Southern Bread Blog

The IDF(Israeli Defense Force) launched a YouTube channel yesterday to take a more aggressive approach against handling the misrepresentation it so often falls victim to in the MSM. I think this is a really good idea personally. We’ve been duped by so many doctored pictures and unverified anecdotal stories over the years that this should be a breath of fresh air. Israel is not perfect, but they are subject to terrorism on a daily basis that would make us in the US just scream. Noboby should have to put up with what they endure. No country would tolerate it, but we always expect Israel to.

I like this approach too, because if a war such as this is inevitable, at least make it open, so that everyone can see just what you are doing. The more your operations are shrouded in secrecy, the more chance there is for your motives to be misrepresented. After a successful mission, put up the videos showing how you targeted only terrorist leaders and how you planned it. And when a mission goes wrong and innocent people are harmed, put that up for the world to see too. Own up to your faults before your enemy does. Openness is a new thing in war, but in the current global culture it’s probably the best policy.

Here is a link to the channel:

• IDF Spokesperson’s Unit

Evidently we’re getting treated to a re-hash of last year’s “magic negro” uproar in the main stream media(MSM). And again, just like last time, they are totally misrepresenting it. Look, I’m not gonna be a Rush Limbaugh defender or anything on this site. I listen to him daily and generally agree with most of what he says, but he doesn’t need me to fight his battles for him. So why even bring it up? It’s to prove a larger point about the MSM. You just simply can’t believe a single word you read anymore in a major news outlet. Honestly, it’s disheartenting. Here’s how they describe the origin of the parody:

So we are led to believe in this synopsis that Rush came up with the whole idea of labeling Obama as a “magic negro” by himself after reading an “opinion” piece in the LA Times. This opinion piece evidently merely referred to Obama as “warm and unthreatening”, leaving Rush to churn his evil hate machine and come up with the rest on his own. Nowhere in the article does it mention that the actual title of the aforementioned article that Rush based the parody off of is Obama the ’Magic Negro’. The piece is subtitled The Illinois senator lends himself to white America’s idealized, less-than-real black man. There is also no link to the source article anywhere in the NY Times article. This is just the shoddiest kind of biased reporting.

All Rush did was reference a phrase used in the exact article, but you wouldn’t know that without doing some digging on your own. This is something that reporters know most people won’t do. Talk about mis-reporting a backstory. I just get so tired of this type of thing. Rush has said time and again that conservatives aren’t just running against liberals, we are also running against the media, so that makes our job doubly hard. He’s right of course, and it’s just going to get harder now that the MSM is in full blown Obama orgy mode.

Rush has also been saying something else lately that is actually in this very source article. “It’s not what he says, it’s how he says it.” He’s obviously referencing Obama and how he’s able to fill a one hour speech with absolutely no content and still have people swoon over it. Here’s how David Ehrenstein said it:

You Obama lovers out there think about that next time as you’re listening to one of his speeches. Make a conscious note as to whether it’s what he’s saying that you are attracted to or how he’s saying it. If it’s the latter, and I’m certain it is because he never actually gives details of anything, then you are in dangerous territory. Don’t be sucked in by the “magic negro” effect. Hold him to account. Make him actually say something substantive before you swear him your undying allegiance. My bet is that you will be waiting a long time.

A couple of years back, my husband and I decided against telling our kids Santa was real. Our kids are fine, no one cried, and no one has had a lame Christmas. And none of their friends have suddenly shunned Santa. They know to politely answer questions about Santa and presents and reindeer.

One of the reasons we choose this comes from a deep desire to be honest with our children. They know St. Nicholas was a nice man from long ago, but we don’t teach that he is immortal or all-knowing. It is a small attempt to have our kids view us credible in our word. Here’s why that’s important. When you strip away the “fun” side of Santa, you are left with a man who is omniscient, immortal, and able to judge good and evil. Now who does that remind you of?

In my view, Christmas, and therefore the gifts we exchange should be a symbol of sacrificial love for one another. We encourage our kids to buy gifts with their own money that they earn. They realize they won’t get that Lego set they wanted, but they are so excited about what they are giving. My daughter likes to tell her younger brother, “You are getting the best present in the world!” She is talking about the one she bought for him. And he will say the same back. They know that they will not get everything they imagine, because there is no inexhaustible magic sack that all too easily fulfills their whims.

