Category Archives: Infrastructure

May 17, 2012

California nightmare by Ted Nugent

This isn’t California dreamin’ but rather an American nightmare. It’s a blinding statement of the obvious, but California’s financial nightmare (and the nation’s) is a terminal addiction to bloated and expensive government completely out of control, with zero accountability.

Will the last American left in California please turn out the lights? And don’t let the door slam you in the behind. California isn’t going broke. It’s already broke and is $16 billion in the hole. With businesses leaving the state in record numbers because of punitive taxes and bizarre overregulation, the only way forward is to either raise taxes or severely cut benefits. Raising taxes is the mantra of liberals, and California is awash with liberal politicians.

In addition to business-killing taxes and regulations, California has the third-highest state income tax in the nation, the nation’s highest sales tax and the highest gas taxes in America.

Get this: Roughly half of California’s income taxes are paid by just 1 percent of California’s residents. It’s no wonder the most productive people are leaving the state each year as more bloodsuckers move in.

If that isn’t bad enough, California has one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates; its health care system is on the verge of collapse, with dozens of hospitals closing over the past decade; crime is rampant in California’s cities; its public employees are paid staggering amounts of money compared to ordinary Californians; and massive numbers of illegal aliens continue to invade the state.

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Original source.


February 23, 2012

A Vandalized Valley by Victor Davis Hanson

While the elites make excuses, citizens cope with theft and destruction. In short, all the stuff of civilization — municipal buildings, education, religion, transportation, recreation — seems under assault in the last year by the contemporary forces of barbarism.

[Note: This article was originally posted in December 2011. The IFNM website was attacked by hackers and many articles are now gone from the archives. As a public service, IFNM is now reposting said articles.]

I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it.

Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County, without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now enjoyed its presence?

The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy! Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness? Do they vandalize the street lights in front of their own homes?

In a small town two miles away, the thefts now sound like something out of Edward Gibbon’s bleaker chapters — or maybe George Miller’s Road Warrior, or the Hughes brothers’ more recent The Book of Eli. Hundreds of bronze commemorative plaques were ripped off my town’s public buildings (and with them all record of our ancestors’ public-spiritedness). I guess that is our version of Trotskyization.

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Original source.


February 20, 2012

Boehner betrays immigration enforcement

Tom Tancredo targets speaker for holding up bill to require use of E-Verify. This important bill – which has 74 cosponsors – is being buried by Speaker Boehner and the House Republican leadership: they have ordered the Ways and Means chairman to sit on the bill indefinitely.


Speaker John Boehner

As if we needed a reminder that America has a unique two-party system – “the evil party and the stupid party” – Republican House Speaker Boehner has provided it yet again. He is blocking a floor vote on a bill that could create a million or more jobs – and at no cost to taxpayers.

That Boehner thinks this is smart politics tells you all you need to know about the bankruptcy of Beltway Republican strategic thinking.

The Legal Workforce Act, H.R. 2885, would require all employers to use the federal E-Verify program to identify fake or stolen Social Security Numbers used by illegal workers. Participation by employers would be phased in over a two-year period. The program is largely self-enforcing because the list of participating companies is posted on the Homeland Security Department website and updated quarterly.

Over 300,000 employers already participate in this Social Security Number verification system at over 1 million worksites. The program has an error rate of less than 1 percent. Currently, the E-Verify program is required for most companies doing business with the federal government, and it is required of all employers in a half dozen states. In Colorado, companies doing business with state agencies have been using the program since 2006.

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Original source.


February 12, 2012

The Skyscraper Slums of Caracas

“That is when the problems began. The mall was supposed to improve the neighborhood, create jobs, and make this a better place to live. Now, crime has soared. Traffic and noise have become unsupportable as the government decided to use part of the mall as a warehouse for food. Trucks come and unload at all hours of the night, making it difficult to sleep.” Yelitza Campos, the neighborhood activist.

There is perhaps no better symbol of the depths to which Venezuela has sunk under President Hugo Chávez than Centro Comercial Sambil La Candelaria, a shopping mall in Caracas, the country’s teeming capital. In 2008, when he ordered its expropriation, Chávez called the mall a “monster of capitalism.” Yelitza Campos, who heads a neighborhood association across the street from the megamall, calls it a “nightmare.”

For Marta Navarro, it is simply a roof over her head.

For the past 11 months, Navarro, 23, and her three young children have been living in a small wooden cubicle carved out of one of the mall’s aboveground parking levels. One of an estimated 50,000 displaced people in Caracas, Navarro considers herself lucky.

Her living space measures 12 feet by 12 feet and has jury-rigged electrical outlets. She and her family share a large bathroom with hundreds of other refugees on each floor; there is no hot water. Residents hang their clothing along the rails, while Bolivarian National Guard units watch over the entrance, restricting access.

“The government provides us everything we need,” Navarro says. “They deliver three meals a day to our cubicle, and they provided beds and furniture when we moved in. My children attend school here, and one of my neighbors even gave birth in a clinic on the parking deck.” She sighs and looks around. “I can’t complain but it’s not home. It just doesn’t seem like home.”

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Original source.


