing US and Canadian players to cut their production.
http://business.financialpost.com/2015/01/21/why-north-american-producers-will-blink-first-in-the-global-oil-war/
Clot,
I offer you an emphatic ‘yup.’
ragnar (42)-
This is what you get when the POTUS is a guy whose schooling, political career and ascent to high office was pretty much on the tailwinds of affirmative action.
It’s a dumbed-down world, pal, and the losers in it are those who strive for something above and beyond the glass ceiling of a “privilege” that has been conjured up by lowlife, race-baiting scum. This is how a POTUS can conceive of a plan to make community college free by taxing the 529s of productive, prudent savers.
“Something like “Consumer confidence is the highest its been in eight years” sounds great. But then look at the long term graph and get statistics, and you find out that even the top month in Obama’s reign of consumer confidence was equivalent to only a 43rd percentile score of non-recessionary months since 1977. His best “normal” year remains below average. Just as the recovery has been well below average, yet he brags about how his policies created it.”
Luge – They don’t need parking to make businesses succeed. Why aren’t these fat a*ses from the burbs not willing to park their cars on Mission Street and walk a few blocks for their ramen?
Oh yeah, this is why.
http://www.northjersey.com/news/crime-and-courts/couple-allegedly-robbed-on-forest-street-in-montclair-1.1197158
It’s a meh sort of world, so chill the fcuk out, smoke a blunt and get busy attaching yourself to the gubmint teat with as firm a suction as you can manage. Get yours before the entire planet explodes in a cataclysmic 0rgy of war, disease and climactic disaster.
gator (56)-
What is an “alleged robbery”?
The fact that the PRM has drugs, guns and a little danger makes it even more fun now.
Luge – They were mugged walking back to their car after their fancy dinner at Fin. Think they’re coming back to town?
The reason for the Sienna and Centro Merde (now Known as Bloom & Something) as well as the new hotel is to try to pay down the PRM’s debt which is still astounding. I am sure it will help a bit, until these apartment dwellers have kids and send them to the public schools. Then all bets are off. IMO, this hotel is going to stick out much like the Tower Center in East Brunswick does, that giant hotel in Morristown does or even the Hess building in Woodbridge. Though, the big difference being that Woodbridge and East Brunswick didn’t have much charm or history. The PRM voted for a developer in for mayor. You reap what you sew.
Have you seen the Bloomfield Center mass condo. I thought the parking garage they first built was large and out of scale. Now the condo’s surrounding it make it look puny. What a colossal dense turd they’ve built. I just hope the fire systems are good there because there is an awful lot of wood framing with out any discernible firewalls going up there.
http://tinyurl.com/colossaltdeveloperturd
Dinner at Fin? Shit, they got mugged twice.
I wonder if they’ll let me back in at Baristanet?
Or how about this one…..6pm during the holiday shopping season. Attempted carjacking in one of the busiest parking decks in town.
http://www.northjersey.com/news/crime-and-courts/mother-struggles-during-attempted-carjacking-1.1171942
How long before boots on the ground in Yemen?
Obviously, people shouldn’t be driving cars in the PRM. That was the mistake both of these victims made. All hail diversity.
Did Obama mention Gitmo in his address last night Anon?
Any two-bit criminal with even a shred of intelligence should know the PRM is easy pickings. You’re pretty much guaranteed that potential marks are unarmed, carry lots of shiny valuables and don’t have the faintest desire or ability to fight back.
Lib – The brain trust that works for the township claims the buildings will bring in more school tax dollars than the resulting expenses for additional students. Anyone wanna place a bet on how that one is going to pan out?
Montclair Master Plan has financial implications on school district
…What about the schools?
Whatever the influx of population in Montclair, what portion of that increased population will be schoolchildren?
Montclair currently has 74 buildings with 10 or more units, not including structures such as senior homes and boarding houses, according to a memorandum Talley provided to The Times. In total, these structures contain 3,060 units and 348 schoolchildren, the memorandum states, a ratio of about one child per nine units.
The memorandum further breaks down the ratio of units and schoolchildren for building height, with ratios increasing as heights decrease.
For example, the eight six-stories-and-above mid-rises in the township contain 744 units, with an average about one child for every 25 units, according to the document.
The 19 garden-apartment properties in Montclair average about one child for every seven units, with 674 total units.
The ratio of one child per nine units is expected to continue in the township, Talley projected. Talley said that she did not anticipate that such an influx of schoolchildren would be enough to greatly impact the Montclair School District.
But will more students in multi-unit structures burden taxpayers?
At present, Montclair actually receives a higher school-tax-to-student ratio in larger, multi-unit buildings than in single-family homes, according to Mayor Robert Jackson.
In a school-tax analysis provided by Jackson, the district’s $117,814,608 school budget is divided among the district’s 6,774 students, equaling $17,392.18 per student. Of that $117.8 total, $16.3 million is generated by outside funding such as state aid. Another $10.9 million is paid by non-residential buildings, according to the analysis.
Of the remainder, $87.2 million is generated by residential properties three stories or less in height, Jackson said. Those properties hold 6,667 students, Jackson said, and based on the $17,392.18-per-student figure, represent just shy of $116 million in costs.
The 107 children residing in the 31 multi-unit buildings four stories or higher account for about $1.9 million in school costs, Jackson said, while the properties generate about $3.4 million in school taxes.
“Look at what those buildings pay in school taxes,” Jackson said. “Those buildings generate more school-tax dollars than they cost.”
The Montclair Times reached out to Matt Frankel, assistant to Schools Superintendent Penny MacCormack, seeking information on current school capacity levels and class sizes as well as what kind of increase in student population the district would be able to accommodate with present staffing and facilities.
In an email, Frankel declined to comment.
http://www.northjersey.com/news/kids-and-dollars-1.1227535
stu (67)-
You don’t need facts on your side to get on TV and declare victory. Even when your party is a shambles and you’ve lost control of clowngress.
So it isn’t 500 Billion Euro QE, it’s 1.1 Trillion!
50 billion euros a month until December 2016….
I can’t wait to see the cost increases for fire protection. Those huge buildings will no doubtedly require expensive firefighting apparatus, more training, probably another firehouse too since the new firehouse probably can’t house a hook and ladder truck that can scale 9 floors. PRM will probably need another fire chief too.
Juice [65];
How long before boots on the ground in Yemen?
With this crowd in charge, we’re far more likely to see the last helicopters (Blackhawks this time, not Hueys) lifting off from the embassy rooftop with people hanging from the railings than we are to see boots on the ground.
Luge, (58)
“Alleged” crimes = black perps + white victims
Definitely a hate crime = non-black perp + black victim
50 billion euros a month until the end of time…
This will end with the ECB buying handwritten IOUs. There’s nothing investment-grade left to buy anywhere on the continent right now.
Every news story I see says Yemen is our partner against terrorism. How can you say that when it’s obviously a country teeming with terrorists?
@TRobinsonNewEra: 800,000 Muslims March Through Chechnya In Support Of ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Massacre http://t.co/RyU8w9mfxK http://t.co/JexL3iztT0
Regardless of which party the president represents, the State of the Union Address has become nothing more than an opportunity to promote their party. The state of the union is really not even covered. Well, definitely not anything negative about it.
We are well a truly fuct. Everyone with half a wit about them has known it for a long time.
[20] “What’s even funnier is he looks darker than President Obama now.”
He’s checking his privilege.
He should be checking for skin cancer.