But they know a little more about Christ’s love shown by sacrifice. They know that gifts are not dependent on artificial good deeds. I don’t want my children to be good because they can get something. That has nothing to do with truth or training the selfish heart of the child. Or even more, I don’t want some goodness standard interfering with God’s view of our works apart from Him, which are filthy rags. Goodness is not a matter of ceasing a behavior. It is Christ laying His righteousness on us. Being good for spiritual insurance is so pervasive in our culture already. I don’t want to accentuate “righteousness by works” during Christmas.

We want to give a clear view of Christ. That His gift is free to anyone who believes. His love is not based how good we are. What happens if they compare themselves with other kids who get more? “Is that kid a better person than I? What more can I do, so I can get?” I don’t want to build on that philosophy any more than is natural to human nature. Instead, I want Christ to be center, and Santa Claus, in my humble view, is a thorn that grows up and chokes the truth of Christ in the minds of our depraved little ones.

How can Christ be pondered if their minds are in constant re-visitation to the myth and superstition of Santa Claus? One common argument is “Oh, come on. It’s just for fun!” Let me assure you, there is no shortage of fun in my house around Christmas. But it is a more humbled fun. We can focus on being together and working together. Sacrifice resonates in our minds and conversations as we make gingerbread houses together and recall the gifts we are going to give. My hope is, in this small way, we are a little better aware of our position before God and our fellow laborers, our children.

–My Wife, Guest Blogging

Conservatives believe in a strict interperetation and following of the constitution as the country’s founding document. This isn’t just a matter of judges and how they rule – as in, being a strict constructionist. But, it’s also a matter of having a document that exists outside the purview of whatever predicament or situation we find ourselves in, that can give guidance to our actions. It’s not some sort of infallible rules handed down from on high or anything. But, it’s goals and it’s aims we know full well. We have read why the founding fathers wrote it the way they did. And that makes it easy to interpret and understand.

At it’s core, the U.S. Constitution is an attempt to create a political union of states, in such a way that the uttermost individual liberty is preserved, yet without weakening it down to the point of majority rule. Pure democracy is a ticking time-bomb of failure. It just never works. We instinctively know that a 51% majority should not be able to control a 49% minority. That isn’t justice or fairness. But, how do you get a system that doesn’t boil down to that, yet still puts the power in the hands of the people. That’s what makes the constitution such an amazing document.

But, yet again, we find ourselves having to defend our ground from thirty second soundbite attacks. Just look at what Whoopi Goldberg said to John McCain during the campaign:

What was the question here? The question was about whether John McCain wanted judges who would interpret the constitution as it was literally written and intended(strict constitutionalist). What Whoopi should want is exactly what she thinks she doesn’t want. She should want strict constructionist judges. How else is she going to ensure that the 13th amendment (the one that explicitely bans slavery) gets interpreted literally and consistently. This is a point often forgotten by the left. An activist judge might not always lean left. They very easily could lean right as well. The only thing that provides consistency is strict interpretation.

The founders wisely put in a process to allow changes to the consitution, yet intentionally made it very hard to do. No matter how an amendment is proposed, it has to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. That’s very difficult to pull off. Especially if the amendment is controversial. That’s why so many liberals want to get activist judges in power. It’s a lot easier to just appoint a judge that will ignore the constitution than it is to ratify a change to it. As I said before though. In our history, we’ve had leftist radical judges and rightist radical judges. The best bet is to appoint neither and let the constitution speak for itself.

As a final note, the founders knew that a simple piece of paper would never be enough to keep a central government in check. We’ll go over the other checks they put in place when we talk about state’s rights.

I have to confess that I really just don’t know where to start on this. Sally Quinn at the Washington Post seems to think that it would be good for all us religious folk to “try a new faith (or non-faith) for one day”. This is just the grossest misunderstanding of religion, and why people believe it, that I can fathom. Religion is only trivial for those that don’t actually believe it. So that leaves me wondering what audience she’s even talking to. And does she even know herself?

Greg Koukl’s usual admonishment that faith is not wishing, and religion is not ice cream is just so appropriate here. I’m sorry but it only takes a child’s mind to know that “trying on a new faith” is just absurd. For instance, what does Christianity espouse? It holds that mankind is hopelessly guilty of sin against God, and that Jesus’s death and resurrection paid for that sin. Buddhism, on the other hand, holds that there is no God. How am I supposed to try that on for a day? It’s impossible. It’s like asking someone to make themselves believe that there is no such thing as temperature for a day. This sounds like an exercise in make believe and childishness. Certainly, Sally doesn’t think we are all a bunch of children here does she?

