Reflections From a Murky Pond

If anyone has any doubts that rock, including heavy metal, has its roots in bles, jazz, country, and other distinctly American forms of “classical” music, this will, or should, end those doubts.

This is from Iron Horse’s Fade to Bluegrass: Tribute to Metallica album. Like most of their albums that I’ve found it’s a compilation of old-school metal hits that have been converted to full-on bluegrass.

Every track I’ve heard has been awesome. I highly recommend this album and Iron Horse in general.

Honestly, when I first saw this clip I was expecting it to seriously hurt my brain but, as it turns out, the way that it did hurt my brain was in the fact that converting Metallica to bluegrass didn’t do so.

In many ways, due to America’s sheer size and population, the nation resembles an empire nearly so much as it does a traditional nation state. That’s not surprising, as each of the different regions have their own cultures and their own economic idiosyncrasies.

What’s interesting is how these joined yet disparate regions are currently fairing.

Forbes magazine has broke the US down into seven distinct regions in their article, “A Map Of America’s Future: Where Growth Will Be Over The Next Decade.” They even went so far as to describe these regions as separate nations.

One thing becomes clear upon researching this article – Both economic and population growth in these regions has a direct correlation with their overall political allegiances. Each region may have it’s own tastes, proclivities, resources and problems but their success or failure seems to break down into which ones are Conservative (RED) and which ones are Liberal (BLUE).

The Inland West

Allegiance: RED
Status: Growing

Over the past decade this region has enjoyed nearly 8% job growth, the strongest in the country, with the highest rate of STEM growth in the nation over the past decade. It has also enjoyed the most rapid population growth in the nation at 21%. Sadly, the western reaches of this region – the inland parts of Washington, Oregon and California – have not done as well due to being resource- and manufacturing-oriented economies within highly regulated, high-tax “blue states.”

The Great Plains

Allegiance: RED
Status: Growing

In the last decade, no region in America has displayed greater economic growth . Since the 2008 recession, it has posted the second-fastest job growth rate in the U.S., after the Inland West, and last year it led the country in employment growth. Its population  growth rate has been 14% over the past 10 years, a rate which is 40% above the national average, and is expected to expand a further 6% by 2023.

The Third Coast

Allegiance: RED
Status: Growing

Since 2001, its job base has expanded 7%, and it is projected to grow another 18% the coming decade. The population is also growing, both natural and through domestic immigration from other economic regions.

The Southeast Manufacturing Belt

Allegiance: RED
Status: Growing

The region is attracting large-scale investment from manufacturers from Germany, Japan, and South Korea and seeing a resultant financial boom.  Both due to birth rates and the migration of families, including immigrants, the population growth has been more than twice as fast since 2001 as in the Northeast, a trend that is projected continue in the next decade.

The Great Northeast

Allegiance: BLUE
Status: Shrinking

The region is financial strong, even today but the population is falling due to sustained domestic out-migration and the fact that it is the most child-free region outside the retirement hub of south Florida.

The Great Lakes

Allegiance: BLUE
Status: Shrinking

The region lost approx. 1,00,000 manufacturing jobs over the past 10 years, making it the only one of the seven economic regions to lose jobs overall during that period, though the pace of job loss has slowed.  It’s population is dwindling, with few people moving to the region and even fewer children being born.

The Left Coast

Allegiance: BLUE
Status: Shrinking

Financially limited but strong, this region boasts the highest percentage of workers in STEM professions – more than 50% above the national average – and the largest share of engineers in its workforce; however, high housing prices and density-centric land use policies are keeping people out of the region.  As a result the population is falling rapidly.

The results are almost disturbingly consistent. The four Conservative region are all experiencing economic and population growth, whereas each of the three Liberal regions are experiencing declining numbers. In both cases these a trends that are expected to continue and, possibly, accelerate over the next decade.

Given these numbers, the 2020 census may see a significant re-apportioning of both the members of the House of Representatives and the electoral votes among the 50 states. In both cases these changes would benefit Conservatives and damage Liberals.

Simply put, if this trend continues as expected and other variables don’t come into play, America can look forward to a bright, red future.

Let’s face it; I’m fairly cruel to Obama and my unrelenting attacks upon the Grifter-in-Chief aren’t very nice. Obama’s stuck with a very difficult job, one made even more so by the boy’s utter lack of experience and skills in it.

So it’s really past time for me to show some kindness to- and compassion for the little boy trying to fill a man’s shoes and leadership role.

Just Think Of Sloths, Obama

So, Mr. Obama, when you’re alone and feeling pretty dumb due to your disastrous mishandling of: domestic policies, the economy, resource extraction and management, foreign policy, wars, and America’s role in- and perception by the world, just think of sloths. It’ll make you feel better.

You also might consider taking up tree climbing. 😉

~*~

Would one you people from the: Secret Service, FBI, NSA, DOJ, or DOD that regularly comb through Reflections From Murky Pond take a moment or two away from perusing the pin-up galleries and other “babe posts” and forward this post to Obama, please?

And yes, Gentlemen (and I assume some Ladies), I do see both where you’re coming here from and what you’re looking at while you’re here and I really don’t think that fapping to my “girlie pics” is the best of possible uses for the American tax dollars that pay for you…Still, I appreciate your support and patronage and you’re always welcome here.

Al Sharpton, one of the foremost silverbacks of the ever-angry and bitter ghetto activists is hooting, hollering, and jabbering again in yet another auto-erotic orgasmic release of race-baiting, grievance-mongering, and profiteering off of the exilic and hate-filled nature of the “Black Community” living within America’s borders.