I don’t think we have the stomach for another war but long standing foreign policy in the Middle East has always had catch-22 implications. We either have funded a group we think we can control or we go there ourselves. Then we withdraw support either financially or with our troops and the place goes back to how it was before.
Having said that, either Iran, Syria, or Yemen will force our hand one way or the other. And let’s not forget about our friends in Israel.
I see the Twit is back with a vengeance.
God, some days I honestly wish for a civil war.
2010 (82)-
Perpetual war is one of the pillars upon which our sham necronomy is built.
Get used to it, serf.
Millionaire households fleeing N.J. by the thousands, study says
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/01/10000_millionaire_households_fled_nj_last_year_study_says.html#incart_river
New Jersey, consistently one of the most affluent states in the country, has slipped a bit in a new ranking of the rich.
The Garden State fell from second to third in millionaire households per capita, according to a ranking released today by Phoenix Marketing International.
New Jersey lost roughly 10,000 millionaire households, but those affluent families who remain still account for 7 percent of the whole state, the researchers said.
The state had climbed to second last year for the first time since 2010, but was edged out by Connecticut in the 2014 ranking.
A high tax rate for top earners may have led to some migration out of the state, according to David Thompson, the lead researcher.
By losing those 10,000 millionaire households, the Garden State returns to third, where it was ranked from 2010 through 2012. Since the last report, Connecticut lost only 1,000 millionaire households, as it vaulted to the second spot, the group said.
Some groups doubt the millionaire-migration theory. Jon Whiten, a deputy director of New Jersey Policy Perspective, said long-term statistics show that tax rates do not cause the rich to flee.
“If millionaires were truly trying to flee NJ’s top income tax rate, we probably would have lost a lot more when the rates were higher,” Whiten said. “But during the 2000s NJ almost doubled the number of tax filers above $500K at a time when the tax rate was increased on them, twice.”
The top five states for millionaires per capita in 2014 are: Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, Hawaii and Alaska. The bottom five are: Mississippi, Idaho, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee.
The report comes the same week that wealth – and wealth disparity have been in the public forum. Oxfam International released a study Monday claiming that the richest 1 percent of the world’s population would have more wealth than the other 99 percent of the globe by next year.
President Barack Obama announced during his State of the Union address that he planned to push for tax code reform to close loopholes for big business.
Looks like a decent snowstorm is coming on Saturday folks. Time to build the free snowblower. I guess I have my plans lined up for tomorrow night.
[81] Like brunch, skin cancer is a symbol of privilege.
O-man did mention this. He said it costs something like 3 million a prisoner to stay there (don’t quote me on that, not sure, but i think that is what he said). He pat himself on the back by claiming to bring the prison population down by 50% during his tenure and then stated that his goal was to close it down.
Libturd in Union says:
January 21, 2015 at 11:15 am
Did Obama mention Gitmo in his address last night Anon?
Technology disrupting the American Dream
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-technology-disrupting-the-american-dream/2015/01/19/3b4008ee-a00c-11e4-9f89-561284a573f8_story.html
re: Bohener – Is he a grandpa yet? Daughter was married about a year and a half ago.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/house-speaker-john-boehner-daugther-ties-knot-dreadlocked-jamaican-born-beaux-article-1.1342922
Daughter was married about a year and a half ago.
So when does Bohener run for Mayor of NYC? He appears to have the necessary credentials.
Fuel for the F I R E!!
This guy is a neo-con, former Intelligence Community. Interesting website 20committee.com . 20 comes from XX Committe, as in double cross – from a English WW2 counterintelligence program to catch German spies and turned them.
Have Fun.
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January 21, 2015
The West, Islam, and the Last Stand of the WEIRD
Yet again, Pope Francis has stirred up the Western commentariat by addressing social issues, this time contraception and having babies. Every time this pope talks about matters sexual there are gasps from enlightened Western post-moderns, who seem shocked that Francis is actually a Catholic. They are so accustomed to the laid-back, non-judgmental “cafeteria Catholicism” around them that a Catholic cleric, much less the Pope of Rome, publicly endorsing what the church actually teaches on such issues, however gently, leads to dropped jaws.
After all, Francis seems so nice and progressive, with his outreach to the poor and welcoming things stated about gays and whatnot — these having been the source of consternation among some Catholic traditionalists — and then he turns out to be another old white guy with a lot of “sexual issues.” I am not a Catholic, but it never ceases to amaze me how educated Western post-moderns cannot seem to fathom that no pope is going to ditch centuries of social teaching just to get a nice write-up in Salon or Vox. Francis is a compassionate man, but as the head of the Catholic Church he advocates positions on matters sexual that seem profoundly outdated and literally unthinkable to many in the West today.
Unthinkability is the issue here. The WEIRD demographic, as I’ve explained before, standing for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, is wholly dominant among our media elites that play a huge role in forming opinions and judging the acceptability of the same. Over the last half-century the WEIRD vanguard has taken over the academy, the media, and the entertainment world; one of its better-known members is in the White House right now. Obama’s castigation in 2008 of “bitter” Americans who cling to guns and religion was a perfect one-sentence explanation of how WEIRDos view less educated and enlightened fellow citizens, which is no doubt why his opponents will cite it forever.
There is no tyranny as offensive as a cultural tyranny, of course, and just as affluent, educated post-moderns view their lessers with undisguised contempt, the guns-and-bibles brigade returns that contempt with interest. This goes some way to explaining why American politics has become so bitter in recent years: both sides simply hate each other and bother less and less to mask it.
The WEIRD contingent has had an impressive string of victories since the 1960’s, especially in America. Their record of wins, fast, may have no precedent in history, since culture tends to shift slowly, sometimes glacially. The culture war has been won, and the victory for the WEIRD side is essentially total. In the last fifty years, racial relations have been so dramatically transformed by government and culture, hand in hand, that racism, once casual among many whites, is totally unacceptable in anything resembling polite society. It speaks volumes that Jeffrey Dahmer, who murdered, dismembered and ate seventeen young men, many of them black and Hispanic, was at pains to make clear that, though he was a cannibalistic serial killer, he wasn’t racist: that fact he deemed important.
Even more transformational have been shifts in gender relations since the 1960’s, with American young women today being better educated than their male counterparts, with access to opportunities personal, professional, and sexual that their grandmothers could only have dreamed of. Some feminists now ask what good men are actually for, not in jest. Young men have noticed this seismic shift and numbers of them are dropping out of the race — professional and sexual — in a way their dads and granddads could not possibly comprehend. In Japan, this has become an official problem, and has a good deal to do with Japan’s staggering demographic crisis. As with race, feminism has triumphed so totally in just a couple generations that we have NGOs plus governmental bureaucracies hunting for evidence of racism or sexism, however fragmentary, to prove the need for more transformation. When young men lose interest in sex, as has occurred in Japan and is spreading in the West, something big is happening.
While race is of interest to the WEIRD demographic, sex is more central to their worldview. Catfights among progressives about determining who has more sexual privilege are fun to watch yet challenging for normals to comprehend. Here the LGBT issue has played a major role. Simply put, less than twenty-five years ago, gay issues were peripheral politically, confined to America’s far-Left fringe, while topics like gay marriage were never discussed by mainstream figures. Thanks to media and government action, now LGBT issues are given a place of importance in all discussions of social issues, while soon the Supreme Court will take up gay marriage, which may prove its most hot-button case since Roe v. Wade.
