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Tuesday, June 01, 2010

RANDOM THOUGHTS #6

Steve Cole muses:

Just thinking to himself.

1. For the year and a half that I have had XM radio, I have heard endless commercials for every truck company I have seen on the highway trying to hire experienced drivers and offering no end of cool benefits. There must be a story here about something. Why is there such a shortage of drivers during a time when the economy is awful?

2. Does Dave Ramsey know about the places where you can sell leased cars? He never mentions them when telling people to get out of car leases. It seems that, if such places are legit, it would be a cheaper way out than borrowing more money to meet the cash surrender value. I would never lease a car and was debt free back in the 1980s when Dave went bankrupt, but I'm just curious.

3. Fourteen US soldiers have received the German Iron Cross medal for bravery in Afghanistan. Media sources, who simply don't know what they're talking about, said that the Iron Cross First Class is equal to the US Medal of Honor. It isn't. The Iron Cross First Class is roughly equal to the Silver Star (and the Second Class to the Bronze Star). No Iron Crosses were awarded between 1945 and 2008, but the Germans have been awarding them to troops in Afghanistan. (Ok, technically, it's the "Honor Cross for Bravery" but it looks exactly like an Iron Cross, which the Germans had given out for two centuries until 1945.)

4. I have got to get these medical tests finished and get my new hearing aide. I was listening to the news one morning and heard that "President Obama and President Calderone were seeking nude dancers." I clicked the Tivo back-button and heard "new answers". I think maybe "nude dancers" would cost the taxpayers less money.

5. The Deadliest Warrior episode about SS vs. Viet Cong contained a factual error. The Viet Cong did not win; they were (in fact) defeated and wiped out during the Tet battles. (All fighting after that was against NVA regulars.) The US military was not defeated; but the communists did eventually break the will of the American people to sustain the war. Anyway, the SS won, which is right, since they're professional soldiers while the Viet Cong a part time farmer-guerrillas.

6. It's funny that you hear a lot about Palestinians wanting to go home to where they lived inside Israel before 1948, and wanting to get back the real estate they owned then. What you never hear about are the Jews kicked out of Arab countries in 1948-1950 (who now live in Israel or the West). Nobody says anything about returning their property, which was confiscated by Arab governments. There would not be a conflict in the Middle East if the Arab governments had just given the confiscated Jewish property to the Palestinian refugees and absorbed them into their populations.

7. North Korea has to change. It cannot continue on a road to nuclear-armed starvation. China is determined not to allow Plan A (North Korea collapses and millions of refugees storm the Chinese border looking for food) or Plan B (South Korea takes over). They want Plan C (a new North Korean government, installed by China, that does what China says without making it obvious that China is running NK now). If China just takes over North Korea, the South Koreans will go crazy. So China has to play it cool. They want North Korea to get rid of the nukes (which China fears as much as Japan and South Korea do) and to convert to the Chinese system (free market under rigid control of a power elite). That would feed the people and improve the economy and solve all of the problems.

8. Ok, so Obama's hand-picked national security team of political lackeys has botched the job, and to show that he's now serious about protecting Americans, he fired the only professional in the loop (the national intel director). This was the guy who has repeatedly told Obama that what the Administration was doing to stop terrorists was dangerously naive and reckless. I got it! Next issue?

9. So, just to be sure, we all know that anyone opposed to the Arizona immigration law is not really protected civil rights but is in fact just wanting to allow more illegal aliens into the country for some reason. I got it! Next issue?

10. So, the new finance reform bill creates a fund to pay for bailouts, making sure that Wall Street (which has been totally run by liberal democrats for 70 years) never has to take responsibility for stupid risks. This also allows the government to seize any company any time, but does nothing to regulate Fannie and Freddie. (You remember them? The two government agencies that donated millions to Obama, Chris Dodd, and Barney Frank, and caused the entire financial crisis by inventing "stupid mortgages for people who cannot pay them"?) Got it. I think we're done for today.