February 10, 2012

Video: Detroit in RUINS! (Crowder goes Ghetto)

“The sad fact of the matter is that a student of Detroit has a higher chance of ending up in prison than graduating high school.” Stephen Crowder

[Note: This article was originally posted on January 17th, 2012. The IFNM website was attacked by hackers and many articles are now gone from the archives. As a public service, IFNM is now reposting said articles.]


December 4, 2011

Victor Davis Hanson on Immigration, Multiculturalism and Amnesty (Video)

See a sneak preview of Roger L. Simon’s “On the Farm” interview with Victor Davis Hanson regarding California’s illegal immigration issues. Hear how Ronald Reagan’s immigration reforms might have inadvertently resulted in the worst problems associated with illegal immigration.

Original source.


November 22, 2011

HAZMAT Called in to Remove 200 Pounds of Feces Near #Occupy Santa Cruz Camp

There’s a whole lot of squatting going on at Camp Poopstock Santa Cruz.

The Occupy Santa Cruz squatters are not only suffering from a ringworm and scabies problem…

Hazmat officials were called in to remove 200 pounds of feces from a lot near the #Occupy Santa Cruz squatter camp.


On November 15 the Occupy Santa Cruz website announced that the members had provided its own portable toilet and handwashing station and soon would be placing more toilets in the park itself.

Verum Serum posted on this disturbing report from the Mercury Times:

This week, two portable restrooms were installed in the park to supplement the one on Water Street since October, Pleich said. “I think a lot of those sanitation issues came before the portable restrooms,” Pleich said.

He added that there are hand-washing stations. “We’re doing everything we can to ameliorate this problem,” Pleich said. Protesters had asked city leaders to keep bathrooms in San Lorenzo Park open overnight.

A permit unilaterally issued by the city earlier this month required that protesters install two more portable toilets. Shauna Gunderson, another Occupy member, said the new restrooms, “put to rest the city’s largely exaggerated claims around sanitation.”

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Original source.


November 9, 2011

Multiculturalism and the end of white America by Patrick J. Buchanan

We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U.N. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no common faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.

Friday, thousands in Moscow, giving Nazi salutes and carrying placards declaring, “Russia for the Russians!” marched through the city shouting racial slurs against peoples from the Caucasus.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram, which is Hausa for “Western education is sacrilege,” massacred 63 people in a terror campaign to bring about Shariah law. Seven churches were bombed.

Sunday, the New York Times reported that Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan are suffering “horrific abuse” following last year’s pogrom.

Ethnic nationalism, what Albert Einstein dismissed as “the measles of mankind,” and religious fanaticism are making headlines and history.

Welcome to the new world disorder.

What has this to do with us? Perhaps little, perhaps everything.

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Original source.

November 8, 2011

Worrisome Analysis: Is a Coming Student Loan Crisis the Next Bubble to Burst?

The volume of outstanding student loans is rising rapidly and now exceeds credit card debt, though recent reports of it crossing $1 trillion may be premature. Moody’s Analytics puts the number at around $750 billion. But while credit card debt is declining, student loan debt keeps going up.

First the dot.coms popped, then mortgages. Are student loans and higher education the next bubble, the latest investment craze inflating on borrowed money and misplaced faith it can never go bad?

Some experts have raised the possibility. Last summer, Moody’s Analytics pronounced fears of an education spending bubble “not without merit.” Last spring, investor and PayPal founder Peter Thiel called attention to his claims of an education bubble by awarding two dozen young entrepreneurs $100,000 each NOT to attend college.

Recent weeks have seen another spate of “bubble” headlines — student loan defaults up, tuition rising another 8.3 percent this year and finally, out Thursday, a new report estimating that average student debt for borrowers from the college class of 2010 has passed $25,000. And all that on top of a multi-year slump in the job-market for new college graduates.

So do those who warn of a bubble have a case?

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Original source.

October 27, 2011

Suicide of a Superpower: An Interview with Pat Buchanan

“I think it is not improbable to suggest that as a country and as a people Americans really will not exist anymore, except as maybe a collection of tribes who are basically at war with each other, for riches, rewards.” Pat Buchanan

Comments on the interview by Jeffers M. Dodge 10-26-2011

The American government as a nation state cannot balance our budget, control our boarders or win our wars. The nation’s cradle faith, Christianity, is declining and all this is happening at the same time. Can America stop going to war with its self, rich against poor, race against race – has the concept of the great melting pot failed?

The Soviet Union disintegrated into 15 separate Nations in 1991. Each of these nations were separate both ethnically and geographically. By 2041 America will be divided up among 4 separate groups; African Americans, Asian America, Europeans (white folks) and Hispanics. Our metropolitan areas will be divided up into enclaves specific to philosophy, ideology, race and culture except for the southwest which will be predominately Hispanic and tied to Mexico.

Why did we lose 50,000 factories and almost 6 million mfg jobs in the first decade of the 21st Century? Both Parties embrace globalization when America had the highest standard of living, highest wages and the strongest regulations on manufacturing in the world. Then we put these factories into competition with factories in China where people make a dollar or two and hour, no unions, no regulations and the Chinese government that will fire any workers that descent. What we got is a massive transfer of production out of the United States and into China. Both parties are responsible for this as well as the open border policies that have created the widest income gap in history. No wonder so many Americans are disenchanted with their government. No wonder we have the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.

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Original source.