Regardless of what the Supreme Court decides, LGBT issues are another area where the culture war has turned out to be one-sided in the end. Opposition to gay marriage is fading fast, while it barely exists among younger Americans. However, just as with race and gender issues, LGBT advocates are showing minimal magnanimity in victory, preferring to double-down on public dissenters. Even the powerful are being driven from jobs and public life over their opposition, even when quiet, to gay marriage. There is more than a whiff of the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) mob about all this, and the idea of live-and-let live does not seem to be in fashion among the Cultural Marxist Left. It’s difficult to see how America avoids a serious clash between progressives and tradition-minded religious groups over all this.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Cultural Marxists have won fast, and their transformation of the post-modern West has been very quick by any historical standards, the Left is brimming with confidence that their revolution is final. Hence the rhetoric about their enemies being on “the wrong side of history,” heard regularly, even from Obama. But any historian will tell you that history is not read that simply, and is seldom quite so linear: ask Erich Honecker how that March of History worked out.
It’s tough to miss that the post-modern Western Left is immersed in WEIRD narratives so deeply that it is unable to recognize, much less tolerate, alternative viewpoints. We have come a long way from the Bolshevism of the last century, which after a brief period of Leninist experimentation in social matters, turned towards an aggressive traditionalism; Stalin and his Red minions had views on abortion, gender, and sexual minorities that would make FoxNews blush. The revolution needed soldiers and workers, meaning hard men, and what were women for if not to make them?
Today’s social revolutionaries have created a post-modern WEIRD paradise that does not seem to know what it wants save permanent revolution. How this new society can be maintained for long without enough children of its own is the great imponderable, since the signature achievement of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960’s, from any big-picture historical perspective, is the amazing decline in fecundity in any society it touches.
Mass immigration is the preferred solution for WEIRDos, because it gets them off the hook for reproducing while providing interesting ethnic restaurants, plus ample cheap labor to do the household chores that affluent progressives don’t seek to do themselves (until recently many of these domestic tasks — cleaning, fixing, lawn-cutting — were assigned to a family’s children, who no longer exist in numbers).
In the United States, mass immigration, heavily from Latin America, is causing discontent but is seen as a nuisance, at most, by WEIRDos, who seldom know the working-class Americans who do see this as a serious threat to their economic and social well-being. In Europe, however, the influx comes heavily from Africa and Asia, and is mainly Muslim, leading to all kinds of problems, the most visible of them being terrorism.
The recent attacks around Paris have caused another outburst of introspection of a highly limited sort in the West. The Usual Suspects are, of course, explaining that all this unpleasantness has nothing to do with Islam. I’ve castigated this progressive myth-making already, as well as those on the other side, who seem to want a permanent war on Islam, which has more than a billion-and-a-half adherents.
Finding a middle path on discussing this problem is tricky but here we go. I have a Ph.D. in history, not Islamic Studies, which Islamist apologists insist you must if you discuss Islamic anything, but I’ve studied the subject in detail, I know Islam’s history and theology. Just as important, I’ve spent time in Muslim countries in many places, I’ve gotten to know many Muslims of diverse backgrounds: some remain my dear friends, some have been lovers (I came close to marrying a Muslim woman: that’s another story). Without further delay I shall engage in what SJWs call stereotyping and normals term analysis.
Issues of culture and development cannot be decoupled from discussions about the Muslim diaspora in the West. Pakistanis in America — many well educated professionals, nearly all speaking English — are frequently successful immigrants, many are notably patriotic and see no contradiction between their faith and their Americanism. Yet their illiterate co-nationals who come to Britain from the most backwards part of Pakistan — they bring their redneck habits, including cousin-marriage, to Yorkshire — are a breeding ground for crime and extremism. This is not all about Islam, other factors matter too, but we must be able to discuss Islam to understand what is going on.
France, which is home to a quarter of the twenty million Muslims living in Western Europe, likewise presents a complex picture that defies thumbnail assessment. The Parisian concept of laïcité, which was defended staunchly by Marine Le Pen in her New York Times op-ed demanding that France talk about Islamic extremism now, has been a success with more Muslim immigrants than many realize. There are millions of French Muslims, mainly of North African extraction, who have assimilated rather well to life on the other side of the Mediterranean, and many are well adjusted French patriots; some are even supporters of Le Pen’s Front national.
Westerners have a tough time understanding how Islam is actually lived by believers, while WEIRDos, thanks to their biases, seem incapable of grasping the essentials. In the first place, it must be understood that Islam is less a religion than a culture and a complete way of life. It has nothing to do with “religion” as defined by the post-Enlightenment West, which is comfortable with faiths that can be safely placed in a box ninety-five percent of the time, locked away when not in church, temple, or mosque.
Islam, being a programmatic faith not confined to the mosque, provides detailed commentary and rules on daily life, including matters sexual that invariably seem strange to post-modern Westerners, who view any infringement on personal sexuality as oppressive. This is a subject of regular mocking in parts of the Western press. Few care to note that Islam is very like Orthodox or Conservative Judaism in such matters.
Islam as actually lived by its adherents easily breaks down into three basic groups that are replicated everywhere there is Islam. Seeing how people live their faith, day in and day out, is illuminating. There is a genuinely radical element — perhaps ten percent, rather more in the West — that advocates Islamism, that is applying Islam in politics, by force if necessary. The aggressively pious vanguard of this sort pushes violence, even murderous barbarism, to further its aims. It has no sympathy for the West and seeks confrontation and victory, not dialogue. Its loudest adherents are usually dysfunctional sorts with a criminal past.
On the other side, maybe another ten percent, there are Muslims who actually reject the faith, de facto, but if they’re living in a Muslim country they keep relatively quiet about it, lest they be denounced as “apostates.” Many are well educated. Such atheists, or at least serious Islam-skeptics, are frequently encountered in the West; it’s seldom noted that many such people emigrate to freer countries precisely to be able to live their skepticism openly.
But the vast majority of Muslims fall into a big group that lives the faith as best they can, without questioning its essentials. They try, they fail, they keep trying. They usually make an effort during Ramadan, at least, and if a life crisis appears, they will pray and seek the comfort of the mosque; the rest of the time their lived faith is rather hit-or-miss. In other words, they are completely normal human beings.
It needs to be clear that these majoritarians do not question Islam: if pressed, they will state the problem, the failing, is with them, not the faith. It should be obvious that the group wholly absent from this division-into-threes is the post-modern Western skeptic, the nominal mainline Protestant, or perhaps a very Reform Jew, who’s down with gay marriage since it’s been “reinterpreted” in recent decades. Hipster Jesus — into you with your sins, cool with your ironic vibe — does not have a corollary in Islam. The hardest thing for WEIRDos, who view all religion as odd, and perhaps risible, when not dangerous, to grasp is — Muslims actually believe this stuff.
Not having been touched by the Enlightenment, much less post-modernism, Muslims are on a different planet, intellectually speaking, than WEIRDos. At best, they talk past each other. As someone who has advocated a tough approach to Muslim immigrants who do not seek to assimilate to Western norms, particularly if they have extreme views, some sympathy for them nevertheless is in order here.
It must be deeply confusing to any Muslim newcomer to France to encounter a place of such unbelief and debauchery as Paris, where raw sexuality is everywhere, women run free in every sense, and faiths of all kinds are mocked openly. Free speech is not a French priority, and certain kinds of speech are protected, while others are not. Since I cannot rationally explain why French law protects certain speech, and not others, I don’t expect an unlettered immigrant from West Africa to make sense of it all either.