Evidently she does. We’ll all live happily ever after? You’ve got to be kidding me. Religious belief is knowable Mrs. Quinn, and if you know it, and believe your facts about it are true, then attempting some sort of mental experiment to try to convince yourself otherwise is just wasting all of our time. Only a newspaper would be stupid enough to put an agnostic as the editor of their faith section. As a parting note, one of the commentors on the page summed it up well. This made me laugh.

My comments for Sally are the same as they are for Sam Harris and all the rest. Their views about religion are totally formed by their familiarity with American Christianity. You do know there are other religions out there that would actually kill a person for doing what you propose don’t you Mrs. Quinn?

I was just reading a post over at newsbusters hilighting an on-air debate between Bill O’rielly and Megyn Kelly over the Washington state governor Christine Gregoire’s decision to allow atheist signs next to the nativity in the state capitol. I must admit that this is the first I’ve heard of this. Evidently, Gregoire made a statement about discriminating against non-religious displays:

I sometimes marvel at how people who should know better simply miss the obvious. She flatly says that she “may not discriminate against the content of other displays” because she allowed a nativity first. Well, I know exactly what I would do. I would go down to the capital and place a big display of Godzilla eating some Japanese folks and breathing fire and claim he is my deity. Uh oh! Somebody beat me to the punch:

What a complete waste of everyone’s time. Our government has lost all vestiges of common sense. It’s freakin Christmas! You know, that holiday that represents the birth of Christ. Of course you can discriminate against atheist signs on CHRISTMAS!!! The vision of the nativity is embedded in the very word for cryin out loud. Please, you militant atheists, either get your own holiday or go put up some anti-religion signs in Syria during Ramadan. Oh, wait. I forgot all of you were too yellow to do something like that. Just shut up then.

I know something about Adam Nossiter that you don’t. He’s been wanting to write this story for a long time. It’s pretty apparent from the tone of the piece and from his past work that he’s the New York Times’ embedded journalist in the South in the ongoing civil cold war. Obviously I’m being humorous, but this is one issue that never gets openly discussed. The animosity between the North-East liberal elites and the South-East conservatives has been an ongoing theme of American society almost since our country’s inception. It’s at times like these that it flares up the most, but it’s always brewing under the surface. Let’s dive into this juicy piece and find out what Mr. Nossiter thinks about the South:

So, not only are southerners xenophobes that fear black people as “unusual”, we are also irrelevant. The first part of that is just too stupid to respond to. The south is the most racially integrated part of the country and has been forever. I’ve talked about that before and won’t waste my time with it again. It’s the idea that the south is irrelevant to national politics that intrigues me the most. In one way I agree with him. Barack Obama didn’t need the deep south this time around to win, and there wasn’t really a viable southern candidate in the running. But, besides the fact that one race doesn’t make a trend, there is another factor to consider. The south puts it’s money where it’s mouth is when it comes to politics. We take it seriously. I think this has a lot to do with the way the south has been treated historically by the Federal government. There are still lots of hard feelings.

A famous quote by Robert E. Lee has him saying that if he’d known the hell that Lincoln was going to subject the South to during reconstruction, he’d never have surrendered at Appomatox. The South was brutalized during that time at the hands of the Feds. Old trauma lingers, and thinking history won’t repeat itself is a fool’s dream. The South, therefore, has always been wary to give up it’s control to a centralized government. That’s why people like Barack Obama gain no traction in the deep south. It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with his perceived policy of having his hand all up in our pockets. We’ve had experience with Illinois lawyers turned President before and the results were barbaric. But that’s not to say the whole south voted solidly as a block this time around though:

So now, Mr. Nossiter says that if you are a southerner who voted for McCain you are stupid. Again, that’s bigotry and I’ll let it pass for what it is. He mentioned Virginia and North Carolina breaking from their “Confederate” past by voting Obama. Of course, he’s right, but the confederacy they broke from was not what he thinks. They didn’t break from racism as he implies. What they broke from are the political principles that the Confederate States of America built it’s new country on. Things like zero tarrifs, the line-item veto, the power for states to impeach federal judges, the banning of tax money for private industry, legislative restrictions on spending, etc. These things were ratified into the Confederate constitution and set the tone for what the south wanted in a responsible federal government. The south got over race long ago, it’s these greater principles of freedom and liberty from central tyranny that the “civil cold war” is ultimately about in this modern era.