In this particular episode of Sharpton’s inane jabbering he’s complaining and screaming about Apple not having any Blacks on their Board of Directors, though he brings up the larger picture of Blacks sitting on Fortune 500 corporations Boards of Directors.

The most laughable part of this dumb ape’s latest rant is that it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that he’s too stupid and unteachable to have even mastered basic arithmetic, which the Whites he hates and envies so much master, by and large, as young children.

There are no blacks on 30% of Fortune 500 Board of Directors. Apple, where we spend a lot of money on Apple, they have a new I-phone coming out today. No blacks in Board of Apple. We buying up all this Apple stuff and can’t get a bite.

— Al Sharpton

Obviously ghetto math doesn’t reach the level of simple percentages or comparing figures, which would go a long way towards explaining Blacks’ difficulties in becoming employed.

Blacks make up approximately 13% of the populace within America but are on 70% of the Fortune 500’s Boards of Directors. That’s a level of over-representation that should have blacktivists like Sharpton either celebrating or being very quiet about it because it could only come about through race-based hiring criteria aka affirmative action.

If it wasn’t for the sad fact that Sharpton has a large audience – an audience containing many who are willing to engage in violence – we could all just sit back and laugh at this display of ignorance and stupidity. It is, after all, an exemplar of exactly why the “Black Community” is a failure and why creatures like Sharpton have audiences in the first place.

Maybe if Sharpton and the other ghetto vermin spent more time on getting past ghetto math and less time on breeding bastards, committing violent crimes, and trying to extort money from Whites, they’d eventually amount to something worth the 600,000 White lives that were spent in the war that gave them, their first hand-out, their freedom.

Obama, America’s lamentable Jester-in-Chief is at it again. This time the dangerous fool is once again trying to sell Congress, America, and the world’s governments on his plan to launch a punitive strike against Al-Assad’s government in Syria.  As usual, his arguments in favor of his chosen course of action are better suited to a fool, cavorting for the entertainment of his masters than to anyone who is allowed to be in a position of authority.

First there is the boy’s attempt to clothe his desires in the Color of Law:

Because these weapons can kill on a mass scale, with no distinction between soldier and infant, the civilized world has spent a century working to ban them. And in 1997, the United States Senate overwhelmingly approved an international agreement prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, now joined by 189 governments that represent 98 percent of humanity.

On August 21st, these basic rules were violated, along with our sense of common humanity. No one disputes that chemical weapons were used in Syria.

What the mendacious fool fails to mention is that Syria is not signatory to that treaty. In point of fact, Syria is not even signatory to the Geneva Convention, having withdrawn from it some 20 years ago. Hence the only way that any “basic rules were violated” is if we accept the postulate that treaties voluntarily entered into by one set of nations can be enforced upon other sovereign nations that did not agree to be bound by them.

Also, insofar as I know, bombs, missiles, rockets, and artillery shells, and such other remotely delivered ordinance also fail to make distinction between soldier and infant. The Gods know that Obama’s drone war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen has torn plenty of children into smoking gobbets of meat.

Obama’s distinction between the forms of weaponry is the rankest of sophistry and, in the boy’s case, also the rankest of hypocrisy. It’s just more of his capering, shucking, and jiving.

Then there’s the fool’s attempt to make this a matter of America’s current and future national security:

Let me explain why. If we fail to act, the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons. As the ban against these weapons erodes, other tyrants will have no reason to think twice about acquiring poison gas, and using them. Over time, our troops would again face the prospect of chemical warfare on the battlefield. And it could be easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons, and to use them to attack civilians.

This statement is much akin to jester’s prank that fails to amuse. It engenders nothing but contempt with the sheer volume of error crammed into so few words.

Let us first put aside those logical flaws or deliberate misdirections that are inherent in this particular passage of Obama’s jabbering:

• Let us ignore the informal fallacy of the slippery slope argument this argument is predicated upon.
• Let us also ignore the fact that punishment does not equate to deterrence and has consistently failed in the Muslim World.

Instead, let us concentrate on the truly dangerous underlying foolishness of Obama’s who agenda regarding the Syrian Civil War. Al-Assad’s government has stockpiles of chemical – and, likely biological – weapons and has had them for decades. Not once has the Syrian government used them on foreign soil or troops and not once have they been turned over to proxies for use by various Muslim terrorist groups. Yet Obama has chosen to side with the rebels, mostly Islamists and filled with member of Al-Qaeda and other terrorists groups.

The one singularly dangerous act of foolishness committed by Obama is his not backing Assad. Nothing will make it easier for terrorist organizations to obtain these weapons, and to use them to attack civilians than the overthrow of the current Syrian government by this Islamist rebels.

And Obama glibly proclaimed that he won’t do anything about it:

First, many of you have asked, won’t this put us on a slippery slope to another war? One man wrote to me that we are “still recovering from our involvement in Iraq.” A veteran put it more bluntly: “This nation is sick and tired of war.”

My answer is simple: I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan. I will not pursue a prolonged air campaign like Libya or Kosovo. This would be a targeted strike to achieve a clear objective: deterring the use of chemical weapons, and degrading Assad’s capabilities.

Every single step Obama takes towards ending Assad’s reign is step closer to releasing stockpiles of WMDs upon the world. If Obama is, for political reasons, unwilling to put American boots on the ground in Syria he is also unwilling to prevent this from happening.

At best the boy is hoping that the situation will drag out long enough for him to safely the leave office before Assad falls. That way resulting catastrophe won’t be on his watch.

~*~

America and the world’s problem is that Obama is a dangerous and dangerously weak fool, much better suited to cavorting and capering for the entertainment of his masters than being in any position of authority. Like all such fools, when wrongly placed in authority, he can, has, and will cause great harm.