The list of things that can get you thrown in a French jail for saying is long, including “offensive” speech against various racial, religious, and sexual minorities, but it must be mysterious to Muslims why gross public indecencies against the Prophet are tolerated when denial of the Holocaust, a purely human affair, is not. When a founder of Charlie Hebdo, the publication whose profane cartoons provoked mass murder, says that its editor, Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, was a provocateur/jerk-off whose offensiveness got everybody killed, we can imagine what less sympathetic Muslims might feel about this case. Not least because Charb was no free speech advocate, rather a far-Left agitator who tried hard to get his political opponents banned while offending every traditionalist, of every stripe, he could.
To illustrate how complex this all actually is, allow me to sketch my good friend A., whom I’ve known for years, a highly assimilated French Muslim. His grandfather came from Algeria after a long career as a decorated French colonial soldier, one of the lucky harkis to escape the bloodbath after Algerian independence, when deGaulle condemned so many who had fought for France to an evil fate. A. has filled those shoes well as a soldier and then a career intelligence officer. His French patriotism is sincere and deep; he has visited Algeria a couple times, his command of Arabic being no greater than mine, and didn’t like it. France is his home, his patrie.
In matters of faith, A. is privately a modest skeptic, but he makes an effort during Ramadan, mostly to appease his father, a kind old gentleman who, like many do, turned to faith in an old age marked by illness and loneliness. The rest of the year, A. regularly goes boozing and whoring like any counterintelligencer worth his salt. His ceaseless quest for the “right beurette” continues, unfulfilled. He is a Muslim and proud of it, but sincerely hates extremists and admits to feeling more than a little sympathy for the Front national, for its willingness to “stand up for France” (while A. is purely Algerian by background, he possesses a dislike of Germans to match anyone in France).
Yet A.’s views on many matters would distress WEIRDos. He thinks outright atheists are contemptible and views liberals with undisguised distaste, especially if they are Jewish and/or gay, and he is no fan of Israel. It should be noted that A. is no fonder of newer Muslim immigrants who freeload on welfare. Yet his anti-Semitism is far from deep or uniform, and he reveres Éric Zemmour, a fellow Frenchman of (Jewish) Algerian descent, as someone “who says the truth.” A. wants Muslims to be respected yet thinks it would be best if jihadists were taken out over the ocean in helicopters, Argentinian junta style, and dropped into the deep from 5,000 feet.
What to make of all this? My friend represents a best-case scenario for Europe, a Muslim whose faith is modest, entirely private, and who feels sincerely at home in Europe, but I know his views on many issues would not pass progressive muster. Survey after survey demonstrates that Muslims in Europe broadly possess views that would be shocking to the WEIRD demographic. Significant portions of Europe’s Muslim community, particularly among more recent arrivals, espouse attitudes that are, at best, conditional in their condemnation of violence, i.e. jihad, while their views on Israel and Jews are implacably hostile.
Short of a coercive reeducation program worthy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution I’m not sure what can be done about all this in 2015. Even if Muslim immigration were halted tomorrow — which is surely not on the table yet — Western Europe will still possess twenty million Muslims, many quite unassimilated, who are reproducing at a rate far beyond the native population. It’s difficult to see how this can end well — or peacefully.
The tragedy is that European powers were, until recently, able to inspire loyalty from their Muslims. France got millions of African Muslims, like A.’s grandfather, to fight for their empire in both World Wars, and Britain managed the same. The Ottoman Empire’s pompous declaration of jihad in 1914, on behalf of the Central Powers, went nowhere as Muslim soldiers of the Indian Army turned out to be loyal to the British Empire, the world’s biggest Muslim power, even in battle against fellow Muslims.
Muslims in Russia proved equally faithful to the Tsar during World War I, that country’s aggressive Orthodox Christianity notwithstanding, while Austria-Hungary found that their Bosnian Muslim subjects were their most loyal and combative soldiers. In the Habsburgs’ last war, the 2nd Bosnian Regiment, the legendary Zweier Bosniaken, won more valor decorations than any other of the emperor’s regiments, while Bosnian Muslims died at the front at the highest rate of any of Vienna’s many ethnic groups.
Such tenacious loyalty to an “infidel” empire seems difficult to imagine a century later, but was understandable at the time, for the simple reason that Western colonial powers protected Islam and ensured Muslims could keep their faith and traditions even under an explicitly Christian occupier. Austria-Hungary’s 1878 invasion of Bosnia met stiff resistance from Muslims, but they were soon bought off with generous allowances for sharia, Islamic law, and Muslim conscripts in the Habsburg Army were led in prayer by imams in Austro-Hungarian uniform with a rigor many had never practiced in civilian life. The slogan, “On the path of Allah, for our Austrian homeland,” was cited by Bosnian troops headed to battle in 1914-1918, and it was no lie, for the Habsburgs protected Islam, and for any pious Muslim, Austria-Hungary counted as dar al-Islam.
How, then, are European countries today doing such a terrible job of assimilating Muslim immigrants? In the first place, Christianity has been replaced by secularism, often of an aggressive kind. We have changed; Muslims have not. The sort of in-your-face secularism that’s commonplace in Europe now is difficult for Muslims to relate to, having no resonance with their historical experience, and is viewed with contempt by many of them. Bonds of tribe and kin that have frayed in the West remain powerful among Muslims. Post-modern permissiveness in sexual matters is likewise met with bemused anger by many Muslims, some of whom gleefully rape European women they view as whores.
Crime is one of the great unmentionables in all this, preventing honest dialogue. In 2010, Éric Zemmour was convicted of racial incitement for stating that Muslim immigrants were grossly overrepresented among France’s violent criminals, though few could plausibly state he was wrong on the numbers. Over the last generation, France has created a serious problem in the suburbs of Paris, among other major cities, where Muslim ghettos are crowded with young people who seldom if ever work, living on welfare while plotting crimes of various sorts, while seething with resentment and hate for “infidels” around them. For some, this path of hatred leads to jihad. Here the Paris killers, with their obsession with angry American rap music, were a walking, vapid, and murderous cliche.
Many are now worried about low-grade warfare erupting across Western Europe, as jihadist cells go active and plant bombs and open fire. All over the European Union, in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, police and spies are watching would-be killers closely. Although there is no enduring security fix to this daunting problem, as I’ve explained before, consistent police and intelligence pressure on Salafi radicals can reduce terrorism, if the will exists to sustain such aggressive operations by the security services.
While more terrorism seems likely, it may not be anything as dramatic as alarmists and thrillers would promise. France already faces an Islamic insurgency of a low-grade kind — it is habitually downplayed by the authorities as “isolated incidents” that happen “at random” when shootings and driving cars into people is anything but random — that may continue on low-boil for years, claiming a few victims at a time, not dozens, much less hundreds. French inner cities may come to resemble shambolic American inner cities like Detroit or Chicago, where war-like casualty rates among civilians are similarly dismissed as “street crime,” with the difference that France’s troublemakers will be inspired by Salafi jihadism while being shockingly well armed. Needless to add, more militarization of police and society will follow.
It’s all too soon to tell. All-out civil war — think more Mad Max than Gettysburg — cannot be ruled out at this juncture. What is clear, however, is that Europe has no idea how to respond to this mounting crisis in any politically coherent fashion. Pushing Marine Le Pen, who heads the most popular political party in France, to the margins of the national dialogue about domestic extremism seems certain to increase political polarization when it needs to be reduced. As I’ve stated many times, unless Europe’s mainstream parties find a way to engage alienated voters of the sort to whom the FN and Germany’s PEGIDA appeal, they are surrendering this vital and politically explosive issue — which is only continuing to grow, especially among the young — to the friends of Vladimir Putin, whose commitment to democracy may be less than sincere.