I don’t know if you have ever thought about this as I have, but whenever I heard about unions growing up in school, one thing always crossed my mind. Why don’t companies just fire all the employees when they went on strike and hire new ones. I mean, when you see people on strike it seems like work continues. Sure, I heard about “scabs” (those that cross picket lines) but I wondered why they didn’t just keep on goin with the “scabs” as employees and leave the union guys out on the road. Naivety was partly to blame, and educational omission was the other part. You don’t here about how this stuff actually works in school. And you rarely hear about it in the media either unless it’s one of those stories that’s just too big to ignore. So how does a labour union deal with this issue? The same way they deal with the possibility that not everyone in the workplace will want to join: violence.

Think labour union violence is a matter of history? Think it only happened in Al Capone’s Chicago or in Teamster/Mob deals? Think again. Labour Union violence is essential to their function. There wouldn’t be any unionism without it. In fact it’s so essential that the United States judicial system has officially endorsed it and agreed to turn a blind eye. The 1973 United Stats vs. Enmons decision exempted the actions of union workers and representatives from anti-extortion prosecution. Cato’s policy paper describes this:

I bet you didn’t know that blowing up a substation and shooting transformers with high-powered rifles was “legitimate” did you? This is just par for the course though. The not-so-dirty little secret is that things like strikes and such don’t work on their own. They only work if there is also a parallel system of violence and intimidation to go along with the strike. People have to eat and live, so they want to work. It’s human nature. To counter this human nature, unions employ violent tactics to scare people into not working. In sane world we call this extortion or coercion. Many politicians however, call it campaign security. Forced union membership and it’s resultant dues pay for many political campaigns, especially democrat. That’s why democrats are so heavily pro-union, and so willing to turn a blind eye to the corruption and violence.

Kendrick reports in his paper that the Labour Relations Board has recorded 8,799 reports of union violence since 1975, from news reports alone. Obviously there are probably many more that go unreported. Last year in Arkansas, our UAW (United Auto Workers) friends engaged in a violent campaign to keep workers from crossing picket lines at the Kohler factory. Right to Work reported some of it:

And more from a New York construction company in 2006:

This epidemic of violence is another reason that conservatives oppose labour unions. Strom Thurmond (republican) and Orrin Hatch (republican) have both tried to pass anti-union-violence measures in congress. Any Christian should obviously be opposed to this type of violence and corruption. Just one more reason that Christianity is incompatible with the Democrat party.

Well, it’s the topic of the day with the automotive bailout and all such going on, so I figured it would be a good next stop in this post series. What is a labor union(or just union) exactly? It’s the cartelization of part of a labor market for the means of collective bargaining power. It’s an attempt to create a labor monopoly of sorts, so as to set wages and other labor costs to a point amenable to it’s constituants. So, the first question to ask is: if real monopolys and cartels are bad for the market, why isn’t the monopolization of labor bad for the market? Answer: It is. In fact, it’s worse. There are numerous issues with unions, but the over-arching problem is that they artificially elevate labor cost above free market prices, thus causing unemployment. They do this through “negotionation” (Wink Wink).

Here, I want you to listen to what Ludwig Von Mises (one of the greatest economists that has ever lived) said of labour unions back in 1959:

Does that sound familiar to anyone? Perhaps if GM, Ford and Chrysler’s executives had read Von Mises years ago they wouldn’t have gotten themselves in this mess. They are currently paying full pensions and health insurance to [link 800,000 former/retired]http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/12/03/auto_unions/?refid=0[/link] employees. Yes, you read that right. The big three are paying over a quarter of a million people not to work. I’ve never even been in the same room with an economics degree, but I can tell you that is unsustainable. It’s not rocket science. A worker’s wage is an assessment of his or her productivity. Therefore if you produce $1000 of value per week, you will get some percentage of that value back in the form of a wage. So let’s say your employer decides to pay you $800 per week and take the 20% profit on your labor to cover other expenses and reinvest in the company. This is an equitable arrangement between both parties.