In his professorial way, President Obama has told Europeans that they must assimilate immigrants better, in order to defeat terrorism, without explaining how this might be done. This lecturing has gone down as well in Europe as does European pontificating at Americans how we need to be nicer to blacks: cheap posturing is not a policy, anywhere. Moreover, Obama’s unhelpful hint leaves out the critical question of how many Muslims in Europe actually want to assimilate to a society that many of them openly loathe. (Neither does it help matters when major NATO leaders tell Muslim immigrants that under no circumstances should they assimilate to European ways.) Ample, if anecdotal, evidence suggests that Muslims in Europe who actually want to adopt European values are doing so, at their own pace, while Muslims who want no part of WEIRD anything are rejecting our post-modernism — some of them with violence.
None of this mess, which has been decades in the making, is conducive to easy solutions. There is no European-wide fix available; individual countries will need to fashion bespoke responses, based on the unique circumstances of their own Muslim populations. But a start to getting on the road to societal health would be making clear that immigrants who have no intention of accepting European political values should not enter Europe. In this vein, Ahmed Aboutaleb, the Moroccan-born mayor of Rotterdam, which possesses a large Muslim population, told co-religionists who are uncomfortable with European freedoms that they simply need to “f*** off.”
Such very free speech aside, institutionalized escapism continues to dominate Western debates on this issue. FoxNews recently caused a ruckus on both sides of the Atlantic with a discussion of Muslim “no-go” areas in Europe. The speaker overstated his case, as he tends to do, leading to hysteria among those eager to dismiss any notion that such areas, reminiscent of parts of North Ireland in the 1970’s where British security forces dared not operate, actually exist. The subsequent pontification has been strong, notwithstanding the fact that such no-go areas do exist in some parts of Europe, as any serious analysis would reveal. A brief discussion with any European cop or spook working operational counterterrorism would bring wisdom that would be discomforting to progressives.
The truth about Islam is that it approaches other religions from a triumphalist position, and always has. By default, it anticipates submission, not co-existence in any sense recognizable to the post-Enlightenment West. While its history is hardly all jihad, Islam’s “bloody borders” are a matter of record, not opinion. The last Ottoman effort to subdue Europe — one of many Islamic invasion efforts over the centuries — came in 1683, and was stopped, just barely, at Vienna. That sounds like a long time ago, but when King John Sobieski’s Polish cavalry appeared from the north to cut the Ottoman siege short, Harvard had been open for nearly a half-century, America’s coastal colonies were thickly settled, and Ben Franklin’s birth was barely two decades off. This was over three centuries ago, but hardly ancient history.
Many progressives fall prey to an argument, composed of equal parts narcissism and masochism, whereby jihadism and Muslim anger are really the West’s fault. The source of all this rage, you see, is to be found in recent Western “colonial blunders,” and certainly has nothing to with Islam. Colonialism has caused all sorts of bad issues — it’s difficult to see how France or Britain would have their big problems with Muslim immigrants without their former empires in the closet — but if it’s fair to point the finger at Western colonialism, it’s equally fair to cite all the centuries of examples when Muslim countries tried to overrun Europe at sword-point, killing, raping, and taking slaves all the way.
History matters and we must understand Muslim narratives about the past. This does not mean the West should agree with those, and we must not allow historical grievances, real or imagined, to be employed in defense of terrorism and murder. Above all, Muslims are people like all the others, and the average Muslim obsesses about such matters no more than the average American seethes about the Alamo. Muslims, on close inspection, turn out to have all the usual human frailties and complexes, not all of them conducive to peaceful coexistence.
The number of Muslims actually eager to wage jihad is small, but to deny that such sorts exist, and that they are motivated by a toxic brew of nihilism and aggression, in the name of Islam, is to perpetuate a dangerous lie. Moreover, opinion polling among Muslims, including in the West, quickly reveals that many of them strongly dislike lots of things about us, including Western sexual mores and Jews. There is nothing to be done about the issue of anti-Semitism at this point — the desire of some French Jews now to simply escape is sadly understandable — while Muslim discomfort about our post-modern ways is intractable unless we are willing to change who we are to appease relatively small, if vocal, numbers of newcomers. That matter will be left to voters, most of whom I doubt will be inclined to abandon their comfortable lifestyles to please angry foreigners on welfare who are responsible for a lot of street crime.
To sum up, the triumph of the WEIRD demographic in the West over the last half-century, so such post-moderns now dominate our scholarly, media and political elites, means that having a genuine discussion with Muslims appears impossible. While Christian Europe of the last century still had some common ground with believing Muslims, the gap today between our societal values and those of most Muslims is vast and cannot be overcome without huge changes, perhaps on both sides, that seem unlikely to happen without bloodshed.
To make matters worse, the only European country that is making an effort to appeal to normal people of faith in dangerous times is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, the Kremlin, speaking through its religious mouthpieces, has staked out a clear position that terrorism is unacceptable, but so is intentionally offending religious people with blasphemy. In this formulation, Russia — and Russia alone — offers a welcoming home to Christians and Muslims alike, while driving extremists of all sorts, whether they be jihadists or Communist cartoonists, out of the public square. Religion is not the problem, Russia makes clear, and its support for traditional religions here is consistent — extremism is.
WEIRDos in the West naturally find all this a tad comedic, and they were mightily surprised when Pope Francis (“One cannot provoke; one cannot insult other people’s faith; one cannot make fun of faith”) came alarmingly close to towing the Kremlin line about Charlie Hebdo. Yet again, post-moderns were distressed to discover that the Pope of Rome is actually a Catholic. You have to be part of the WEIRD demographic to find it “shocking” when traditional religion stands up against aggressive blasphemy.
Europe is in real danger here. The possibility of mass violence, caused by jihadist insurgents who are painted as “criminals” by the political and media elite, is serious and the gross decline in European military strength since the end of the Cold War does not provide assurance that such messiness could be brought under control quickly. In that case, radicalization will beget counter-radicalization and grave violence between Muslims and native Europeans should be expected. In that case, madmen like Anders Brievik will turn out to be trendsetters of an odious kind. Here the progressive need to find Islamophobia, which seems to concern many on the Left more than armed jihadism, does not promote stability.
As Europe descends into chaos and violence, a dystopian future wanted by no sane person, who will be there to stave of total collapse? Some are already planning for this, quietly, but most of Europe is not — how can governments plan for something they dare not even name? — and we can expect NATO to be unready for what may be coming. Having participated in many defense exercises with NATO, I can state confidently that the very last thing the U.S. military wants to get caught up in is European chaos. If the German military, far too small to contain mass violence, appeals to Stuttgart, where the U.S. European Command is headquartered, for assistance, somehow emails will be lost and calls will be “missed.” It’s impossible to imagine Obama committing American troops to putting down Muslim riots and worse in Europe.
However, Vladimir Putin will be waiting by the phone, eager to “help” Europe in its time of troubles. Not to mention that Putin comes from the Russian secret police tradition, where you create problems in order to solve them. Kremlin wags are eager to remind everyone how many times Holy Russia has selflessly saved the continent from Western European madness, in 1814 and in 1945 in particular, and suddenly the man in Moscow will appear as a savior, a warrior of faith himself — not at all like Europe and America’s weak-willed elites — who can appeal to moderates of all sorts, Christian and Muslim alike, to reject violence and extremism. This scenario is fanciful only if you are blind to what Putin wants, and how bad the situation in Europe actually is. When a drowning Europe needs Putin’s urgent assistance, our WEIRD demographic may find out that history did not turn out quite as they had been promised.
Someone has yet again dramatically overestimated my willingness to read a long article whose point isn’t made clear in its introduction.
http://nypost.com/2015/01/21/chinese-officials-blame-criminal-bacon-for-citys-pollution/
Libturd in Union says:
January 21, 2015 at 10:23 am
To the contrary Passion Fruit, we could completely end our use of fossil fuels and then a couple of volcanoes could explode and do the same amount of climate change in one week than we humans did the decade prior. Just saying. There’s a lot of profit to be had in climate change. As there’s a lot of profit to be had in creating and selling tests for the core curriculum in our schools. Sadly, the masses still take their cues from their corrupt political leaders, when in actuality, the power is truly in the voters hands. Too bad the voters are just suckers being played.
[92] aptly named
I stand corrected. There is someone on this board more annoying than anon.
In the spirit of Grim’s headline post today…sorry, I couldn’t help myself either:
Dinosaur farts may have caused prehistoric global warming
by Tafline Laylin, 01/10/15
http://inhabitat.com/dinosaur-farts-may-have-caused-the-last-global-warming/
We know that today’s cows are responsible for producing staggering amounts of heat-trapping methane gas, a major driver of climate change, but British scientists now claim that dinosaurs with vegetarian diets may have contributed to prehistoric global warming simply by passing gas. Dr. Dave Wilkinson from Liverpool John Moores University led the study, which was published in the journal Current Biology. He told The Telegraph “Indeed, our calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all modern sources.
Sauropod dinosaurs that roamed the planet 150 million years ago may have released more methane gas into the atmosphere than all modern sources combined. Although methane does not stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, it is 20 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2. “A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic climate,” Dr. Wilkinson told The Telegraph.
The researchers compared sauropods to the modern dairy and beef industry. “Global methane emissions from medium-sized sauropods that weighed about 20 tonnes would have amounted to around 472 million tonnes per year,” the study concluded. That amount is roughly equivalent to the 500 million tonnes of methane released into the atmosphere today. Prior to the industrial revolution, before beef production exploded, natural methane emissions only added up to 181 million tonnes per year.
[89] wicked
This was something that could be seen from a long way off. What couldn’t be seen was the pace. It’s coming a lot faster than I thought it would.
What I wondered for some time now was this: How would society, and the US in particular, respond? How would the effects be countered, thoughtfully or reflexively? I know, stupid question–everyone knows the answer will be reflexive.
But here’s the rub: we are trying to counter the effects of technological disruption with “solutions” that make technological disruption even more likely. And we will welcome it; case in point was an article I read about how waiters get back at their customers. Gross. Makes me want to go to restaurants where you can order from an iPad and not deal with an anon-type server who resents your privilege and will hock a loogie in your soup.
[96] toxic,
If anon stopped posting inane shit, perhaps that would hold down global warming. Better yet, he could stop breathing and emitting all that CO2.
No comment necessary
http://www.mycentraljersey.com/story/news/local/middlesex-county/2015/01/21/charges-filed-helmetta-shelter-case/22107797/
Live Earth part Deux. I went to the one back in 2007, mostly to see Roger Waters and the Police. (which the Police screwed up by using Kayne)
Davos (Switzerland) (AFP) – More than 100 artists will take part in a global “Live Earth” concert on June 18 to galvanise demands for climate action, former US vice president Al Gore said Wednesday.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-pharrell-williams-to-head-up-live-earth-global-climate-concert-2015-1#ixzz3PTstsrqs
If smoking bacon is the cause of the demise of the human species, it will have been worth it.
Where there is a Global Warming CO2 problem there is a solution.
There are a few CO2 caprture and sequestration startups
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/531346/can-sucking-co2-out-of-the-atmosphere-really-work/
Post 92 burned a hole in the ozone layer.
“A unified theory of media idiocy on climate is beyond the scope of this column”
“When climate reporters robotically insist, as they did again this week, that the 2000s represent the hottest period in the rather skimpy, 134-year historical record, they are merely reiterating that the pre-1998 warming happened. No clear trend up or down has been apparent since then.”
“If the decades have validated any set of propositions, it’s the following: Mankind is unlikely to do anything meaningful about carbon dioxide as a matter of concerted public policy, and anything it does will be in the service of domestic pork interests, having no impact on climate.”
News reporting of the latest climate alarm was not uniformly bad. Among hundreds of publications in the Factiva database, exactly one—the Mail on Sunday, one of those derided London tabloids—injected the phrase “statistically significant” into consideration of whether 2014 was in any meaningful sense the “hottest year on record.”
A nonjournalistic source and not exactly an outfit of climate-change deniers, Berkeley Earth, also noted that, when it comes to 2014 and the other “hottest year” candidates, 2005 and 2010, the observed temperature difference was smaller than the margin of error by a factor of five, adding: “Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”
To its credit, the Washington Post alluded to the possibly more important fact that “rising temperatures have not kept pace with computer simulations that predicted even faster warming.”
The New York Times contributed nothing to reader enlightenment as usual, and the Associated Press committed a howler by claiming that “nine of the 10 hottest years in NOAA global records have occurred since 2000. The odds of this happening at random are about 650 million to 1, according to University of South Carolina statistician John Grego. ”
This might be true if Earth’s climate were dice, where rolling a six has no effect on the odds of the next roll being a six. But climate is a continuous process of incremental change. A unified theory of media idiocy on climate is beyond the scope of this column, but even someone with the apparently parched intellect of an AP editor should be able to look at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charts and notice that cool years are grouped with cool years, warm years with warm years, and in-between years with in-between years.
Either NOAA’s entire temperature history is a statistical anomaly of incomprehensible, galactic proportions—or AP has peddled itself a faulty assumption. And sure enough, Mr. Grego tells me AP specifically instructed him to assume “all years had the same probability of being ‘selected’ as one of the 10 hottest years on record.” This is akin to assuming that, because you weighed 195 pounds at some point in your life, there should be an equal chance of you weighing 195 pounds at any point in your life, even when you were a baby.
The real mystery, though, would be if the warmest years did not bunch up in the post-1998 period, given the sharp warming observed from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.
When climate reporters robotically insist, as they did again this week, that the 2000s represent the hottest period in the rather skimpy, 134-year historical record, they are merely reiterating that the pre-1998 warming happened. No clear trend up or down has been apparent since then.
The bigger problem, of course, is that evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming. One would be astonished if mankind, with its prodigious release of greenhouse gases and other activities, were not having an impact on climate. But how and how much are the crucial questions.
But all this is magisterially beside the point in a sense. If the decades have validated any set of propositions, it’s the following: Mankind is unlikely to do anything meaningful about carbon dioxide as a matter of concerted public policy, and anything it does will be in the service of domestic pork interests, having no impact on climate.
Even if humanity could assert bureaucratic control over climate, the cost-benefit case would remain problematic—the costs being huge and the benefits necessarily being as uncertain as man’s role in causing climate change.