So, now let’s say you join up with your fellow employees and decide to unionize in order to improve your lot. Well, the first thing you do at the bargaining table is to ask for increased wages. You’d like to make $900 per week instead of $800, and you’d also like to have a pension for every employee (let’s say there are 100 employees), equal to 70% of current average salary and salary indexing to cover cost of living increases. If these demands aren’t met, you threaten to strike. Eventually your employer gives in and agrees when he realizes the local government is always going to take the union’s side. The employer figures it won’t be too bad since he can just raise prices a modest amount to cover the additional payroll expenses from the risen wages and there are no retired employees so he’ll worry about that later.

Fast forward 20 years, and now pretend you are the business owner. The company has grown from 100 to 350 employees. It now has 75 employees in the pension system at a cost of $2400 per week (70% of current average salary, plus healthcare) which adds $180,000 to your payroll and produces nothing in return. That $180,000 has to be paid for from somewhere. You can’t just wish it into existence. What do you do then? You can’t spread the cost out to the other employees by reducing their wages because you are obligated by the union to pay on a scale. You can’t raise the price of your product because that would put you at a severe disadvantage in your particular market. Well, the only other option is to lay off some employees to cover the cost or reduce the amount of money that you use for R&D and capital improvements.

You can see what’s going on here. This problem is just going to compound itself as the years wear on. The amount of growth needed to stay ahead of the curve on your obligation to retiree’s is unrealistic. Eventually the business will have to close down or file bankruptcy when it gets overtaken by it’s inability to pay. So you can see. This is one way that labour unions always lead to higher unemployment as Von Mises said. There are other issues that Conservatives reject unionism on. I’ll bring those up in the next post.

I use a linux desktop at work nowdays, and I’m very happy with it for the most part. There are some caveats to using Linux in a predominantly Windows based environment though. For instance, I have to log into our Windows servers to do my daily work. This isn’t that big of a deal since the Linux world has long had software like rdesktop that will let you RDP into a Windows box. I really like rdesktop because it’s so lightweight. It doesn’t have all of the bulk that the KDE remote app does.

But the big drawback to it, is that you have to launch it from the command line every time if you want to log into a different box. It has no X based interface to ask what server you want to connect to. It’s just that sort of redundancy that slowly drives me nuts as I do it over and over. So I set out in search of a solution. It seems that other people want this, but nobody bothered to code up a solution for it. So I did it myself. I ended up using the perl GTK libraries to make a simple X launcher for rdesktop. Here is the source code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Gtk2 ’-init’;

use constant TRUE  => 1;
use constant FALSE => 2;

##: Globals
my $defserver = "serverX";

##: Create main window
my $window = Gtk2::Window->new;
$window->set_title("Remote Desktop Launcher");
$window->set_position(’center’);
##: Main window signals
$window->signal_connect (destroy => sub { Gtk2->main_quit; });

##: Create a vbox layout
my $vbox = Gtk2::VBox->new(FALSE, 6);
$window->add($vbox);

##: Create the text entry box for typing in the server name
my $entry = Gtk2::Entry->new();
$entry->set_text($defserver);
$vbox->pack_start ($entry, TRUE, TRUE, 0);
##: Entry signals
$entry->signal_connect( activate => &button_callback);

##: Create a launch button and stick it in the window
my $button = Gtk2::Button->new (’Launch’);
$vbox->pack_start ($button, TRUE, TRUE, 0);
##: Button signals
$button->signal_connect (clicked => &button_callback);

##: Display everything we just made
$window->show_all;

##: Set initial focus
$entry->grab_focus();

##: Enter the event loop
Gtk2->main;

##: Button callbacks
sub button_callback
{
    my $servername = $entry->get_text();
    my $pid = fork();
    if ($pid == 0) {
      exec("/usr/bin/rdesktop -0 -g1440x900 ".$servername);
    }
  Gtk2->main_quit;
  1;
}

Ok, first copy and paste this code into a file called “rdl.pl” and mark it executable with chmod 0755 rdl.pl. Then make sure you have the Gtk2 libraries for perl installed. Just run a sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell and do a install Gtk2 to get the libraries. Lastly, change the value of $defserver to the server name you want it to always populate in the text box by default. I log into one particular server about 80% of the time so this saves me some typing. Now just make a launcher for the script on your desktop or launch bar or wherever and you’re good to go. Enjoy!