A carbon tax as part of pro-growth tax reform might pass a cost-benefit test mainly thanks to the nonclimate benefits of tax reform. Alas, no sign exists that a quorum of countries is ready to march together down this road. President Obama this week decided to use the tax-reform opportunity to pursue partisan class-warfare themes rather than advance a carbon tax proposal in exchange for lower rates.
So the climate problem, if there’s a problem, likely won’t be solved by some supreme effort of global bureaucratic will. But one could easily imagine it being solved by the normal, unwilled progress of technology. A battery—pick a number—five or 10 times more efficient than today’s, holding more energy and charging and discharging faster, would so revolutionize world energy practices that scientists would have to consider how a sudden decline in human carbon-dioxide emissions might affect the climate.
Solar and wind collection don’t have to be particularly efficient if storage becomes efficient. More solar energy reaches the earth’s surface in a year than is contained in all remaining reserves of fossil fuels and uranium. And to the inventor the financial and reputational rewards would be extravagant—which explains why billions of dollars are flowing into battery research.
I’ll join the call for brevity in posts. Post a summary a few lines and a link.
Scrolling through those posts on a mobile device is a pain.
This Global warming has nothing to do with the US. Its all someone elses fault.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/delaware-sized-gas-plume-over-west-illustrates-the-cost-of-leaking-methane/2014/12/29/d34c3e6e-8d1f-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html
Libturd,
Funnily enough I happened to have the very same smoked pork belly last night, I presume gifted to my family from some other Chinese family. Steamed then sliced thin, each piece was a translucent ruby and amber delight.
Looked like this: http://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Chinese-cuisine-specialty-streaky-bacon-Hunan-Xiangxi-smoked-Bacon-bacon-Bacon/1432103_2038509058.html
Public service announcement:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11359960/Woman-on-top-is-most-dangerous-sex-position-scientists-conclude.html
Scientists have found that the position, dubbed “cowgirl”, is responsible for half of all penile fractures in the bedroom.
Everywhere Muslims go, problems follow.
Simple solution? We get out of their lands, leave them alone, round up their diaspora and send them back to a godforsaken Muslim jerkwater of their choosing.
Only catch is, it would require energy independence on our part.
Gluteus (105)-
This, from one of the biggest contributors of tiresome, pedantic, self-serving, circular logic-filled nonsense in the history of NJRER:
“I’ll join the call for brevity in posts. Post a summary a few lines and a link.
Scrolling through those posts on a mobile device is a pain.”
Also, everywhere Muslims go, poverty accompanies them.
American Express laying off 4000 employees.
Why EVERYONE needs two years of public paid college education…..
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/texas-woman-er-doctors-remove-meth-pipe-vagina-article-1.2086427
[111] Luge the problem is we could send all of the Muslims to one place but they would not stay, for some reason they try to export the failed policies from what ever country they were starving in to the UK, US, France, Germany etc. The caliphate didn’t work so well where they came from but in the UK it is sure to be great!
Texas woman needs ER doctors to remove meth pipe from vag!na
Christina Searcy stuffed the tube into her gen!tals after the van she was traveling in with three pals was pulled over by a Montgomery County deputy on Friday, reports the Houston Chronicle. She later admitted to having the pipe hidden. But when she tried to remove the device, she found it was lodged.
BY Lee Moran
A redfaced Texas woman ended up in an ER after a meth pipe she hid in her gen!tals during a drugs bust got stuck.
Christina Searcy stuffed the tube into her vag!na after the van she was traveling in with three pals was pulled over by a Montgomery County deputy on Friday, reports the Houston Chronicle.
The quartet, all from Cleveland, Texas, were arrested after a coin bag containing several baggies of coca!ne and a mar!juana joint were discovered inside the vehicle.
They had been stopped after reports that they’d committed fraud. That allegation was later dropped.
Searcy, driver Kevin Gene Hales, and other passengers Kimberly Kinn and Melinda Robertson were all taken into custody.
They were warned while being booked into jail that they’d face additional charges if they didn’t declare all the drugs on their persons.
Kinn revealed she had a pipe in her bra, which later tested positive for methamphetam!ne.
Searcy then also admitted to having a pipe hidden in her gen!tals. But when she tried to remove the device, she found it was lodged.
The 36-year-old was rushed to Kingwood Emergency Room where doctors successfully took out the tube, which later also tested positive for meth.
All four suspects face drug possession charges, reports the Montgomery County Police Reporter.
#110 Clot
If you just post the Zero Hedge links, we’ll hardly hear from you.
#73 Toxic (Previous thread)
“I wouldn’t give my 5 year old a running chainsaw or a nail gun either.” Do you have those lying around the house plugged in and running 24×7?
“That’s got nothing to do with what you posted claiming there are no self defense uses for firearms.”
I have never said there is no self defense use for firearms. I am not anti-gun, I am just Pro Gun control so dumb ass gun owners like granpa who leave a loaded gun around kids should go to the Big house.
89- An interesting comment from the article. Btw, thanks for the share, great article.
“I would suggest you learn more about the issues before providing an opinion. If US had capitalism for IT work and mandated free movement of labor, much of the H1B problem would go away. The way it is structured now it is the complete OPPOSITE of free movement. Most people just don’t realize the scam the H1B has become.
H1Bs are hired at supposedly the prevailing rate but it is always cheaper than local employees AND they must work at the same job, the same position with same title for 6 years. Employers add extra hours and weekends with no extra pay. If the H1B quits, they have to leave the US immediately. If they get a different title in same company, the 6 years starts over. If the go to a different company, the 6 years starts over. The result is an indentured servant for 6 years at cheap rates. That is why big companies are hiring so many H1Bs.
Furthermore the majority of H1Bs go to INDIAN companies to place Indians temporarily in US at cheap rates. The H1Bs do not even go to US companies. Most come from India — 64 percent of last year’s applicants, according to the White House. Four Indian firms — Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro — brought more than 26,000 Indians to work in the US in 2012 under the H-1B visa scheme. Cognizant even more.”
They are going to screw everything up with their bs. If you hate the western culture so much, get the fuc! out. I don’t live in a Muslim country because I despise their culture and way of life. What is so hard to understand? Why don’t they get it? You have to be sick to make your life focus the destruction of another culture. Get a life!!! Go have fun. Go grab a beer and bang a chick. Much better than trying to make this world a Muslim utopia.
jcer says:
January 21, 2015 at 5:33 pm
[111] Luge the problem is we could send all of the Muslims to one place but they would not stay, for some reason they try to export the failed policies from what ever country they were starving in to the UK, US, France, Germany etc. The caliphate didn’t work so well where they came from but in the UK it is sure to be great!
89- This points out one of the main factors that drives me to think wage inflation is coming. If they don’t, what will happen? Social revolution?
“It’s clear by now that the fruits of automation, computerization and outsourcing are being reaped by the top 1 percent — in this case, shipping companies and not drivers. The old bell curve with the middle class bloating comfy in the middle is being replaced by what’s called the power curve, in which something called the 80/20 rule applies: 20 percent of the participants in an online venture get 80 percent of the rewards. Think Uber. It’s not the drivers who are getting rich. Something new and possibly awful is happening.
Many books have been written about this phenomenon, and in 2012, the Aspen Institute convened a meeting on this topic, with the resulting report bearing the jaunty title of “Power-Curve Society: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy.” One participant was Kim Taipale, a leading thinker in this field. I quote from the Aspen report on its summary of Taipale’s thesis: “The era of bell curve distributions that supported a bulging social middle class is over. . . . Education per se is not going to make up the difference.””
Wow, this article has caused me to question wage inflation. We are screwed if they are starting to come with answers like this quote. They are just going to create a “vast and expensive welfare program”. This would be a terrible idea. Suicide rate will go up, depression will be out of control. People need a purpose in life.
“For the past several weeks I’ve been accosting captains of industry and asking how the American economy is going to both raise incomes and retain jobs. One told me that the rich are going to have to carry the not-so-rich — a vast and expensive welfare program. Another suggested make-work of the sort that FDR tried during the Depression: goodbye self-service gas stations, welcome back attendants and someone to wipe the windshield.”
[119] punkin,
If tech is causing unemployment to skyrocket, as is suggested here, where is the wage inflation coming from? Wage inflation comes from demand for labor, and if there is no demand . . .
Admittedly, I wasn’t an Econ major but I wasn’t asleep in these classes.
[120] punkin
I have read ahead and see that you get it. Never mind. As for makework, that has been occuring, more or less, since the Depression, and I suspect there will be more. In Europe, that is a staple–e.g., work rules that mandate a driver and assistant to make deliveries in a little truck where one could easily do it. In this country, that is often the province of government although regulation imposes some makework requirements on industry (not to mention the makework created by regulatory complexity). Finally, the reasons you cannot pump your own gas in NJ has to do with both makework and environmental controls. What makes it palatable is that the cost is actually borne by the taxpayer through lower gas taxes–if there were no such thing as state gas taxes, people from NJ would be tanking up in PA, not the other way around.
I agree, huge blocks of long text (mostly cut-n-pasted from other sources) are annoying and lessen the quality of the blog.
Can a filter be installed? (I know the answer, the question is…).
Oh man, they really are going to take this ship down. If they don’t ignite wage inflation soon, social unrest will follow. It’s almost a guarantee that people will start to become violent if the trend continues. Just give some jobs and raises to keep this economy from exploding under the stress of social unrest. I don’t want to live in that world.
“To my ears, the optimists sound Panglossian. I have watched Uber (which I use) chew up the taxi industry. Office buildings are being erected for a new age of fewer employees. The law library is online, the back office is overseas — and steno exists only in old movies. (“Miss Jones, take a letter . . . ”) The middle class has flat-lined; unemployment is down but wages aren’t up.
Much of this is ultimately supposed to be good. The term “disrupter” has become an accolade, like first-responder or something. Yet there could be an awful political and social price to pay, and that, for the moment, is being discussed only in whispers — largely limited to forums like Aspen and not the political arena. The stirring will likely have severe political repercussions. After all, what is being disrupted is not the occasional industry but the American Dream. The disrupters disrupt sleep itself.”
Please unmod or undelete a post of mine. It referenced post#112.
Suspect stick frame construction is going to be out of favor tomorrow. Terrible for all those people.
Unfortunately, I get it. This seriously makes me sad.
Comrade Nom Deplume, who needs to stop screwing around and get back to work says:
January 21, 2015 at 7:06 pm
[120] punkin
I have read ahead and see that you get it. Never mind. As for makework, that has been occuring, more or less, since the Depression, and I suspect there will be more. In Europe, that is a staple–e.g., work rules that mandate a driver and assistant to make deliveries in a little truck where one could easily do it. In this country, that is often the province of government although regulation imposes some makework requirements on industry (not to mention the makework created by regulatory complexity). Finally, the reasons you cannot pump your own gas in NJ has to do with both makework and environmental controls. What makes it palatable is that the cost is actually borne by the taxpayer through lower gas taxes–if there were no such thing as state gas taxes, people from NJ would be tanking up in PA, not the other way around.
126 – went into black list, sorry.
Nom, this comment from that article drives the issue home.
“For most of human history, there has very little technological innovation. The main technological shift prior to the computer was the industrial revolution, which while disruptive, opened up a whole new set of jobs requiring human labor – in factories – replacing jobs in agriculture. Jobs shifted because human bodies were still needed to do the new jobs. The industrial revolution also developed quite slowly, over about 100 years. It was a gradual shift.
What we’re seeing now is that for the first time in human history it is perfectly viable to replace many industry sectors with technology, and we’re not seeing any new industries open up that employ vast amounts of labor, as factories did. The new industries opening up require minimal labor and maximum reliance on capital and technology. They’re also developing at lightening speed compared to past shifts.
Granted there in the past 100 years there have been many disruptions of skilled or semi-skilled labor – such as typesetters – but those have not been on a massive scale, so the new technologies (operating computers) could absorb them. Now we are approaching the point where it’s technologically possible to replace huge swaths of jobs, including most service jobs, with technology. And we don’t see any new labor-intensive industry sectors opening up.”
[130] pumpkin
Decades ago, I more or less (actually, less) saw this, and other trends, coming. So I decided to go to law school because I figured that this could not be outsourced or overtaken by technology.
I was wrong on both counts.
As I have said many times before, Obama’s economic agenda doesn’t succeed without protectionism. But I use Obama here as a reference point, not a statement on him personally. Rather, it can be said that we don’t keep our standard of living without protectionism, but that presupposes we can sell as much to ourselves as we do the rest of the world. So, in a back-of-the-envelope sort of calculus, our standard of living is going to come to an end. Indeed, it already has.
Look at globalization. Economically, it means a massive reversion to the mean. And we aren’t the mean.
That’s some fire in Edgewater..I think those new condo developments in Bloomfield and Montclair kinda look similar…..
OK, short story was…I didn’t take the AMEX offer (FT position). Whew!
#131 – So true. What can you do? Try to…whatever pays, without attracting too much trouble.
plume (131)-
I saw it somewhere today, forget where: the world’s economy all boils down to trade now. And, you can’t print trade.
“Decades ago, I more or less (actually, less) saw this, and other trends, coming. So I decided to go to law school because I figured that this could not be outsourced or overtaken by technology.
I was wrong on both counts.
As I have said many times before, Obama’s economic agenda doesn’t succeed without protectionism. But I use Obama here as a reference point, not a statement on him personally. Rather, it can be said that we don’t keep our standard of living without protectionism, but that presupposes we can sell as much to ourselves as we do the rest of the world. So, in a back-of-the-envelope sort of calculus, our standard of living is going to come to an end. Indeed, it already has.
Look at globalization. Economically, it means a massive reversion to the mean. And we aren’t the mean.”
gluteus (116)-
At least those links don’t go to preposterous stories, built on strawmen and tortured attempts to justify “good for thee, not for me”, thread-the-needle justifications for limousine liberal behaviors.
Grim – you missed it, with this story. Snooki is going to form a mega church and give sermons.
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/01/snooki_ordained_minister.html
and reversion to the mean does not occur until you dive well below the mean, or so I am told.
Wow. First, Snooki’s a guest lecturer at Rutgers, and now she’s a minister.
Wonder who’ll give her the first honorary PhD.
I forgot, Snooky want smoosh smoosh.
http://southpark.cc.com/clips/360406/its-called-a-snooki
South Park Cartman gets raped by snookie (SNOOKIE…: http://youtu.be/zDWgldK83M8
Millionaire households fleeing N.J. by the thousands, study says
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/01/10000_millionaire_households_fled_nj_last_year_study_says.html#incart_m-rpt-1
139. She already got the “D” bro….(sorry for the visual)
141. Millionaires are some lucky mofos. Once you hit a certain number, wouldn’t you leave? What the hell keeps people in a place like this? Most say “family” but that is for many a reason to GTFO.
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